The Hackenblog

“Americans, both young and old, play video games at an ever-growing rate. Today’s adults, unlike those who dropped game play in the 1980s due to public shame (Williams, 2006a), play more than previous generations. 40% of adults are now regular players, compared to 83% of teenagers. The average player age is now 33, propelling the industry to $7.4 billion in U.S. sales in 2006 (Entertainment Software Association, 2007). The result is a population engaging in this medium as an acceptable mainstream activity. And as the Internet has become a larger part of everyday life (Wellman & Haythornthwaite, 2002), so too have networked games. 67% of teens now regularly play some game online (Rideout, Roberts, & Foehr, 2005). Online games bring people together as they use their cell phones, their computers and their gaming consoles to access not only games, but other people. The most social and high-profile of these spaces are persistent virtual worlds—games that are always on, in which players maintain a regular character who grows and changes, and in which many players participate in long-term social groups (Griffiths, Davies, & Chappell, 2003; Yee, 2006). These worlds, called “massively multiplayer online games,” or MMOs, are vibrant sites of community (Steinkuehler & Williams, 2006). Yet even as participation in them rises to several million players in North America alone, research on their players and their impact has remained relatively scant. Ethnographic and experimental investigations of player ‘guilds’ and communities have explored the social dynamics and relationships that exist (Taylor, 2003, 2006; Williams, Caplan, & Xiong, 2007), but systematic and generalizable research has remained elusive, largely due to the difficulties of securing access to players within the walled gardens of for-profit companies. The current investigation represents the first case of access to proprietary in-game player data. With the active cooperation of a major game operator, the current study surveyed players and unobtrusively collected in-game data on their behaviors. This combination of demographic, attitudinal and behavioral data generated a true player census of a virtual world. The paper presented here explicates players’ demographics, their playing patterns as related to those demographics, and their motivations for play. Many of the results defy both stereotype and theoretical predictions.”
Who plays, how much, and why? A player census of a virtual world, Dmitri Williams, Nick Yee, Scott E. Caplan. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 13, Issue 4, Pages 993-1018, Published Online: 2 Sep 2008 (via Gamers Play Against Type, USC news, which has this in it: “In addition, while women made up only 20 percent of players, they logged more time in the game than their male counterparts. ‘The hardcore players are the women,” Williams said. “They play more hours, they’re less likely to quit.’” Take that, fanboys. )

“An Open Letter to the American People

“This year’s presidential election is among the most significant in our nation’s history. The country urgently needs a visionary leader who can ensure the future of our traditional strengths in science and technology and who can harness those strengths to address many of our greatest problems: energy, disease, climate change, security, and economic competitiveness.

“We are convinced that Senator Barack Obama is such a leader, and we urge you to join us in supporting him.

“During the administration of George W. Bush, vital parts of our country’s scientific enterprise have been damaged by stagnant or declining federal support. The government’s scientific advisory process has been distorted by political considerations. As a result, our once dominant position in the scientific world has been shaken and our prosperity has been placed at risk. We have lost time critical for the development of new ways to provide energy, treat disease, reverse climate change, strengthen our security, and improve our economy.”
61 Nobel Laureates in Science Endorse Obama, SEA, September 25, 2008 (via and via)

“Popular wisdom may suggest that toll roads are unfair to the poor, but a new study shows these pay-as-you go transportation options may actually be fairer to all income levels than paying for road improvements through sales taxes.”

~snip~

“The 91 Express Lanes is a 10-mile stretch of roadway with four lanes in the center of the freeway reserved for registered users with transponders. Subscribers can then pay a toll to enter the lanes and bypass stop-and-go traffic in the adjacent “free” lanes. The tolls are set to keep traffic in the reserved lanes free-flowing and range from $1.25 to $10 depending on direction and time of day.”
Toll Roads or Sales Taxes? Most forms of transportation finance are regressive forms of taxation that burden the poor more than the rich, says a new study by USC and UCLA researchers. By Anna Cearley, USC News, August 19, 2008 (also at Transportation if you have access)

Feh. I never drive the 91, but if I did have to drive that nightmare, I’d be happy to pay for it to be a better experience.

I’ll be saying this until the election is over: the MTA needs to do a better job with the money they have instead of taxing everyone in Los Angeles County so they can do more bad jobs in a few, very select places. Please vote NO on the MTA 1/2% increase in sales tax. 8.25% sales tax is enough already; 8.75% is too much for too little. Thank you for your attention

“Can science help us determine if someone is deceiving us?

“The very high-tech stuff we rely on includes functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetic encephalography, and some very, very sophisticated electroencephalography—one of the techniques used to test so-called guilty knowledge. That’s where you expose somebody to something and they have guilty knowledge—they’ve seen it before, let’s say. You can tell by looking at their brain response, up to a point, whether their brain has seen that thing or not. You say, well, do you know X, or have you seen X, and they say no, but their brain says otherwise.”
The Science of Sniffing Out Liars, An interrogation expert spills his secrets. By Susan Kruglinski, Discover, July 28, 2008

Being lazy and honest are the only way to fly.

“Classical violins created by Cremonese masters, such as Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri Del Gesu, have become the benchmark to which the sound of all violins are compared in terms of their abilities of expressiveness and projection. By general consensus, no luthier since that time has been able to replicate the sound quality of these classical instruments. The vibration and sound radiation characteristics of a violin are determined by an instrument’s geometry and the material properties of the wood. New test methods allow the non-destructive examination of one of the key material properties, the wood density, at the growth ring level of detail. The densities of five classical and eight modern violins were compared, using computed tomography and specially developed image-processing software. No significant differences were found between the median densities of the modern and the antique violins, however the density difference between wood grains of early and late growth was significantly smaller in the classical Cremonese violins compared with modern violins, in both the top (Spruce) and back (Maple) plates (p = 0.028 and 0.008, respectively). The mean density differential (SE) of the top plates of the modern and classical violins was 274 (26.6) and 183 (11.7) gram/liter. For the back plates, the values were 128 (2.6) and 115 (2.0) gram/liter. These differences in density differentials may reflect similar changes in stiffness distributions, which could directly impact vibrational efficacy or indirectly modify sound radiation via altered damping characteristics. Either of these mechanisms may help explain the acoustical differences between the classical and modern violins.”
A Comparison of Wood Density between Classical Cremonese and Modern Violins, Berend C. Stoel of the Department of Radiology, Division of Image Processing, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands and Terry M. Borman of Borman Violins, Fayetteville, Arkansas, United States of America, PlosOne, July 2, 2008

Apparently even trees grew better in the old days.

“Shaking a virus to death is not a new idea. Arizona State University physicist Kong-Thon Tsen, who pioneered the practice, conducted eight peer-reviewed studies in 2006 and 2007 demonstrating that vibrations can deactivate a number of viruses. But Tsen’s latest work may have found a way to destroy HIV, just by hitting the right note.

I”n much the same way that opera singers use sound waves to shatter glass, laser light has shown considerable potential for killing viruses such as the tobacco necrosis virus and M13 bacteriophages. Like a wineglass, a virus’s outer shell—known as a capsid—has an intrinsic frequency of vibration. Tsen uses a near-infrared laser to excite the target’s outer shell and spur vibrations powerful enough to rupture the capsid.

“In March 2008, preliminary testing revealed that Tsen’s lasers were able to destroy HIV in test tubes. For people with AIDS, Tsen’s antiviral attack could be more effective and safer than the current drug cocktails, which have a slew of side effects. In the next two or three years, Tsen hopes to test the technology’s effects on HIV in monkeys, zapping blood outside the body.”
Zapping HIV With Lasers. Lasers set to the right frequency may effectively knock out the virus, by Orli Van Mourik, Discover, June 10, 2008

So there IS something to look forward to!

“2 Sex—what is it good for? Scientists are not sure, since asexual reproduction is a better evolutionary strategy in some important ways.

“6 Barbary macaques have a distinctive way to get their mates to make a sperm donation: yelling. If the female does not shout, the male almost never climaxes.

“7 How do we know this? German primatologist Dana Pfefferle watched a group of macaques, counting the females’ yells and the males’ pelvic thrusts. She says this work is ‘quite weird, but it’s science.’

“11 The tiny male paper nautilus, an octopus, impregnates the much larger female by shooting his penis (a modified tentacle) into her—and leaving it there.

“12 Homosexual behavior is found in at least 1,500 species of mammal, fish, reptile, bird, and even invertebrate.”
20 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex, Discover, March 19, 2008

Ah, nature, sorry, Nature.

You’d think people with advanced degrees would have bigger vocabularies, but when that inner fanboy gets loose, we’re lucky they have any language left at all.

I’m glad you had fun guys. Now go write some NSA grants and make us all proud.

I got to wake up with a sore throat, but that just means I’m getting it out of the way for the rest of 2008.

And since it IS 2008, I can post this again!

Journal of Bloglandia, because Blogtopia (y!sctp!) was taken.

and

The Journal of Women on Comics, women read comics and write great things about them.

“Researchers in Chicago used drugs and manipulated genes to control the sexuality of fruit flies, making them gay and then straight again within a few hours. ‘It was very dramatic,’ said scientist David Featherstone. ‘They even attempted copulation.’ Scientists cloned fluorescent cats, developed an antidote for zombieism in cockroaches, and revealed that evolutionary changes in the lower backs and hip joints of females prevent pregnant women from toppling over. ‘When you think about it,’ said Harvard anthropologist Katherine Whitcome, ‘women make it look so very damn easy.’”
Weekely Review, Harpers Magazine, December 18, 2007

Journal of Bloglandia (ISSN1950-7645)

Journal of Women on Comics (ISSN1940-7637)

Please cross-post, thanks!

“But now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments. The newborn movement (’x-phi’ to its younger practitioners) has come trailing blogs of glory, not to mention Web sites, special journal issues and panels at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. At the University of California at San Diego and the University of Arizona, students and faculty members have set up what they call Experimental Philosophy Laboratories, while Indiana University now specializes with its Experimental Epistemology Laboratory. Neurology has been enlisted, too. More and more, you hear about philosophy grad students who are teaching themselves how to read f.M.R.I. brain scans in order to try to figure out what’s going on when people contemplate moral quandaries. (Which decisions seem to arise from cool calculation? Which decisions seem to involve amygdala-associated emotion?) The publisher Springer is starting a new journal called Neuroethics, which, pointedly, is about not just what ethics has to say about neurology but also what neurology has to say about ethics. (Have you noticed that neuro- has become the new nano-?) In online discussion groups, grad students confer about which philosophy programs are ‘experimentally friendly’ the way, in the 1970s, they might have conferred about which programs were welcoming toward homosexuals, or Heideggerians. Oh, and earlier this fall, a music video of an ‘Experimental Philosophy Anthem’ was posted on YouTube. It shows an armchair being torched.”
The New New Philosophy, by Kwame Anthony Appiah, NYT, December 9, 2007

Shouldn’t that be the New! Improved! Philosophy! and in sparkling letters?

“According to Hsee (1998) - in a paper entitled “Less is better: When low-value options are valued more highly than high-value options” - if you buy someone a $45 scarf, you are more likely to be seen as generous than if you buy them a $55 coat.”

~snip~

“If you have a fixed amount of money to spend - and your goal is to be seen as generous, rather than to actually help the recipient - you’ll be better off deliberately not shopping for value. Decide how much money you want to spend on impressing the recipient, then find the most worthless object which costs exactly that amount. The cheaper the class of objects, the more expensive a particular object will appear, given that you spend a fixed amount. Which is more memorable, a $25 skirt or a $25 candle?

“Gives a whole new meaning to the Japanese custom of buying $50 melons, doesn’t it? You look at that and shake your head and say “What is it with the Japanese?”. And yet they get to be perceived as incredibly generous, spendthrift even, while spending only $50. You could spend $200 on a fancy dinner and not appear as wealthy as you can by spending $50 on a melon. If only there was a custom of gifting $25 toothpicks or $10 dust specks; they could get away with spending even less.”
Evaluability (And Cheap Holiday Shopping), Overcoming Bias, November 27, 2007

Humans are weird.

But maybe not.

“Citing Schrodinger’s cat, cosmologists speculated that humans’ observation of dark matter, beginning in 1998, might bring about the premature destruction of the universe.”
Harpers Weekly, November 27, 2007

“One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”
Schrödinger’s cat, Wikipedia

“…?”
Mayerson, November 27, 2007

“It was Keynes, too, who anticipated and helped prepare for the ‘craving for security’ that Europeans would feel after the three decades of war and economic collapse that followed the end of the Gilded Age. Thanks in large measure to the state-provided public services and safety nets incorporated into their postwar systems of governance, the citizens of the advanced countries lost the gnawing sense of insecurity and fear that had dominated and polarized political life from 1914 through the early Fifties and which was largely responsible for the appeal of both fascism and communism in those years.

“But we have good reason to believe that this may be about to change. Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one’s daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.”
The Wrecking Ball of Innovation, a review of Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life, by Robert B. Reich. Review by Tony Judt, NYT Review of Books, December 6, 2007

This isn’t an easy read, but I highly recommend it. Not only are we living in interesting times, we’re living in vicious times, too.

I’ve always liked and respected Robert Reich, but after I read his first post-Clinton book, I could not help but think he was something of a lamb among wolves, or maybe just Border Collies with OCD, in the Clinton administration. This review doesn’t change my opinion.

“Detecting nothing—even when it’s 1 billion light-years wide—is not easy. It took observations of radio galaxies, temperature, and a bit of conjecture. Lawrence Rudnick, the astronomer who led the team that found the void, was studying data from the Very Large Array, a network of 27 radio antennas in New Mexico, when he spotted a gap in the constellation Eridanus where radio signals from galaxies appear unusually faint. He matched this gap with an enormous ‘cold spot’—colder than the frigid temperatures of deep space—in the cosmic microwave background, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. ‘We knew we could connect these two things, the lack of radio galaxies and the cold spot,’ Brown says. ‘It’s the easiest explanation—you don’t have to invoke any strange cosmologies to explain it.’”
The Ice-Cream Scoop Taken Out of the Universe. A patch of the heavens that contains far more nothingness than the rest of space, by Stephen Ornes, November 21, 2007

Day-yam, I love science, really I do.

“A long-simmering dispute about whether a leading engineering organization whitewashed the role of the Army Corps of Engineers in the failure of the levee system during Hurricane Katrina has broken into the open with a bitter YouTube spoof and a demand for an ethics investigation of the organization’s staff.”
Engineer group not amused by online spoof of levee review, by Mark Schleifstein and Sheila Grissett, The Times-Picayune, November 13, 2007

Whoo-hoo!

And Levees.org.

“Many a mother has said, with a sigh, ‘If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump, too?’

“The answer, for cockroaches at least, may well be yes. Researchers using robotic roaches were able to persuade real cockroaches to do things that their instincts told them were not the best idea.

“This experiment in bug peer pressure combined entomology, robotics and the study of ways that complex and even intelligent patterns can arise from simple behavior. Animal behavior research shows that swarms working together can prosper where individuals might fail, and robotics researchers have been experimenting with simple robots that, together, act a little like a swarm.

“‘We decided to join the two approaches,’ said José Halloy, a biology researcher at the Free University of Brussels and lead author of a paper describing the research in today’s issue of the journal Science.

“Dr. Halloy and his colleagues worked with roaches because their societies are simple, egalitarian and democratic, with none of the social stratification seen in some other insect societies — no queen bees, no worker ants. ‘Cockroaches are not like that,’ Dr. Halloy said. ‘They live all together.’

“They also have weak eyes, which allowed the researchers to create a robotic roach that resembles a miniature golf cart more than an insect. In the roach world, however, looking right is not as important as smelling right, and the scientists doused the machines with eau de cockroach sex hormones.”
Led by Robots, Roaches Abandon Instincts, by Kenneth Change and John Schwartz, NY Times, November 16, 2007

Ew, don’t make me think about roach sex. Although I hope I’m looking at the future of pest control, and not some new DARPA initiative. Roach Brigade! Nah.

I like what the guy at KS Tracker said:

One thing is sure, cockroaches are some stupid pests. Actually all insects are brilliantly-evolved idiots.

This is probably what dolphins and house cats think of humans.

“Each year, American adults have, overall, a 1-in-1,743 chance of dying in an accident. That means that even if nothing else killed you—doing away with old age and disease—you would on average live to be 1,743 years old before a fatal accident. But you could do better. A 9-year-old child has much lower odds of accidental death, about 1 in 10,000. If we could keep everyone to this low rate (avoiding work and driving would probably help), we could typically live 10,000 years. About 37 percent of the population would do better yet, living on average to the ripe old age of 20,000, says James Vaupel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.”
If You Never Aged, How Long Would You Live? With a little luck, you could well make it to your 20,000th birthday, by Boonsri Dickinson, Discover, November 16, 2007

They have really gone over the edge at Max Planck now. On the other hand, the only thing I mind about being of a certain age is the wear and tear and not being able to bounce back from the flu or a bender like I could in my 20s. Ah well, I’d rather be this age and not drink as much.

“Most people think of space as nothingness, the blank void between planets, stars, and galaxies. Kip Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, has spent his life demonstrating otherwise. Space, from his perspective, is the oft-rumpled fabric of the universe. It bends, stretches, and squeezes as objects move through it and can even fold in on itself when faced with the extreme entities known as black holes. He calls this view the ‘warped side of the universe.’

“Strictly speaking, Thorne does not focus on space at all. He thinks instead of space-time, the blending of three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time described by Einstein’s general relativity. Gravity distorts both aspects of space-time, and any dynamic event—the gentle spinning of a planet or the violent colliding of two black holes—sends out ripples of gravitational waves. Measuring the direction and force of these waves could teach us much about their origin, possibly even allowing us to study the explosive beginning of the universe itself. To that end, Thorne has spearheaded the construction of LIGO [Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory], a $365 million gravitational-wave detector located at two sites: Louisiana and Washington State. LIGO’s instruments are designed to detect passing gravitational waves by measuring minuscule expansions and contractions of space-time—warps as little as one-thousandth the diameter of a proton.

“Despite the seriousness of his ideas, Thorne is also famous for placing playful bets with his longtime friend Stephen Hawking on questions about the nature of their favorite subject, black holes. Thorne spoke with DISCOVER about his lifetime pursuit of science, which sometimes borders on sci-fi, and offers a preview of an upcoming collaboration with director Steven Spielberg that will bring aspects of his warped world to the big screen.”
The Man Who Imagined Wormholes and Schooled Hawking. Kip Thorne revolutionized physics, did the science for Contact, and straddled the Cold War divide, by Susan Kruglinski, Discover November 9, 2007

I wonder if it’s too late to become a science groupie?

“Then there are the Scientists, in their iconic white coats. The public seems not to like the white coat, and it doesn’t help to point out that Scientists don’t really wear white coats anymore. This is about perceptions, and you don’t change a perception by labeling it a misperception; you change it by providing another perception. There needs to be a new uniform, and everyone needs to wear it. Perhaps a white cape. Or a black cape. Or something else entirely.

“I don’t know. The fact is, an effective rebranding of Science would require an official committee of scientists and style gurus making these sorts of decisions—and I will only add that evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins should not be allowed anywhere near the thing. Marketing is clearly not the man’s strong suit. His endorsement of a proposal that rational atheists start calling themselves ‘brights’ still induces a squirm four years later. And now he’s gone and founded a teen-friendly OUT Campaign, intentionally modeled after the gay liberation movement. Because of course, there’s no surer way of persuading Middle Americans to your cause than to stand on a chair in the cafeteria at lunchtime and publicly liken yourself to a homosexual. Good thinking there, Richard.

“The bigger problem with rebranding efforts, though, is that they often fail. By this point, Science may simply be carrying too much cultural baggage to be convincingly reintroduced to the public.

“In which case—in fact, in any case—the second and superior solution is just to get rid of Science. Let physicists be physicists and geologists be geologists, and forensic scientists be…well, they can be crime-scene investigators. The word ‘science’ would never be spoken, at least not by anyone who cares about it. Just deny all knowledge. If you’re a physicist and some drunken rube calls over to you at a party, ‘Hey, Alan! You’re in science. Isn’t it true that cows have seven stomachs?’ just shrug and walk away. They’ll get the message eventually. The magazine Science would have to change its name or fold, as would Scientific American, and institutions such as the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Council, et cetera.

“But what else would we really lose? What benefit is currently accruing to the scattered fields of botany, Mars exploration, quantum physics, and so on, by being thought of as mere branches of a greater, more boring whole? They don’t really gain by association with CSI, so what would they suffer by coming to be thought of as self-contained pursuits, like telemarketing or cooking?”
A Modest Proposal for Science: End It, Don’t Mend It. Science was rendered obsolete by its own smashing victory, by Bruno Maddox, Discover Magazine, November 6, 2007

Instead of something that doesn’t scare the shit out of us:

“What I would like to suggest, however, is that mature theology is also very far from intelligent design, which I consider to be a particularly unfortunate, maladroit, and problematic notion, at least as it is commonly presented and understood. It is true that the fifth argument of St. Thomas Aquinas for the existence of God is based on the design and governance of the universe. Yet theologians themselves noted, long before Richard Dawkins, that the argument is hardly cogent, and probably better serves as a reflection (in a double sense) of faith by believers than as an effort to persuade unbelievers. In addition, according with Stephen Jay Gould’s insistence on the paramount role of chance in evolution, a priest friend of mine often takes the case a seemingly irreverent step further: with all the chance, chaos, entropy, violence, waste, injustice, and randomness in the universe, the project hardly seems very intelligent! Do we imagine that God is intelligent in basically the same way that we are, just a very BIG intelligence and ’super-smart’? And ‘design,’ once again, evokes the watchmaker who somehow stands outside the universe, tinkering with his schemes at some cosmic drawing board. How could God be outside of anything or stand anywhere, or take time to design anything?

“All of this is mind-numbingly anthropomorphic, and what seems to be irreverent and blasphemous is actually the only way to avoid being so. As I already suggested in my blog, we are perhaps not aware of the radical purgation of our concept of God that is incumbent upon us, whether necessitated by the challenges of science, or by those of our own theology and spiritual growth. Unfortunately, the most fervent people are often the most naive: the monks of the desert in the fourth century got violently upset when traveling theologians suggested that God did not have a body.”
Intelligent Design People Don’t Get Theology, Either, by Father Michael Holleran, October 31, 2007

How could God be outside of anything or stand anywhere, or take time to design anything?

Yeah, quit anthropomorphizing God; it’s irritating and a waste of time. We can’t figure out world peace, I feel that takes precedence to figuring out what God has for lunch every day (if there are days and lunches in the God realm). Please remember what good old J.B.S. Haldane said sometime somewhere:

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

And it’s got to be queerer than the “intelligent” designer-types can suppose, too. And furthermore, if life on this planet is intelligently designed, we really need a new word for intelligent. Like wacky, random and annoying. Here ends the sermon, cats.

“The huge underwater mechanism will not only give us more ‘information about where [neutrinos have] originated, such as the outskirts of black holes,’ it will also register ‘waves of light’ given off by ‘free-swimming bioluminescent bacteria’ under intense benthic pressure at the bottom of the sea. Further, while peering into the outer dark, feeding currents of data into drone harddrives that think in slow algebras, unpeeling galaxial structure and calculating the future evolution of simulated stars, this machine amidst the shoals will also help solve ‘the mysteries of undersea storms.’ Living clouds of light swim past, colliding with particles as old as the universe – and the drowned antenna whirs on, detecting all of it.”
From Beyond, BLDGBLOG, November 1, 2007

I do like reading this blog. H.P. Lovecraft can wait.

“Boy, this story begs for followup with more, expert opinionizing. In the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Andrew Schneider reports a case of glowing shrimp in the kitchen. A fellow bought them at the market, ate a few, turned out the lights, and “it was like a bright eerie light was shining on it.”
Seattle PI: Those shrimp are glowing…and they’re cooked.

“Withdrawing a paper usually evokes a bit of embarrassment and sometimes means scandal for the authors taking it back. Not so for a retired chemist in New York state. He is getting pats on the back. The NY Times’s Cornelia Dean today brings to readers the tale of a man who, partly from self-confessed vanity, decided to check Google for a tracery of his life and publications. Most of it was fine - except for one paper of his half a century ago now being cited at creationist sites as evidence why random chemistry could never produce living things.”
NYTimes: Retired chemist, sad to see his old paper feeds creationist claptrap, puts kibosh on it.

“A University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Hall of Science study released this week paints a pretty sparse and distressing picture of what local school children are learning about science. Some kids asked reporters following the story “Science, what’s that?” It turns out that most teachers devote less than an hour a week to topics that pass as science, and the time seems to be shrinking. About one in six spend no time at all on it. Nearly half the teachers say they know they aren’t prepared to teach it.”
Nor. Calif. Papers: If local kids are science ignoramuses, here’s a reason…

“In Nature members of the Cassini imaging team — from many nations and with headquarters at the U. of Colorado — see propellers in Saturn’s broad “A” ring, outermost of the prominent ones. (The newly found features look more like bow ties to The Tracker.) Ah ha! they say. Thus is betrayed the gravitational mischiefs of moonlets. There must be thousands of them. They confirm that this belt is debris still being ground down to powder — but still sporting chunks up to the size of hillocks, leftovers of from some kind of smash-up by larger bodies. A passing comet or asteroid may have instigated the ruckus. The general picture has been bruited about before. The new images seem to advance the ball a good bit.”
Mainly Brit Press, Boulder Camera: Saturn’s outermost ring’s secret: scads of moonlets.

All of the above, KSJ Tracker, October 25, 2007

Mmmmmmm…science!

“Anyemaqen Mountains, China — More than 3 miles above sea level in these jagged, wind-scoured mountains, there’s little doubt that global warming is endangering China’s future.

“The glaciers that ripple off the peaks of Anyemaqen, a mountain range in the western China province of Qinghai, are shrinking rapidly, endangering hundreds of millions of people who depend on the waters flowing eastward through the Yellow River.

“With the rest of the country punished by record heat waves, floods and droughts this summer, it’s no wonder that Beijing, which has long viewed global warming as a problem that rich nations should solve, is waking up to the fact that China may be especially at risk.”
Warming of glaciers threatens millions in China, by Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer, August 1, 2007 (via KSJ Tracker)

So what happens when we start fighting over water instead of oil?

All proceeds go to Cancer research!

Tastefully Done - Webcomic Artists Showing It All (2008)

Act now! Only whatever it is shopping days until the Solstice!

(Hmmm, a fundraiser for a worthy cause at lulu.com…why does that seem so very familiar?)

Or so they tells me:

“Actually, the older woman carries just as heavy a load after 40/50/60 as she does when she is 20, her ‘load’ changes slightly. Would I have used the word necessity in that sentence? No. Perhaps I might have used the word ‘benefit.’”
Evolution Depends on Crones Crone Speaks, October 17, 2007

I think the benefit of being in my late forties is that I’m so much smarter than I was in my twenties, it’s all just so much easier to deal with. So, the load is probably just as heavy, I’m just managing it better. Being invisible is a mixed blessing though.

And then there’s Joe Bob:

“I’ve been thinking about this because of a recent New York Times report on an international conference of anthropologists and ethnographers who are puzzled by recent research showing that families with a resident maternal grandmother are healthier than families without one, even if everything else about the family is normal. In some societies, the survival of the family–actual life and death–is more often preserved by the presence of a grandmother than by, for example, a mere father.”
The Grandma Mafia, Joe Bob’s America, November 8, 2002

Ah, Joe Bob. Only you could write the words “mere father” with such aplomb.

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their work to raise awareness about global warming.

This makes me proud to be an American. For awhile, and then it’s back to the horrors of the bush junta. Sigh.

Nope, can’t be sad yet! Congratulations, Al!!! Whoo-hoo!!! Could you please run for President now?

Update:

Al is deeply honored.

“I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis — a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level. My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.”

What a guy. Yay! Tipper, too!

“It appears to have started with a Sept. 9 story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, by David Templeton, about a researcher who developed a radio frequency generator intended to kill cancer cells. For some reason he touched a match to the water in the culture dish and found that it burned as long as the RF generator was zapping the water. Although some stories have referred to this as burning saltwater, what actually seems to have been happening is that the RF energy was causing hydrolysis, dissociating H2O and releasing hydrogen gas. The initial discovery apparently happened last May.”
Can radio waves liberate hydrogen from salt water? Is this a new energy source?, KSJT, September 13, 2007

Hmmm, but is it nutty?