blog
revere | July 31, 2009It's late-ish in the evening and this one of the Revere troop has pulled his/her/its new-ish car (funny, it doesn't look newish) into the Best Western parking lot and gotten online for the first time since this morning. First about the car. It isn't brand new. It's a couple of years old but we bought it to replace the infamous 15-year old Volvo sedan shit box I've been complaining about for years here. I finally got someone to take it off my hands for $340. I was asking $800, we settled on $600, but when he drove 100 miles to look at it (he'd seen pictures and I had described it with brutal…
razib | July 30, 2009Matt Yglesias pointed to this Forbes list of best cities for singles. Shouldn't one observe that the best city for men might not be the best city for women, and vice versa??? (sex ratio differences) Below the fold is the famous "singles map" from a few years back....
razib | July 28, 2009News story, brought to you by the same people responsible for China Strong.
Police Still Searching For Missing Productive, Obedient Woman
razib | July 27, 2009
In the post below I wanted to have an attractive female headshot, so I naturally looked for something from Megan Fox. A few years ago I probably would have used someone like Jessica Alba. In fact, I did use Alba as an "illustration" a few times in this blog's history. But 3 years is a long time, and Fox is the new thang in the air. But I wanted to make a bit more precise my subjective impression, so I thought Google Trends might be helpful. I think it can be argued that Jessica Alba's "peak" was the mid-2000s, and the trend data goes back to 2004. And so below, the results....
It's rather…
revere | July 25, 2009It's a Saturday morning, it's summer in the northern hemisphere, and in a few days The Reveres are off to the beach for a communal vacation. A Revere-fest (or infestation). A little time away from the pressure cooker is good for people our age, old enough to remember the proto-punk rock band The Velvet Underground. They were part of the New York scene in the sixties when the revere tapping these keys lived there. Lou Reed, one of its best known members and song writers, is almost exactly my age (give or take a few months). We are also both still alive (at least he is).
The Velvet Underground…
razib | July 22, 2009Rocket Science
Irreplaceable data
The Neuroscience of McGriddles
Very off topic: Why I won't be at my high school reunion
The Best Eclipse of the Century is Tomorrow!
razib | July 22, 2009Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four:
The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have. Here's one way around this: Don't buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it. (Sony and Interead--makers of rival e-book readers--didn't immediately respond to my inquiries about whether their devices allow the same functions. As far as I can tell, their terms…
revere | July 21, 2009We are hoping that the infuriating failure of the Scienceblogs servers to keep up with traffic leading to submission timeouts (just as aggravating for bloggers as commenters) will be cured by a server upgrade which is to begin shortly. We have just been informed by our Seed Overlords (a.k.a. the publishers) that Commenting will be turned off shortly (between 7 pm and 8 pm EST, July 21) to allow migration to the new server. The site will remain readable and the Comment Form visible but you won't be able to comment.
This affects all of the Scienceblogs.com. We are told the entire process will…
razib | July 15, 2009Too big a bill:
Josh Muszynski, 22, of Manchester, New Hampshire, was one Visa customer aghast to find the 17-digit charge on his bill. Adding insult to injury, he had also been hit with a $15 overdraft fee.
He noticed that his debt exceeded the world GDP while making a routine balance inquiry on his online Bank of America account. According to his statement, he had spent the profound sum in one pop at a nearby Mobil gas station -- his regular stop for Camel cigarettes.
"Very, very panicked," he jumped in his car and sped to the station.
razib | July 13, 2009
Conor Clarke and Conor Friedersdorf are guest blogging at Andrew Sullivan's. They also did a Bloggingheads.tv recently. Names matter, that's for sure. I also think that Clarke looked somewhat like the "Gigolo Joe" character from A.I. in the diavlog.
razib | July 10, 2009Two emigrants from ScienceBlogs to Discover Blogs, Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer, are on Bloggingheads.tv. The focus is the new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, coauthored by Chris & Sheril Kirshenbaum. A comment from below seems appropriate:
I remember an interesting (if apocryphal statistic) about radiation levels in the UK - you could get a higher radiation dose from living in the relatively undeveloped and unspoilt Cornwall than from living next to Sellafield (the UK's nuclear processing plant, aka Windscale) simply because the granite rocks…
razib | July 8, 2009Sunday Function
The subsidiary patient
Pavlov's Dogs: Proving the Null With Bayesianism
UK House of Lords report on genomic medicine: implications for DTC genetic testing
More fuss over Enceladus
razib | July 6, 2009Living the Scientific Life is still in the running for the trip to Antarctica. If you haven't, consider voting for her essay.
razib | July 6, 2009
Peter Suderman & Megan McArdle are getting married. One of my thoughts was, "How tall will their offspring be?" (assuming they are intent on producing any) I couldn't tell Peter Suderman's height from photographs with certainty, but he has confirmed they are the same height, 6 feet 2 inches. What sort of heights would we expect for the McSuderkinder?* Assuming 80% heritability for height, 3 inches as the standard deviation for both sexes, 5'10 and 5'4 as mean heights (male & female), and plugging into the calculator:
The highest probability of height for any male offspring: 6 feet 3…
razib | July 5, 2009An Index Of Blogging Clients:
Blogging clients allow you to prepare posts and then upload them directly. Useful for
-composing drafts of posts offline
-easier editing of HTML
-easier inserting and handling of photos
-easier editing of existing posts
Here's a list of the ones I know of. Any additions welcome.