retrospectacle
Posts by this author
So Mike over at The Questionable Authority posted an excellent critique/synthesis/etc of the comment thread going on in the Obama vs. pedophile case, which I thought deserved its own post. Check it out.
Ok, I'm updating 'da roll tonight, so if you want me to check out your site for link-worthiness leave it in the comments!
Neuroscience has a long and sordid history with anesthetic chemicals. Take curare (d-Tubocurarine) for example. Better known as a South American "dart poison," curare causes paralysis but not loss of consciousness. However, this chemical was used during the early 1900s as a surgical anesthetic for…
So I got this comment on my post about the "Video Game Mind Control" aka the EEG headset made by Emotiv. Thought I would post is to get a bit more visibility.
Hi guys,
I work at Emotiv and stumbled upon this site by chance.
As you guys seem to have the most knowledge in this area compared to other…
I can't believe some of the stuff that Presidential hopefuls have to endure. Barack Obama is currently involved in a lawsuit with a self-professed pedophile over pictures of his kids.
It's enough to make any father lash out in anger. A self-professed pedophile posts photos of your young daughters…
As I've mentioned before, my research and my lab focuses on the delivery of genes to the inner ear to repair or reverse deafness. One potential method for getting these genes into surviving cells is to insert them into a modified virus which infects the healthy inner ear cells. Following infection…
Yep, PZ's half a century old today, so go wish the old coot some birthday cheer. Mmmmmmmm fried squid.......
I think I've just uncovered the saddest thing in the world: a panda who's lost a limb and now has problems socializing. Cruel, cruel discriminative pandas. Why won't you let Niu Niu in on your panda games? Admittedly, the loss of 2/3 of her limb (in a fight) has resulted in balance problems that…
Bob Abu sent me this really amazing website on inner ear biology and morphology. Its got some really impressive SEM pictures and very informative descriptions of the anatomy of the cochlea. I'd suggest checking it out.
Cross-section of the sensory portion of the cochlea (the organ of Corti.)
Every gamer's wet dream---controlling the game with your mind---may soon be a reality.
Made by Emotiv, its called Project Epoc, and will be demo'd at the Game Developer's Conference this week. This wireless headset if fitted with sensors which, I only guess, can detect changes in blood flow in…
The time has come for blogroll updating! Yes, time to clean out the old links and put in some shiny new ones.
Want a link?
Leave it in the comments! (No promises, but I do promise to take a look!)
Forward to your bloggy friends. :)
In a recent head-to-head test of four fad diets, apparently the Atkins diet resulted in the participants losing the most weight. The Atkins diet relies on the elimination of carbs in your diet, and encourages intake of protein and fats instead. However, there's more to the story:
Women on the low-…
Water is water....unless its holy water, of course! I'm not quite sure what's special about this gimmicky beverage, except its from Canada and might raise my eyebrows slightly more than Aquafina or Evian. I'm pretty sure this water isn't any holier than Detroit's finest tap water.
Uh oh, looks…
Ladies and gentlemen, the fat lady has sung.
A federal jury today found Lewis "Scooter" Libby guilty on four counts.
Libby was convicted of:
1. obstruction of justice when he intentionally deceived a grand jury investigating the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame;
2. making a false statement by…
That vile woman just doesn't know when to quit. A lot of mudslinging is tolerated in political banter, but you really have to have some god-awful dirty mud when even your own party denounces you as the bigoted banshee you are. For those of you who aren't familiar with her most recent foray into…
Seems that ScienceBlogs was down for about an hour or so......strange. This has been happening with some semi-regular frequency the past few months, which makes me wonder who we've pissed off this time. Anyway, the tech guys have informed us that there's a major upgrade in the pipeline which should…
Walking around the gym, watching all those people spinning or walking or treading or ellipsing....wouldn't it make good sense to harness all that rat-race energy as power? Could you imagine getting a free gym membership for spending a certain amount of time on power-generating machines? Well, seems…
Weird things meme, as seen on Adventure in Science and Ethics:
(continued under the fold.......)
1. I hate John Mayer with the fire of a thousand suns and the depth of a million oceans. This hatred has recently come to encompass the whole flaccid genre, including, but not limited to, Belle and…
Remember when I asked if evil, evil You Tube was really so evil for broadcasting copyrighted material? Well the kerfuffle was over Viacom pulling their content off YouTube and putting it on rising-star video thingy Joost. I was looking at this new-fangled Joost thing, and it *seems* to be TV…
Mexico has a lot of problems on its hands: pollution, emigration, drugs, poverty, pollution, to name a few. But Mexico also plays host to many endangered species and habitats, providing a very dangerous home to the animals lucky enough to live there. And these endangered animals, including rare…
Well, nothing good thats for sure. But my SciBling Dr. Charles has a interesting (if disgusting) post up on the inner life of a Twinkie.
I was most interested in the notorious "is it a liquid or solid?" filling:
*The Filling - primarily made of shortening (partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and…
PZ notes a cataclysmic event: a bank actually turned down a $50,000 check written by the Almighty!
Kevin Russell found out it's not easy trying to cash a check from God. The 21-year-old man was arrested Monday after he tried to cash a check for $50,000 at the Chase Bank in Hobart that was signed "…
Maybe I'm just being snarky, but does anyone else find it somewhat amusing that this file photo of the iPhone using GoogleMaps has a big fat Starbucks as the point of interest? Hey potential iPhone users, now you can plan you next trip to Starbucks instead of just tripping over one every 30 feet!…
This is so unbelieveable, I had to watch it twice. Needless to say, cornstarch water behaves very strangely when shaken (but not stirred) by high-speed vibrations. The result are faraday waves.
Faraday waves are nonlinear standing waves that appear on liquids enclosed by a vibrating receptacle.…
Just ask 1st Lt. Ehren Watada who's second court martial is coming up. He's refused to be deployed to Iraq and made (GASP!) critical statements of Bush and the war.
Watada has acknowledged making public statements criticizing the war and Bush. He has said deploying to Baghdad last year with the…
Ohhh this picture makes me crack up. I took it outside "The Sink," a bar in Boulder, Colorado when I was there a bit ago for a science conference. Yes, it says "STD Happy Hour." I forget what it was suppost to stand for, but it did have some other meaning.
Check out this interesting op-ed piece in the NY Times today, on a case being heard in the Supreme Court over Bush's faith-based initiatives.
The question before the court is whether a group seeking to preserve the separation of church and state can mount a First Amendment challenge to the Bush…