gregladen | December 11, 2011Skeptics love to hate CAM. And often, with good reason. Alternative medicines or medical treatments, as is often pointed out, become "mainstream" when the available science suggests that they work, so it is almost axiomatic that "alternative" means "unproven" and it is probably almost always true that the kinds of things that end up as "alternatives" come from sources with poor track records. For instance, one of the most common forms of alternative medicine used over the last several decades is Extra X where X is some substance we know the body uses, and that we know a deficiency of is…
gregladen | December 11, 2011...A door had slammed shut for Thompson and Ritchie in March of 1969, when their employer, the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., withdrew from a collaborative project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Electric to create an interactive time-sharing system called Multics, which stood for "Multiplexed Information and Computing Service." Time-sharing, a technique that lets multiple people use a single computer simultaneously, had been invented only a decade earlier. Multics was to combine time-sharing with other technological advances of the era, allowing users to…
gregladen | December 10, 2011This is a very good LaTex Tutorial, marred only by the fact that it is running in some odd operating system that I am not familiar with:
The rest of the tutorials are HERE, nicely organized.
Hat Tip Got Emacs
gregladen | December 10, 2011The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution and Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life are two very recent books on human evolution, both of which I recommend, depending on your interests.
The first is by Dean Falk, who has studied brain endocasts for the last 30 years. Falk chronicles her early work on endocasts, the relationship between that work and the much earlier work of Raymond Dart, in South Africa on the first Australopith fossil, and touches on the problems of being a woman with somewhat controversial findings to…
gregladen | December 10, 2011Follow the adventures of Klaus the Forklift Operator. May not be work safe, depending on where you work:
Bonus video:
gregladen | December 9, 2011Some interesting news from the world of computer programming. A company that provides products to improve code studied a bunch of programs and evaluated how badly they were written. Cobol programs had the lowest rate of bad code, while Java the highest. Part of this is because Cobol programs are all old and have been revised and fixed up quite a bit, but it was also suggested that Java programs relatively suck because modern programmers relatively suck. For this reason, maybe Microsoft's latest Evile Corporate Decision makes sense: The new Microsoft 8 App Store deal allows Microsoft to…
gregladen | December 9, 2011This is actually outrageous. Some of your messages, perhaps many, have been hidden in a place you probably never thought to look. I just found out about it, and looked there, and in fact there were messages I needed to see. Facebook has majorly let me down with this cute little move of theirs.
The story about how bad this can get and how to find your hidden missives is HERE. Hat tip, Ana.
gregladen | December 8, 2011Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean (near here) some time ago. In the absence of much physical evidence, experts figured out that the crash involved a misunderstanding of air speed due in part to faulty air speed data from iced over sensors. Then, last April, the cockpit data and voice recorders were fished out of the sea, which is rather incredible. Since then, further analysis has confirmed the initial finding but added a twist: Yes, there was a problem with air speed, but the proximate reason for the crash is because the individuals piloting the plane (especially one…
gregladen | December 8, 2011I'm not sure exactly what this means, but ...
A respected scientist from the Cern particle physics laboratory has told the BBC he expects to see "the first glimpse" of the Higgs boson next week.
...Next Tuesday, two separate teams will each reveal the outcome of trawling through their latest data from LHC collisions. A spokesman for one of these teams told us that this year alone they've searched the remains of some 350 trillion collisions, with only ten or so producing candidates for a reliable sign of the Higgs.
bbc
Anybody got any inside info?
gregladen | December 8, 2011That's a large number of grants.
As of today, the National Geographic Society has issued 10,000 grants funding research and exploration since 1890--including ten National Geographic grant projects that, according to an internal panel, "have made the greatest difference in understanding the Earth."
Barbara Moffet interviews Krithi Karanth, a 32-year-old conservation biologist based in Bangalore, India, the recipient of National Geographic's 10,000th grant (since the first in 1890). Dr. Karanth, who grew up around the wild animals of India's national parks, will use the funds to examine the…
gregladen | December 8, 2011TV show Mythbusters has apologized after an experiment it conducted to measure the speed of a cannonball went wrong, leaving a trail of destruction across a California suburb. Instead of hitting its intended target, the cannon misfired, sending a six-inch ball of lead careening through one house, damaging another before ending up lodged in a minivan. No one was injured.
OMG. I so wish it was my house hit by the Mythbusters Cannon Ball!!!!!
Anyway here's one of those zany animations of the event:
OMG!!!!
gregladen | December 8, 2011This is very, very cool.
Geologically, there are ways in which minerals move around and get deposited with rock. A common phenomenon is for a crack to form due to cooling of molten rock or an earthquake or something, and then this space gets filled in. Stuff might just fall into it. Liquidizer rock (magma) might intrude into it. Hot gasses containing residue might build up a deposit within it, or liquid water might flow through it leaving behind minerals, which fill the crack. The thing is, geologists have studied these processes and have a pretty good idea of what they are, how they…
gregladen | December 7, 2011First, I should say right away that the planet that has been in the news so much lately is not known to be "earth like" ... depending on what you think "earth like" is. What we know is that the planet orbits its star in a position that allows for the possibility that water on its surface could be liquid. But, the possibility that the planet has a "surface" ... as opposed to some increasingly dense gaseous layer like Neptune ... has not yet been established. Not that this would favor life one way or another. For all we know, getting life started on a hard crust covered earth is way harder…
gregladen | December 7, 2011I'm enjoying James Lawrence Powell's book "The Inquisition of Climate Science" Powell's book specifically addresses the clilmate change denialist movement and the global warming deniers themselves, and does so severely. He documents and discusses who is paying for climate change denialism documents the lack of scientific credenntials of the denialists, and outlines and describes in detail events such as "climate gate."
The book is exceptionally well documented and could actually be used as a supplementary text in a class on science policy or science and society.
Author's bio from the…
gregladen | December 7, 2011The Linux Journal reader's choice awards have been announced. You'll recall that I suggested to you some time ago that you contribute your vote. Now, you can find out if you won!
The number one distro is Ubuntu, as I thought. Gnome won the best desktop, also as I thought, but now I am also thinking if this will be the last time that will happen for a while (assuming "Unity" and "Gnome" are not the same thing in a comparison like this). I had voted for "Enlightenment because it may be the best non-Gnome desktop that is not essentially Gnome with a screwdriver driven through it in a few…
gregladen | December 7, 2011Opening Our Oceans With Data.Gov
Today, we are pleased to announce the release of ocean.data.gov, the newest community on Data.gov. This effort is the result of two important initiatives of the Obama Administration: the development and implementation of the National Policy for the Stewardship of the Ocean, our Coasts, and the Great Lakes and the creation of Data.gov to make Federal data more accessible to the American people.
Since President Obama signed the Executive Order establishing a National Ocean Policy, the Administration has been working steadily to implement this policy. One…
gregladen | December 7, 2011Why we still have to take creationism seriously:
Adventures in Defending Evolution:
gregladen | December 7, 2011There is a lot of news in Ana's Feed about the nuclear power industry world wide, as well as across Japan, and especially disturbing news related to the Fukushima plant in particular. In brief, the main reason that the situation at these reactors seems to be kinda-sorta under control (as in the water in the plants has stopped boiling uncontrollably) is that much of the nuclear fuel has melted its way into the underlying geology, and/or all over the plant's foundation structures, and/or dispersed through groundwater that is moving through the system. Towards nearby rivers and/or the ocean…