gregladen | April 27, 2011All over the planet, giant telescopes and detectors are looking (and listening) for clues to the workings of the universe. At the INK Conference, science writer Anil Ananthaswamy tours us around these amazing installations, taking us to some of the most remote and silent places on Earth.
gregladen | April 27, 2011When Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters came out, I got myself an electronic copy of it and searched for the words "God", "Jesus", "Miracle" etc. Amanda and I had watched Capt'n Sully be interviewed a few times and we guessed that he was a straight up guy who knew how to land an airplane on a river. And did. We were happy to find an example of something extreme and unlikely happening and the key person involved not invoking supernatural powers as causing or stopping something from happening.
At an entirely different time in the past, well, a few times, I was almost eaten by a…
gregladen | April 27, 2011Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).
gregladen | April 27, 2011Donald Trump, Orly Tate, others are "side show carnival barkers" and questions by birthers, others "silliness" according to Obama, in a press conference moments ago.
Following a down-and-dirty live statement to the press asking everyone to just shut. up. and get down to business on the important issues facing the nation, the press vowed to provide intensive, irrelevant and annoying coverage of the birth certificate issue all day and for the rest of the week. Presumably the story will be interleaved with coverage of some wedding going on in England.
Here's a statement from the White House:…
gregladen | April 27, 2011The reactors at Fukushima continue to be hotter than "cold shutdown" levels, and at least one reactor (#1) is probably leaking from the core containment vessel. Fission products in high amounts, high pressure, and high temperature indicate that something close to fission is still happening although an apparent lack of large quantities of short lived isotopes may indicate that it has been a while since extensive fission has occurred in the leaking reactor.
There is still concern over possible hydrogen explosions and unexplained "white smoke" continues to rise from several buildings on site…
gregladen | April 27, 2011I started to work in Africa in the mid 1980s. Since I had been admitted to a graduate program that was heavily involved with work in Kenya, it would make sense that I'd work there, but I was well aware of the fact that there would be no work at Koobi Fora until the Koobi Fora monograph was done, since those in charge of that research felt a responsibility to get what they had done published before collecting more data from the field. I had the opportunity to work in South Africa as well, and there were good reasons for me to do that, but there was one very large reason not to: Apartheid.…
gregladen | April 26, 2011According to Steve Jobs, Apple's iPhone and/or Apple corporation (the distinction is important but often muddled in this conversation) does not track its users' geographical location, but Android (which is neither a phone nor a company, but a system ... another important yet muddled distinction) does.
Supposedly:
One MacRumors reader emailed Apple CEO Steve Jobs asking for clarification on the issue while hinting about a switch to Android if adequate explanations are not forthcoming. Jobs reportedly responded, turning the tables by claiming both that Apple does not track users and that…
gregladen | April 26, 2011Kids who score higher on IQ tests will, on average, go on to do better in conventional measures of success in life: academic achievement, economic success, even greater health, and longevity. Is that because they are more intelligent? Not necessarily. New research concludes that IQ scores are partly a measure of how motivated a child is to do well on the test. And harnessing that motivation might be as important to later success as so-called native intelligence.
Read the rest here.
gregladen | April 26, 2011I've hardly ever played video games, and Julia, growing up, never did either. Then a couple of years ago we got a Wii and now we play it regularly but responsibly. Amanda joins us now and then.
After the filing of our 1040s, we realized we could afford to buy a new TV to replace our old energy-hogging tube model, so we did. Now we will be able to see what we are doing when using the Wii. As an indicator of how much we are NOT addicted to game play, I'll note that other than testing that the connection works, We've not used it since installing the TV on Friday.
The Wii is great, but it…
gregladen | April 25, 2011The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine). It is considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and it is the only one classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale.
source
But it's OK, because all that really happened is a few dozen people died in the explosion and fire, several thousand children had their thyroids cut out, and farmers across much of eastern Europe got an extended vacation.
gregladen | April 25, 2011Pioneering surgeon Susan Lim performed the first liver transplant in Asia. But a moral concern with transplants (where do donor livers come from ...) led her to look further, and to ask: Could we be transplanting cells, not whole organs? At the INK Conference, she talks through her new research, discovering healing cells in some surprising places.
gregladen | April 24, 2011From 2000 through 2007, inclusively, approximately 780 thousand people in the United States took a bullet. Most of them were wounded by another person in an act of violence. A fairly large number were wounded by accident, killed by a bad guy, or killed themselves. A small number died in a shooting accident, tried to kill themselves but messed up, or were wounded or shot by a cop. Here's the data culled form the CDC databases on injuries and deaths in the US, in crude rate per 100,000:
The numbers for the year 2000 are from a somewhat different set of data and I would be cautious about…
gregladen | April 24, 2011Because you wanted to know:
First observation: Far more men are killed in this manner than women. Boys with their toys. Presumably, women are being killed by something else. Second observation: There may be a trend towards decreasing rates of death by accident involving firearms. This could be a simple increase in the effectiveness of medial intervention, or perhaps it is something else.
gregladen | April 24, 2011Since this came up I thought you might like to see the data.
NOTES: It would be interesting to look at the ratio of fatal to non fatal over long time spans (before/during/after transition to high quality trauma treatment in the US); I would like to see good data breaking down suicide by age that tracks along with the CDC surveys; Most importantly would be information of similar quality and sources indicating attempted suicide and successful suicide with means other than guns. From the numbers we do have, we can say that there is a bias towards minors in the suicide category, and non-gun…
gregladen | April 24, 2011Yet the 11-year old girl lies in a coma, the bullet removed from her brain on Friday, with a poor prognosis.
Maddy Montanye was shot in the head on Thursday by her father, Jesse.
Jesse's .22 caliber pistol had jammed, and he was trying to get it unjammed while sitting in the living room across from his daughter. That's when the weapon discharged and the bullet penetrated Maddy's head. Several other family members where in the home at the time, but were not injured.
For reasons that are not yet clear, it took 45 minutes to airlift Maddy to the Hennepin County Medical Center. The hospital…
gregladen | April 24, 2011Placed in orbit by the Shuttle Discovery, launched with this payload in 1990. Stop by and say hey.
gregladen | April 23, 2011By leading the Americans in his audience at TEDxPSU step by step through the thought process, sociologist Sam Richards sets an extraordinary challenge: can they understand -- not approve of, but understand -- the motivations of an Iraqi insurgent? And by extension, can anyone truly understand and empathize with another?
gregladen | April 23, 2011Archaeologist Lew Binford has died at the age of 79 at his home in Kirksville, Mo. He died of a a heart attack.
I knew Lew a little, having spent some time with him while I was in graduate school, and having met him at the occassional conference (he was famous for NOT going to conferences very often by the time the 1980s rolled around).
Lew was a dick, a very smart guy, and probably had as much influence on archaeology as any other individual. Those who have taken classes from me know that I've got a few stories to tell about him. But not now.
RIP Lew Binford. May your bones be dug up…
gregladen | April 23, 2011iPhones know where they are, so they probably know where you are, and these data have been captured and maintained by the Apple devices and have been used by police in geoForensic investigations. Crushing civil liberties? There's an app for that!
Apple came to international attention in 1984 when the upstart computer company bought Superbowl Halftime ad space to show how they could destroy Big Brother. I'm not sure who Big Brother was at the time (it may have been a combination of IBM and Microsoft) but this was a direct reference to Orwell's book "Nineteen Eighty-Four".
Ironically,…
gregladen | April 22, 2011I'm not sure what I think of Gnome 3's Shell Interface. Imma try it out but I think they may have fallen into the trap of making the desktop the point rather than, well, emacs and a web browser the point (the only two pieces of software I use every day and both days). Either way, Fedora 15 looks interesting, and it does use Gnome 3 Shell.
Linux in Exile has a review. The LIE author is really into Fedora, and seems to know a lot about it, so this is rather useful. Here.