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Car Buyers Are Dumb v.2

In response to my blog yesterday about America's continued love affair with horsepower and V8 engines, I recieved an excellent comment. It's worth a read: If you ask people why they drive 4WD SUVs you get a number of answers, usually associated with safety, or power and control. While many early SUV models were available in 2WD versions, people overwhelmingly prefered 4WD. Yet repeated usage surveys in the 90s showed only about 10% of SUV drivers ever used 4WD. What gives? Why are people buying the extra design, precision engineering, and transmission weight and buying the extra gas to haul…

Unconscious Shopping

Another week, another fascinating seminar over at Mind Matters. The paper in question concerns a topic near and dear to me: decision making. Here's the abstract: Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing. On the basis of recent insights into the characteristics of conscious and unconscious thought, we tested the hypothesis that simple choices (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but that choices in complex matters (such as…

Internet Dating Addiction?

I am going to start a category for the random, stupid things people believe you can get addicted to. Here is a good one: internet dating. A researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Australia argues that perceived popularity in the online dating scene can lead to Internet dating "addiction" and multiple relationship failures. "At first blush the person seems very popular -- they might receive 200 replies so they get a lot more attention than if they had walked into bar. It gives a feeling of being powerful. The online environment doesn't have the conventions and context of a real…

Public vs. Publicized: Future of the Web at WWW2010

It is somewhat hard to grok how much a Big Deal the WWW2010 conference is when it's happening in one's own backyard. After all, all I had to do was drop the kids at school a little earlier each morning and drive down to Raleigh, through the familiar downtown streets, park in a familiar parking lot, and enter a familiar convention center, just to immediately bump into familiar people - the 'home team' of people I have been seeing at blogger meetups, tweetups and other events for years, like Paul Jones, Ruby Sinreich, Fred Stutzman, Ryan Boyles, Wayne Sutton, Kim Ashley, Henry Copeland and…

Subversive chemistry

I must urge you to steal buy this book: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). The description makes it sound perfect. Laboratory work is the essence of chemistry, and measurement is the essence of laboratory work. A hands-on introduction to real chemistry requires real equipment and real chemicals, and real, quantitative experiments. No existing chemistry set provides anything more than a bare start on those essentials, so the obvious answer is to build your own chemistry set and use it to do real chemistry. Everything you need is…

lateral thinking for small broke countries

So... these credit default swap thingies, they pay out if some credit instrument goes bad, like a bond issue, and, famously, financial companies buy them as side bets hedges against financial "events", including betting against instruments they are promoting to clients, and deals they have no involvement in at all and they are not regulated Soooooo........ countries can play this game also, right? So, Iceland owes a few $billion or so. It faces sovereign default in 2011 unless a miracle happens. CDS spreads right now are about 5-6% for Icelandic bonds, which is huge, yet way too small - 1-…

Fermi Scientific Linux. What is it?

I had promised a little more info on Scientific Linux. This is a form of Linux with a name that changes faster than my shirt when I realize I've got it on inside out. Form the Fermi LInux site: Fermi Linux is the generic name for linux distributions that are created and used at Fermi National Accelerator Lab. These releases have gone through different names: Fermi Linux, Fermi Linux LTS, LTS, Scientific Linux Fermi, SLF. At the time of this writting, the only officially supported Fermi Linux is Scientific Linux Fermi. But the inside story is both less and more interesting than you might…

I think we've been insulted by American book publishers

Richard Wiseman, the fabulously funny and enlightening skeptical psychologist, has written a book called Paranormality which is a fabulously funny and enlightening dissection of paranormal claims; I got an advance copy because I'm special and I recommend it highly, and so do Skepchicks. However, something strange happened. Wiseman is British, and he published in the UK, but when he tried to get it picked up in the US, publishers balked. The book has done well in the UK and has been bought by publishers in lots of other countries. However, the major American publishers were reluctant to…

Ferrofluids (MoTD Science Club time again...)

These are great: ferrofluids are stable suspensions of ferromagnetic particles. Typically, the liquid is something organic and nonvolatile, and the magnetic particles are iron oxides (such as Fe2O3 or Fe3O4). Why so neat? Look here. Magnets, moved around near a ferrofluid, can create beautiful patterns that are a direct effect of the field lines. Image courtesy Flickr User Steve Jurvetson. It's tricky stuff to make: generating liquid colloids is hard enough, but making one that's stable for any appreciable length of time is even harder. Over time, the particles tend to settle and aggregate.…

The Prius Needs a Gas Tax

That didn't take long. As soon as a gallon of gas stabilized around $2 and change, hybrid sales started to flatline. Now Toyota needs to use incentives to push the Prius: In April, Toyota will begin its first national advertising campaign for Prius since it began selling the hybrid in the United States in 2000. Ads will begin appearing in local markets before then. Toyota has also started offering the first incentives on the Prius, including some no-interest financing, and lease deals of as little as $219 a month. The moves by Toyota come amid flat sales last year for Prius, whose first six…

OADay winner: My Father the Anthropologist; or, What I Offer Open Access and Why

Here is the other one of the two winning posts in the Open Access Day blogging competition: My Father the Anthropologist; or, What I Offer Open Access and Why by Dorothea Salo: In 1980 or thereabouts--I was eight or nine--my father the anthropologist started yet another rant about serials cancellations at his university's library while he drove the family somewhere in the family car. He thought the problem an artifact of library underfunding, I remember. I don't recall that he ever did anything about it save rail bitterly on the subject to us, his captive, powerless, and resentful audience.…

What use is a redundant cologne?

You can now buy scents on the web that are inspired by HP Lovecraft. For instance, you could get Cthulhu: "A creeping, wet, slithering scent, dripping with seaweed, oceanic plants and dark, unfathomable waters." But what if you already smell like that all the time? (via io9)

Denialists' Deck of Cards: The 10 of Hearts, "You Don't Understand Us"

An industry lobbyist can buy time by becoming petulant. After throwing a temper tantrum, the next step is to play the 10 of Hearts. Play this card by saying that your industry is misunderstood. It is a sophisticated, nuanced entity that needs more understanding before any proposals advance.

Darwin Quotes

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life. - Charles R. Darwin, Support The Beagle Project Read the Beagle Project Blog Buy the Beagle Project swag Celebrate Darwin Day Prepare ahead for the Darwin Bicentennial Read Darwin for yourself.

Hot New Science Blogging Anthology

The Open Lab 2009 science blogging anthology has been published and is available as a paperback book and a PDF file. There's a piece of Aard in there among many fine contributions. Tell me what you think and what e-reader you're using if you buy the PDF!

Cool Resource

The NY Times has a pretty cool resource available on their website. It has the first chapters of hundreds of books that they have reviewed, split into fiction and non-fiction categories. Great way to get a gist of the book and whether you'd want to buy it.

Hacking Your Kindle

The other day when I was not hacking my kindle, I discovered that it ran on Linux. Or at least, when I went to "status" and typed in 411, the OS details came up and that is what it indicated. So, should I really be impressed buy this? I love this punchline:

Sleepy Snake Eats Mischievous Mouse

Fascinating footage taken with time lapse photography... A hapless tree teeming with squirrels... Doomed lemmings... kind of looks like they're running off a Marshmellow Peep Nail Fungus Yes, those are sleep fungi underneath the nail More great footage here or buy your own here at the Mochimochi store.

Higher taxes may not curb some CO2 emissions

For air travelers, a carbon tax won't make them stay home. This is bad news. Can someone please invent a fuel-cell-powered jet? A preview of the computer jet-setters won't be allowed to buy. How hallucinogens work. Plato thought writing would destroy memory. What will digital camcorders do?

Spider spiral

This beautiful photo by Kindra Clineff catches nature one-upping human craftsmanship. I can just hear that spider piping "neener neener neener". Also, it's a perfect follow-up to Christobal Vila's graceful animation about math in nature, which has now officially gone spiral-viral. Buy a print here. Via NOTCOT.

Money can buy happiness... if you spend it on other people

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." - Douglas Adams In this pithy paragraph, the sorely missed Douglas Adams sums up a puzzling paradox of modern life - we often link happiness to money and the spending of it, even though both proverbs and psychological surveys…

Truth is pain…a poll

Apparently still smarting from the trouncing Catholics received from Hitchens and Fry, a site called Catholic Truth Scotland is trying to recoup some dignity…by running an online poll? We could tell them that that won't work. The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world True [70.6%] False [29.4%] I fear those numbers are about to change in a way that will make them very unhappy.

Randy Olson's new blog: The Benshi

Happy New Year and welcome to this new "on-line journal" which will be a collection of essays. It will be sort of a continuation of thoughts from my book, "Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style." In the essays, which will be roughly twice a week, I will be making reference to parts of the book from time to time. Check it out

Draw a Pig Personality Test

This is an online personality test, based on your drawing of a pig. I wanted to save my picture of a pig to share with you because I thought it was rather nice, especially considering that it was drawn online and freehand. Unfortunately, this site does not keep your picture available for very long after you've finished drawing it so be sure to "grab" it before it goes away forever. I'll show you my results if you show me yours! Ho-hum, inaccurate as usual, but I'll spare you the details. . tags: online quiz, personality test, draw a pig

Science 2.0 article quotes four ScienceOnline'09 participants

Science 2.0: New online tools may revolutionize research quotes Michael Nielsen, Eva Amsen, Corie Lok and Jean-Claude Bradley. Article is good but short. If you come to ScienceOnline'09 or participate virtually, you can get the longer story straight from them.

OK, maybe you can turn video games into art

This is a thoughtful contemplation of online personas and what they mean to people. It also has some useful implications: "What will happen if Dublin is invaded by zombies?", indeed. I worry about that all the time. Avatar Days from Piranha Bar on Vimeo.

Senator Obama on Detroit

Senator Obama earned a lot of points in my book today because he took the leadership of the U.S. auto companies to task for being such retrograde, anti-progress morons. From the NY Times (italics mine): In a speech that hit hard at the failings of Detroit automakers, Mr. Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate, said Japanese companies had done far better than their Detroit counterparts to develop energy efficient vehicles.... "For years, while foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology for their vehicles, American automakers were spending their time investing in…

Around the Web: 18 recent reports relevant to libraries and librarianship

I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here. Of course I've very likely missed a few, so suggestions are welcome in the comments. Shaping the Future of Monograph Publishing in the Liberal Arts: Results of a survey to Oberlin Group Faculty 2014 Planning Guide for Data Management ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2013 Higher Education's Top-…

50,000 Comments!

It seems like only yesterday we got to 10,000 comments and now John Mashey has posted the 50,000th comment, with more content than most blog posts. And here's his acceptance speech: Thanks to all. I always hoped my efforts would be rewarded, although I never expected this! CafePress is HQ'd about 20 miles away, although who knows, the T-shirt might come from China for all I know. There is at least hope that it's a short truck ride away. My forthcoming Deltoid T-shirt will take its proud place amongst some other rare T-shirts I own: -- SGI "Building a better dinosaur" Jurassic Park dino,…

Facebook shares at $4,000 each!

So it's official. I now own a portion of Facebook, even if it's a very tiny fraction of the some 240 million shares now on the market today, the initial public offering. The opening price this morning was at $42 per share, but even before they went on the market, some wealthy investors were already jockeying for their own piece. In one extraordinary case: From the Wall Street Journal: Knight Capital Group, one of the biggest aggregators of US retail share trading, is seeing orders for Facebook come in from brokerage firm clients -- including one from an investor willing to buy the stock…

Jail must really suck in Bulgaria

Losanoff JE, Kjossev KT. Gastrointestinal 'crosses'. A new shade from an old palette. Arch Surg. 1996 Feb;131(2):166-9. Okay, so within a single week in January of 1993, five male prisoners from the same Bulgarian prison were hospitalized with perforations of their gastrointestinal tracts. The perforations were the result of the prisoners' intentional ingestion of 'crosses' made out of paper clips and rubber bands. Two halves of a paper clip were tied crosswise with a rubber band, pulled together to collapse the cross, wrapped in a piece of paper, and ingested. The paper came loose along the…

Start Them Early: Interview with Karen Ventii

Karen Ventii is one of my SciBlings - her blog is Science To Life. At the second Science Blogging Conference in January she co-moderated a panel on Gender and Race in Science: online and offline, relevant to the discussion of racial diversity that is ongoing here on Scienceblogs right now. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? My name is Karen Ventii & I come from Ghana. What is your scientific background? I have a B.S and an M.S in Biology and I'm currently getting my Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Emory…

The Slow Death of Traditional Newspapers

As a companion piece to my post a few days ago regarding Christiane Amanpour's remarks about blogging, have a look at Andrew Sullivan's latest column for The Times Online. Lot's of interesting statistics: Between March and September the 500 biggest newspapers in America reported an average circulation decline of 4.6%. In six months. That's close to a 10% decline per year. No newspapers showed any but fractional gains. It is therefore a near-certainty that many towns and cities in America will no longer have a newspaper after the down-turn. And that may apply not just to small names but to…

Links for2009-07-28

kate_nepveu: Worldcon: online jerkitude "I'm trying to come up with a list of bedrock principles that apply across all online contexts, and I keep getting bogged down in my lawyer tendencies. So what would you say are the fundamental, applies-anywhere minimum requirements of human decency when it comes to online interactions?" (tags: internet culture society SF blogs) Invisible flash takes photos without the glare - tech - 16 July 2009 - New Scientist "Although the dark flash gives a crisp image without disturbing those in the picture, the results have an odd colour balance that looks…

Worth A Thousand Words

The ToBo Lab fish crew learning how to ID parrotfish from fish expert Rich Pyle aboard the Hi'ialakai "Visual storytelling through science/nature photography" was the fourth session I attended at Science Online 2011. Run by ace photographer and journalist Allie Wilkinson and photography enthusiast and science writer Melody Dye, the session focused on how to enrich the public understanding of science through imagery. We often don't realize how important visual presentation is in communication. Whether in the form of a pic next to a headline or a photo essay, images are powerful means of…

ScienceOnline 2009: Transitions

ScienceWoman and PropterDoc coordinated a session at ScienceOnline 09 that provided space for people to talk about different transitions they have blogged through, and how they navigated or negotiated those transitions. Both coordinators have gone through some job transitions which have manifested themselves in their blogs in different ways: ScienceWoman has gone from being a graduate student to a junior faculty member and has blogged through her pregnancy and now two years of her daughter's life, while PropterDoc has also changed jobs but also changed countries at the same time, and is…

TEDxLibrariansTO Countdown Questions: Day 5

The very fine TEDxLibrariansTO team is counting down to this Saturday's big event with some daily questions for us all to consider. The topic, of course, is Librarians as Thought Leaders! These are the questions for Day 5. I'll attempt to answer them and every day's questions very briefly. I figure if I go for extremely brief answers, there's actually a chance I'll get to them every day! Question 1: Name one thing we could do right now in order to be perceived as thought leaders outside the profession. My Answer: Predictably, perhaps, I'll answer that we should mostly (but not completely)…

The Problem with Textbooks - or is there a problem?

So, I put together part of my online textbook (finally). Let me give a little history and insight into this 'textbook'. Ok - I blog, I am sure you got that part already. When I write a post, I like it to start from the basic ideas so that anyone could find it and get what I am saying about some physics thing. Well, I started to realize that there were some things that I kept repeating (like how to add vectors). Instead of re-writing this every time a post had vectors, I made a post Basics: Vectors and Vector Addition. Then, I realized that I could keep doing this and slowly build up a…

Quick Picks on ScienceBlogs, August 11

"Taxicab Confessions: The Earwax Episode" "I usually try to avoid the subject [of what i do] with some people, because when i say "I study the inner ear" a lot of people feel the need to unload their medical problems regarding earwax upon me." And: is it a coincidence? Sandra Porter also has a post about earwax, here. "Vonnegut: Science Art" Did you know that Kurt Vonnegut has a website with original works of art that you can buy? I didn't! "Science losing a good friend in Lieberman" "Say what you want about Joe Lieberman and the political scene, but Lieberman for years has been one of…

Eat poultry? Data reveals brands that self-inspect under controversial USDA program

The food safety group Food & Water Watch (FWW) is publicizing data listing the companies and brands of chicken and turkey that have adopted the USDA's controversial "modernized" inspection system. The New Poultry Inspection System (NPIS) shifts responsibility for inspections from USDA specialists to company employees. The change was strongly opposed by food safety groups, but the Obama Administration implemented it anyway in early 2015. (Worker safety advocates also opposed the rule because it proposed a significant increase in line speeds which would lead to more repetitive motion…

Donohue Blames the Victims

Among the religious right leaders, almost no one can be counted on to, as Jon Stewart puts it, bring the crazy as consistently as Catholic League president Bill Donohue. You're gonna love his response to the possibility that Mark Foley was molested by a priest when he was a teenager: "As for the alleged abuse, it's time to ask some tough questions. First, there is a huge difference between being groped and being raped, so which was it Mr. Foley? Second, why didn't you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn't allow themselves to be molested. So…

DNA Identifies Ancient Foodstuffs

Here's a novel way of identifying the erstwhile contents of an ancient pottery vessel: never mind the chemical composition of the residue, the lipids, the proteins, the isotope ratios, the pollen, the phytholiths, the seeds or the leaf fragments. Just scrape some gunk off the inside of the sherds and check it for DNA snippets to identify the organisms that produced it! The beauty of this approach is that you will easily see if the DNA you've grabbed is likely to belong to the substance originally kept in the vessel. If you come up with your own DNA or that of a soil microbe or earthworm, then…

Super Bowl XLII: Pro and Con

Pro: 1) THE GIANTS WIN THE SUPER BOWL!!!!! w00t! 2) Michael Strahan and Amani Toomer get championship rings, which is particularly sweet, because they suffered through some really awful teams. 3) Eli Manning drinks for free in the tri-state area. This'll buy him at least six months of peace and quiet from the New York press. That was one of the all-time great fourth quarters. I have no idea how he got away from that one sack, and Tyree's catch was amazing. 4) This breaks up Boston's sports hegemony for the year, which couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of fans. 5) THE GIANTS WIN THE SUPER BOWL…

The Catholic League catches on to our latest subterfuge in the War on Christmas

The Catholic League is afraid parents might see The Golden Compass…and then buy the books for a Christmas gift. Horrors! You can't give books by atheists on Christmas! Watch the video from Fox News to witness the outrage. Also, I have to love this quote from a Christian who opposes the movie fervently, despite never having seen it or even reading the books. But he has his reasons. I don't have to read the book, I've never been bitten by a snake either, but I, you know, it's not something that I have to do to know that it's not going to, that it's not necessarily going to be a good thing for…

Here's another great example of what "support the troops" really means

Back at the beginning of April, ATA airlines suddenly went out of business. With no prior warning, they filed for bankruptcy and suspended all flights. This decision was sparked by FedEx's still unexplained decision to drop ATA from the group of airlines that they use to fulfill their military charter contracts as of October 1st. Before going belly-up, ATA did a lot of military charter business. So much, in fact, that the loss of the carrier means that troops are still facing delays of several days in coming home from the war zone. Apparently, FedEx has been unwilling to suck up the extra…

Louisiana Academic Freedom Act

Louisiana now has an Academic Freedom Act in the works. Academic Freedom Acts are right wing ploys to force specific issues ... or more commonly, specific politically or religiously motivated version of issues ... into the classroom at various levels. Academic Freedom Acts also typically are designed to silence faculty who teach things that conservatives, evangelicals, global warming deniers, and so on do not want to hear. From a commentary in The Daily Advertiser: Gov. Bobby Jindal's first regular-session legislative plan is designed to help Louisiana schools train a better work-force. So…

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Resigns

They're dropping like flies now. In another blow to the Bush Administration, The New York Times reports that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will announce his resignation later has announced his resignation (update) today... and it's about damn time. Senator Charles Schumer puts it lightly: Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who sits on the committee and has been calling for Mr. Gonzales's resignation for months, said this morning: "It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general has done the right thing and stepped down. For the previous six months…

Will bottom trawls have negative effects on deep-sea corals?

This is the fifth of five articles about the shared characteristics of shallow and deep-water corals. It's far from complete, I'm afraid. Deep corals are out of sight, but not out of reach. The commercial fishermen working above just trawled an old growth sea forest near New Zealand. The bubblegum corals (Paragorgia sp.) on deck in the pictures below are on the order of 100-200 years old. Notice there's not one colony on the deck, but several. The corals were collected from a seamount by commercial fishers trawling for "orange roughy"- the fish formerly known as "slimehead". They changed the…

Quack gets dose of his own medicine, nearly dies

A vitamin D overdose is nothing to laugh about — it's painful and debilitating, can cause kidney damage, and can kill. This is a case where consuming excessive amounts of a vitamin supplement can do more than help you make expensive urine, and can lead to crippling illness and death. Gary Null is a thorough quack who has been raking in the dough with — you guessed it — nearly worthless vitamin supplements. Now this would simply be a tragic story of one of his poor deluded suckers clients had come to harm from his magic crap food, but it's almost funny that Null nearly killed himself by eating…

Darwin Quotes

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin. - Charles R. Darwin Support The Beagle Project Read the Beagle Project Blog Buy the Beagle Project swag Prepare ahead for the Darwin Bicentennial Read Darwin for yourself.