Misc
milhayser | November 12, 2013On Aetiology, Tara C. Smith continues her series on the science of The Walking Dead, explaining how diseases spread and how they might cause zombiism. One thing that would be observed in any real contagion would be an incubation period— the time between when a virus (for example) enters your body and you start showing symptoms of infection. For a virus like the flu, this could be about two days during which you don’t feel sick but could still be infecting people around you—even if you don’t bite them. Tara also expresses nerd rage at the show's "doctors" pursuing antibiotics to treat the flu…
milhayser | November 10, 2013This movie was already spoiled for me because I read the book many years ago. But the movie can't help but spoil itself. It's a great film and one of the best adaptations of a novel to ever appear onscreen, but if you really know nothing about Ender's Game, and can read at a 9th grade level, honestly go read the book first. If you have time.
The problem is that by the time of Ender's "final exam," it's hard to imagine anyone in the audience sympathizing with Ender's shock that he hasn't really been playing a video game; he and his tween friends have been controlling actual spaceships…
stoat | November 8, 2013 An advert in the Economist, and here's the M$ puff online. M$ are trying to persuade the world that Evil Google is invading your privacy by auto-scanning emails to target ads. I can't get exciting by this. Google, and Gmail, are supported by ads (aside: I'm astonished to discover just how much money their is in ads; only with Google did it become clear how much of such useful infrastructure they could support) and I'd rather they read my mail in order to send me useful and/or interesting ads (like this rather tasteful one I've inlined; I got that for searching for same) than spamming me with…
milhayser | October 21, 2013As anti-vaccinationists, global-warming denialists, and young-earth creationists know, it’s not too hard to fool the public with bogus science. But a new exercise by John Bohannon of Science suggests it’s not too hard too fool professionals either. Bohannon used a computer program to generate unique iterations of a purposely flawed paper, playing Mad Libs with the formula “Molecule X from lichen species Y inhibits the growth of cancer cell Z.” He sent his fake papers to 304 open-access journals, and it was accepted by more than half. Some of these journals are admittedly sketchy, but others…
milhayser | October 4, 2013The fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was released last week, saying that global warming is occurring without a doubt, and human activity is extremely likely to be the cause. Greg Laden shares a number of graphics from the report, summarizing "It is getting hotter. It is getting wetter, or dryer, depending on where you are. And the big ice hat our planet wears is falling off." Peter Gleick collates a number of excerpts related to water on Significant Figures, which say that there are likely more regions getting more rain than less; the frequency of…
milhayser | October 1, 2013On Pharyngula, PZ Myers says that cancer, unlike an infectious bacterium or virus, is not the product of millions of years of evolution. Instead, PZ writes, “Cancer misuses and perverts existing processes in your cells to send them out of control.” But what causes cancer? Well, it happens about 20,000 times a day in your body. Luckily, it is almost always repaired. It is the mutation of DNA during cell division. Just one base out of place, and suddenly the gene that made a protein to tightly regulate cell division is making a protein that encourages the cell to divide continually. Depending…
milhayser | September 29, 2013The U.S. "war on drugs," besides failing to meet its goals, has demonstrated a stubborn ignorance of the effects that different drugs have in the human body. Granted, some drugs cause degeneration and are properly outlawed. Opiates such as heroin and stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine take a harsh physical toll and leave users addicted to the chemical. But classified along with these truly dangerous drugs are some of nature's most mysterious medicines. New research shows how marijuana, psychedelics, MDMA and even ketamine have positive physiological and psychological effects that…
stoat | September 19, 2013I'm not desperately interested in the "MOOC" on-line course thing, though I can see that I might be in future. I don't have a lot of spare time; for example the 2 hours I had free last night I spent running + recovering, not learning. But others do, and CIP has been talking to "the enemy" - i.e. the tenured professors in minor universities who have the most to lose. John Boy is even more in favour than CIP. However, I don't want to debate their virtues but do want to note CIP's:
The flood waters in Colorado seem to have washed away my comments on yet another blog by a historian at a school (…
milhayser | September 18, 2013After thirteen years and three films, it's still hard to know what to think about Richard B. Riddick. No one calls him Dick. His luminescent mother-of-pearl cat's eyes allow him to see in the dark, when they're not protected by an iconic pair of black welding goggles. He is very talented at killing people and animals, especially with melee weapons or hand-to-hand. He's not based on any literary or comic-book character. Judging by his conversational abilities, he may be brain damaged or developmentally disabled. He is extremely strong. He is played by Vin Diesel.
In Pitch Black (2000),…
milhayser | August 27, 2013I found this beautiful snake basking in barely flowing water at an elevation of about 5800' in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. At first I thought it was a striped racer, but racers have two light stripes on their sides, while this one has a light stripe down the middle of its back and a light underbelly. It appears to be a juvenile garter snake, or at this altitude, it could be full-grown, morphologically adapted to a less plentiful food web. It's rather small, about 24" long. Click any image below for full size.
Light belly, dark back with a single stripe down the middle.
It…
milhayser | August 21, 2013For writer and director Neill Blomkamp, Elysium is round two of sci-fi feature as social allegory, following in the footsteps of 2009's District 9. Whereas District 9 paralleled the history of apartheid in South Africa, Elysium deals with issues of illegal immigration and social class, centered on everyone's favorite pre-apocalyptic wasteland, Los Angeles.
It's a pure joy to see L.A. extrapolated to a vibrant, populous, spray-painted pile of rubble in the year 2154, where even gringos like Matt Damon hablan español. This proletariat L.A., where ex-con Damon earns minimum wage building robot…
milhayser | August 20, 2013Posted to the homepage on August 11, 2013.
The Moon—like the sun, stars and Earth—is easy for a human being to take for granted. But the Earth's moon is truly exceptional, and should be appreciated for shaping the exceptional world we live on. Earth is the only planet with a single moon, and relative to the Earth, Luna is the largest moon in the solar system. The Moon thus exerts a strong, solitary influence on the planet it was torn from. Evidence suggests that the Moon was blown into orbit by a massive asteroid impact about 4.5 billion years ago, shortly before the emergence of life on…
milhayser | August 15, 2013In his role pinch-hitting as The Daily Show anchor while Jon Stewart directs a feature film called Rosewater, John Oliver has demonstrated a candid, hilarious fury that is unmatched in its impact by Stewart's usual well-meant silliness. People have called Stephen Colbert the heir to 1950's primetime BS-caller Edward R. Murrow, and Colbert is certainly unmatched in his own way, but after seeing Oliver in the limelight, it's hard to imagine a more urgent rebuttal to the media and political hypocrisy of our day.
Last night Oliver didn't have to work hard to demonstrate the ridiculousness of…
stoat | July 7, 2013I go away for a week and the bees go mad.
I don't mean so mad that they put their honey in a pot for me - only that they seem to have filled up the hive to the top, probably with rape. And this despite them being a new swarm, in place only since late May. That's 13 kg of honey (err, with wax mixed in of course, since the frames in the top super were foundationless, because I was in a hurry. They did not put their own comb neatly in rows).
Also while we were away the houseleeks have come out into full flower, even better than last year.
That one is unadjusted, but not really true colour.…
milhayser | May 24, 2013The threshold of 400 carbon dioxide molecules per million molecules of Earth's atmosphere is an arbitrary but still significant milestone, reflecting a near 50% increase in the concentration of the greenhouse gas since humanity first started burning fossil fuels for industry. Sure, the Earth has experienced hotter chemistry before, but Peter Gleick says it all the in the title of his post: The Last Time Atmospheric CO2 was at 400 parts per million Humans Didn’t Exist. The Arctic was also free of ice, and CO2 levels were changing 1000 times slower than they are today. Not that we can't survive…
stoat | May 19, 2013 VV has a thoughtful post about the value of peer review, looked at mostly through the lens of a couple of recent poor papers. Peer review (or whatever system you choose for choosing which papers will see the light) has to balance weeding out dross with not suppressing the unusual but good. It is primarily intended to do this for scientists; its not so great at handling the recent (?) phenomenon of septics deliberately gaming journals in order to publish their drivel. But I think I care about that less than I used to. Probably the greatest problem it faces is the vast mass of publish-or-…
stoat | May 6, 2013 It's the law, it seems. And a suitable title for a misc post.
I've been busy, which accounts for my pathetic lack of posts recently.
* I ran the Brighton marathon (3:46).
* We entered the Town Bumps at Oxford, in IVs!
* I ran the Head of the Cam again.
* I've discovered that Yahoo and Flickr are fuckwits. Mind you, scienceblogs is unimpressing me at the moment with its more than glacial slowness.
* Some folks at work pointed out that my posts are incomprehensible. Such is life, but I do have a glossary. I just added CAGW, in case you were wondering what that was. The ScienceBlogs Great March…
milhayser | April 25, 2013On ERV, Abbie Smith reports on the phenomenal success of the HPV vaccine in Australia. The vaccine, designed to protect against several types of sexually-transmitted papillomavirus, was first administered to Aussie girls in 2007. Since then, total prevalence of the virus among young women has dropped from 11.5% to less than 1%—and to 0% among girls who actually got the vaccine. These girls are also protecting their partners and reducing overall circulation of HPV; infections among young men, who were not even vaccinated, dropped from 12.1 to 2.2 percent. Abbie calls this a "blatant,…
milhayser | April 15, 2013I have been remiss in not posting articles from the homepage here on Page 3.14...so to catch up, here's four at once.
No Beauty Without Water
On World Water Day, think of the water cycle that defines this planet. On The Pump Handle, Liz Borkowski writes "rivers often flow through multiple countries, and actions by one country or community can affect their neighbors’ ability to meet their water needs. Consuming too much water, or polluting a shared body of water, can make it hard for others to have enough for drinking, hygiene, agriculture, ecosystem health, and other needs." Rivers and…
stoat | April 4, 2013 A classic from the Daily Mash:
NORTH Korea is not an elaborate modern art installation, as previously suspected. As the tiny nation seemed to be genuinely threatening the United States with a nuclear strike, experts said it was now likely that Kim Jong Un and his late father are not ground-breaking surrealists in the mould of Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and Anne Widdecombe.
Well, I liked it. Since I'm here: I haven't written on the Lewandowsky stuff before (I just copied someone else, mainly because I liked the cartoon) but it seems to have been getting sillier. mt seems to have it about…