Prime Stream
thescian | January 16, 2008
A new essay is out at TheScian.com. It is about why apples fall downwards, why frogs leap and why we fly rockets. In other words, it is about the force of gravity. It's written by a non-scientist, so there are no discussions about strings tangled in eleven dimensions, tensor calculus or fluxions that made Newton's mama proud.
In some ways, this essay started two years ago while I lived in Atlanta. I was wondering about how easy it is to move horizontally but not vertically (prompted by what JRD Tata had said). Since then it has slowly grown, shed words, morphed, evolved and finally has seen…
thescian | January 16, 2008Via BrietBart:
Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday canceled a speech at Rome's La Sapienza university in the face of protests led by scientists opposed to a high-profile visit by the head of the Catholic Church to a secular setting.
So, what does the Pope do?
Cini said of Benedict on Thursday: "By cancelling, he is playing the victim, which is very intelligent. It will be a pretext for accusing us of refusing dialogue."
thescian | January 15, 2008
Monkeys are paving the way for future. A report in NY Times:
If Idoya could talk, she would have plenty to boast about.
On Thursday, the 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity.
...
These experiments, Dr. Nicolelis said, are the first steps toward a brain machine interface that might permit paralyzed people to walk by directing devices with their thoughts. Electrodes in the person's brain would send signals to a device worn on the hip, like a cell phone or pager, that would relay those signals to a pair of braces, a…
thescian | January 9, 2008Tangled Bank 96 - Toadally at Aardvarchaeology where you'll learn that clams have herpes (wha..WHA!!??).
thescian | January 9, 2008NEN
The National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), founded in 2002, is a not-for-profit initiative of the Wadhwani Foundation, working to inspire, educate and support the next generation of high-growth entrepreneurs in India.
NEN was co-founded by five of India's premier academic institutions: IIT Bombay; IIM Ahmedabad; SP Jain Institute, Bombay; IBAB, Bangalore and BITS Pilani. Over the past three years, NEN's focus on introducing a new paradigm in entrepreneurship education in India -- and its innovative method of doing so -- has made it its leading catalyst on campuses across India.
NEN's…
thescian | January 9, 2008John Pollock writes at TR:
In 1798, the English economist Thomas Malthus argued that population increases geometrically, outstripping the arithmetic growth of the food supply. He promised "famine ... the last, the most dreadful resource of nature." It took another 125 years for world population to double, but only 50 more for it to redouble. By the 1940s, MexiÂco, China, India, Russia, and Europe were hungry. Franklin D. Roosevelt's farsighted vice president-elect, former secretary of agriculture Henry A. Wallace, believed the solution lay with technology. He was right: the Malthusian tragedy…
thescian | January 8, 2008The wife asked, what if we jump and there's no gravity? You are the science dude. Extrapolate.
Well, that's a great question (and you are very pretty, of course). A small correction to the question. There is no place where there's zero gravity. If there is such a place it is infinitely far away and we'll never get there. The place with no gravity is infinitely far away because the force of gravity - although it weakens as we get far away from its source - never becomes zero. However, there are places with very very weak gravity.
So, what if we jump where there's very very weak gravity?
If we…
thescian | January 8, 2008So Intel has pulled out. Well, fuck them. If you own Intel stocks and have no idea of what I am talking about, then screw your apathetic greedy self too.
Here's what got me all riled up: businessweek article where the author has got it totally backwards.
Not only is this [OLPC] profoundly anti-teacher, it also misinterprets experience learning. Children learn language by interacting with their family. Almost all learning takes place in a teaching context. Yes, of course, there is learning by the individual alone, but most "learning" takes place in a context of a guide, a coach, be it parent…
thescian | January 7, 2008Before anyone says anything, I'll question the metaphor myself: giant computer? That's just a stupid metaphor, as though we can compare a giant and the Universe. But then, we can't speak from a out-of-this-universe perspective, so, I suppose giant computer would have to do.
So now, if the Universe is a computer, what is it computing? How is it doing it? Are atoms and other structures it's transistors? What are we? (my theory: we are it's buffer overflow) If it is not a computer, what the heck is it?
A long running intellectual debate, the hardest problem so far, and all the blah.…
thescian | January 7, 2008Forward the article Naps May Boost Memory to your colleagues and your employer, then start boosting your memory.
thescian | January 3, 2008Boots is a big healthcare/beauty store here in the UK. I buy a lot of shit-gear for my daughter there. Like all other stores out making a quick buck Boots too harps on the vitamin supplements theme and sell things that would make you levitate, help your mother, and transport you to paradise. But, is there a line which they would not cross, like saying Vitamin B keeps your energy level up? Well, shame on you if you thought they wouldn't. Read DC's Improbable Science on a sting operation that shreds Boots disingenuous marketing.
thescian | January 3, 2008A summary of a forecasting (sort of) report at RealClimate:
The group imagined three potential scenarios, labeled expected, severe, and catastrophic. These are not forecasts exactly, since forecasting society is even harder than forecasting climate, which is itself pretty dicey on a regional spatial scale, but rather a fleshing out of plausible possibilities, a story-telling, visualization-type exercise.
The "expected" scenario calls for 1.3 °C of warming globally above 1990 levels, by the year 2040. Changes in precipitation and sea level prompt migration at a scale sufficient to challenge…
thescian | January 2, 2008A recent Science Friday podcast at NPR, hosted by the ever ebullient Ira Flatow. Absolutely fascinating.
thescian | January 1, 2008Read the novels "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (see a note) and "Measuring the world". Read a few of Borges's stories, but I am yet to read him more thoroughly. 2008 would be that year, I hope. Is magic realism the voice of the so-called third world?
Rediscovered Shakespeare through a rereading of a few plays (Tempest, Julius Caesar) and his sonnets. What a man! what a man! We know almost nothing about him, but his creations, oh, his creations are what dreams are made of!
For the first time, listened to Andrea Bocelli and Joshua Bell. A pleasure like no other. Opera and classical music is…
thescian | December 31, 2007No, no, it wasn't caused by any of the modern marvels to counter erectile dysfunction, it was biological evolution ensuring good sex and the consequences thereof, says Dr Bowman. A report at Press Esc:
"As the diameter of the bony pelvis increased over time to permit passage of an infant with a larger cranium, the size of the vaginal canal necessarily also became larger, potentially resulting in a vaginal-penile discrepancy in size," Dr. Bowman pointed out. "Sexually satisfying coitus requires a satisfactory 'fit' for both partners."
This meant that as humans evolved, men with larger penises…
thescian | December 30, 2007Astonishing story at Beebs.
They share an easy intimacy that belies the fact that identical twins Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein spent their first 35 years in total ignorance of the other's existence. They were given up for adoption to separate families as part of an experiment in the US to discover how identical twins would react to being raised in different family backgrounds.
Neither set of adoptive parents knew the babies were part of a study or that they had been born twins.
...
"We both felt like asking: 'So what have you done with this body, with this DNA?'" says Elyse, "Or, 'So what…
thescian | December 2, 2007Hooray! After days of anticipation, they are finally out!
First Prize - A Story in Blue by J Ramanand
Joint Second Prize - Call of the Running Tide by Anita Murthy
Joint Second Prize - The Going Got Tough by Dr Shantala
Congratulations to the winners!
A few words on the stories. Ramanand's story is a thoughtful take on the effects of religion on what is probably the most momentous event in human history: meeting a whole new lifeform. I enjoyed it greatly and it made me think.
Call of the Running Tide by Anitha Murthy is a gentle story about childcare in a world that relies increasingly on…
thescian | November 30, 2007Murphy's Body Snatchers Law states that if a body can be snatched, it will be. Watch a wasp turn a cockroach into a zombie by blocking a neurotransmitter and then leading it by its antenna to the dining table to be eaten [via Slashdot]
Reminds me of a recent short story I read. Greg Egan's Steve Fever at MIT Technology Review.
The brain is such a strange playground!
thescian | November 30, 2007Nature talks of the paradox where military generals have helped science more than politicians.
Next year will be the 50th anniversary of Pakistan's first fully fledged military coup. In 1958, it fell to General Mohammad Ayub Khan to "save the nation" from what he called "discredited politicians", and later to offer himself up for election to consolidate his power. Today's general is a different one, but the justification for continued martial law sounds depressingly familiar.
Such governance may be undemocratic, but both science and education tend to receive more investment when the generals…