Technology
pharyngula | December 31, 2009
Oooh, baby. That's a Nu-Life Communion Host Dispenser, equipped with a rapid reload system for fast wafer loading and quad-rotator technology that allows up to 400 wafers to be fired without reloading. If you need to shovel Jesus into people's mouths at a high rate of speed, this is the gadget for you. And you can get it in gold, silver, or white.
Or maybe you'd prefer the Communalabra Germ-Free Communion Host Dispensing System, which is only available in gold, but does have accessories: a Host Tube Quick-n-Easy Re-fill & Re-load System, and embroidered carrying cases and covers.
And…
revere | December 31, 2009Given the usual response to terrorist threats on airplanes, we expect the latest move to protect us will be to require us to travel nude. OK. Probably not. Republicans are too skittish about public nakedness. They prefer it in the privacy of their mistresses' beds. What we will see, instead, is yet another attempt at a technical fix, spearheaded by high priced security and aviation "consultants." I saw one of them, Mary Schiavo (former inspector general of the Department of Transportation) the other night on the PBS Newshour. She was hawking expensive explosive sniffers for airport check-in,…
grrlscientist | December 30, 2009tags: How It's Made: Bread, baking, agriculture, chemistry, food science, technology, streaming video
This interesting video shows how bread is made in large, mechanized factories: from mixing the ingredients to shipping it out for consumption.
drorzel | December 29, 2009If you're still not sure whether you should be teaching physics to your dog, here's another good reason: Superconductors.
The "super" in "superconductor" refers to the fact that these materials conduct electric current with absolutely zero resistance, better than the best ordinary metals. This has obvious applications in the green technology field (which dogs should definitely be interested in, as discussed in a previous installment)-- if you could remove the resistance of power lines, you would lose less energy on the way from the generating plant to your home, increasing the energy…
razib | December 29, 2009Google, Past and Future:
Ah, but what about 2010? That, claim the editors at Smartgrid, will be the year that Google and Microsoft really roll up their sleeves and go to war. In everything from search to office apps and Internet browsers, the two behemoths will roll out fancy new services designed to erode their rivals' revenue streams. "Both companies are largely betting their collective futures on this battle, so the stakes are huge," said industry analyst Rob Enderle. "Microsoft is going to partner and try to starve Google out of content and partners. Google is going to work against…
drorzel | December 28, 2009When I saw the data generated by the sales rank tracker Matthew Beckler was kind enough to put together, I joked that I hoped to someday need a logarithmic scale to display the sales rank history of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Thanks to links from Boing Boing, John Scalzi, and Kevin Drum, I got my wish:
For those not familiar with the concept, a log scale plots values on a scale that represents each order of magnitude as a fixed distance. So, the top horizontal line on that plot represents a sales rank of a million, the line below that a hundred thousand, the line below that ten…
drorzel | December 20, 2009I've been playing around with the spiffy sales rank tracker Matthew Beckler wrote, because I'm a great big dork, and enjoy playing with graphs. Here's a graph of the sales rank vs. time through 2pm EST today (plotted in Excel from the data table at the bottom of the page):
As I noted in my previous post on this, the downward-going jumps are striking, and probably indicate discrete book purchase events. There also seems to be a clear trend that jumps starting at higher numbers are larger than jumps starting at lower numbers. If we assume that's the case, what does that tell us about the…
drorzel | December 18, 2009How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is now listed as "In Stock" at Amazon, so it's the perfect time to order a dozen or so copies for your last-minute holiday gift needs.
"But, wait," you say, "why do I want to teach my dog physics? Particularly quantum physics-- why does anyone need to know that?"
The answer is: "Lasers." Lasers are pretty awesome, right? Let's ask an expert:
If I were creating the world I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, Day One!
OK, maybe he's a bad one to ask. Still, lasers are pretty awesome, and lasers…
drorzel | December 17, 2009Quantum physics can sometimes seem so arcane that even humans don't need to worry about it, let alone dogs. It's actually tremendously important to our modern world. In fact, if you're reading this on a computer (and how else would you be getting it?), you have quantum physics to thank for it.
Computers are based on millions of tiny transistors manufactured on chips of silicon. These transistors are combined together to make "bits" that can be in one of two states, which we call "0" and "1." Manipulating these bits lets us do mathematical operations, write books about dogs, and watch videos…
drorzel | December 17, 2009Yesterday's reason to love quantum was the CCD sensor, which relies on the photoelectric effect to take digital pictures. Sticking with the photoelectric theme, today's first quantum-enabled technology is the photovoltaic cell, the basis for solar panels.
Photovoltaic cells convert light into electricity, essentially via the same photoelectric effect used in CCD's. A photon of light comes along, and knocks an electron out of some material (typically something silicon-based), and that electron is used to create a current that can power electrical devices. There's some tricky business involved…
drorzel | December 16, 2009I've been writing a bunch of publicity copy for the book the last few weeks, and one of those things is a list of reasons why every dog should know about quantum physics. I've been planning to chop that up into a bunch of individual blog posts in the run-up to the book, but the Washington Post beat me to (one of) the punch(es):
Getting a digital camera for Christmas? Before you fire it up to capture Uncle Wally's fateful fifth trip to the punch bowl, take a moment to picture this: You've got a genuine scientific marvel in your mitts. In fact, it took nothing less than two Nobel prizes and a…
drorzel | December 14, 2009In response to my post about Amazon sales-rank tracking, Matthew Beckler created just such a tracker:
That's the last few days' worth of hourly rankings of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, as of 10am Eastern. Enormous dork that I am, I find this really fascinating, and not just in an absolute-number sense (because, really, these numbers don't mean much of anything).
The big thing that jumps out at me is the quantization of books. You see a bunch of sharp, downward-going jumps in the graph, which presumably correspond to discrete book purchase events. In between jumps, there's a slow upward…
clock | December 12, 2009There will be, at ScienceOnline2010, at least two sessions dedicated to books and book publishing - From Blog to Book: Using Blogs and Social Networks to Develop Your Professional Writing and Writing for more than glory: Proposals and Pitches that Pay - as well as several others that will at least mention books as vehicles for distributing scientific information, popularization of science, or science education.
This got me thinking....about ways that the Web is changing the world of the book. I can think of three aspects of this:
1) Changes in the process of writing a book
It may not be a…
drorzel | December 11, 2009You know, if somebody were to put together an application that would periodically check the Amazon sales rank of a given book and generate a Google Analytics style time series graph, and charge authors $5/book to see the output, I bet they'd make a bunch of money.
Granted, it would put that person on the same moral level as a crack dealer, but I imagine a big pile of $5 bills would go a long way to soothe that...
razib | December 6, 2009Apple's Game Changer, Downloading Now:
The way the industry once operated, "Each handset company would come up with its latest iterations and maybe have the hottest device of the season or not," says Ms. Huberty, the Morgan Stanley analyst. "Enter apps into the equation, and that changes. It goes from being a product cycle game to a platform game."
"People will look back on the iPhone as a turning point in the industry," says Craig Moffett, a telecom analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. "The iPhone will be remembered as the first true handheld computer.
grrlscientist | December 1, 2009tags: Tiger Woods, Taiwanese News, Apple-1 News, Taiwan, animation, streaming video
This video is an interesting news report from Apple-1 News in Taiwan regarding what really happened to cause Tiger Woods to drive into a tree after bouncing off a fire hydrant in front of his Florida home.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Are animations such as these legal for use by news organizations in the US? I suspect not; otherwise, they'd be making use of them many years ago.
Anyway; there is precedent for making allegations of Domestic Violence against Woods' wife, Elin Nordegren, since her stories that she told…
drorzel | December 1, 2009The Royal Society has launched a spiffy new site that lets you browse highlights of the last 350 years of science as published in the Philosophical Transactions ("Giving Some Accompt of the Present Understanding, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World since 1665."). These include things like Ben Franklin's very matter-of-fact instructions for flying a kite in a thunderstorm, Thomas Young's introduction of the wave theory of light, and Maxwell's original treatise on electromagnetism. These are available as scanned PDF's, in all their oddly-typeset glory (…