Technology
hrynyshyn | March 26, 2009Few technologies give rise to more spirited debates among environmentalists than nuclear power generation. So it was with some trepidation that I started to read an essay on the subject in last week's Washington Post. This is the same newspaper that took six weeks to run a rebuttal to George Will's latest attempts to obfuscate the climate change debate and still hasn't run a correction for the myriad mispresentations contained therein. So maybe it's not surprising that "5 Myths on Nuclear Power" by hitherto unheard of Todd Tucker is similarly hobbled by a lack of respect for reality.
Here are…
revere | March 26, 2009The American Scientist is the magazine of the scientific society, Sigma Xi. You can get it on the news stand, and that's where I bought the latest issue (March-April, 2009). One of the articles is by historian of engineering, Henry Petroski, and it's about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The bridge was a product of Depression infrastructure funding but instead of being an investment in the future it only lasted four months. It is famous because its spectacular collapse was caught on film (below the jump) and for many years was shown in thousands of undergraduate calculus and elementary physics…
clock | March 25, 2009I first posted this on June 24, 2004 on the www.jregrassroots.org forums, then republished on August 23, 2004 on Science And Politics, then a couple of times on this blog.
Why did I decide to re-post it today?
Because I have been thinking and reading about the current state and potential future of journalism, including science journalism, and writing (still in my head) a post about it. So, I am forcing myself to go through my evolution of thinking about the topic, digging through my categories on the Media, Science Reporting, Blogging, Open Science, onlin Technology, etc. and this essay was…
purepedantry | March 25, 2009Wired Science reports on a way to bleach your hair without all issues of...you know...turning it so stiff and destroyed that it resembles a donkey tail. All you women of the world itching to turn blonde, take note.
The system involves an enzyme from forest fungus. Which is good somehow. Forest fungus on your hair being good apparently involves a meaning for the word "good" that I was not hitherto familiar with.
Not that it matters for me. The ongoing race about whether I will lose my hair entirely or whether it will turn entirely gray is a dead heat with both being the likely outcome.
bioephemera | March 24, 2009
It's Ada Lovelace Day!
Ada Lovelace (1815 - 1852) is often referred to as the world's first computer programmer. The daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, and the admired intellect, Annabella Milbanke, Ada Lovelace represented the meeting of two alternative worlds: the romanticism and art of her father versus the rationality and science of her mother. In her attempt to draw together these polar opposites and create a 'poetical science' during the Victorian age, Ada collaborated with the renowned mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage. (source)
I'm betting famous names like Marie Curie…
razib | March 23, 2009I thought this Genetic Future post was an exaggeration, as it seemed to indicate that the Gene Sherpa was accusing 23andMe of terrorism. I thought there has to be context, right? Uh, not really:
In healthcare, imagine if your doctor was found to be breaking the law. Stole from Medicare? Non-Compliance with State regulations? Spousal Abuse? Selling Drugs?
Most of these are career killers. In fact in CT we just had a large group of GI doctors who are now not doing so well because one of their partners was just charged with endangering a minor.
Why is it so vital that physicians, nurses and…
clock | March 23, 2009From NC Sea Grant:
....At nearly every fisheries management meeting he attends, Baker hears the same complaint: North Carolina's recreational fishermen don't have to account for their catch. Two years ago, during a regional meeting about snapper and grouper, Baker looked down at his hands and finally saw a possible answer: his mobile phone.
"I wondered if you could send a text message to a computer database somewhere instead of just texting from phone to phone," he says. "And if you could do that, maybe that was something recreational fishermen could do to track their catches and fishing…
gregladen | March 23, 2009Or, perhaps, a garagable aircraft.
First Flight:
Landing and parking animation (video may load very slowly):
MIT press release.
gregladen | March 23, 2009Everybody knows the answer is almost always Linux, and one of the reasons for that is because Windows cheats. Mr. Exile has run a test in which he compares two laptops, one with four times the memory and about double the processor speed and a more advanced processor, with the hotter computer running XP and the older, less powered computer running Linux.
Since the valid test is not when the desktop pops up (because Windows is still busy booting when that happens), Mr. Exile instead timed how long it took for him to have a browser opened to his web based email page.
If you are a Windows…
gregladen | March 23, 2009... as usual ...
a legislator in Texas has introduced a bill to require open document formats in all state government business. The bill is carefully worded such that only ODF could pass its test as "open." The story is covered by the Fort Worth Star Telegram, which is careful to be even-handed, giving Microsoft's spokesman equal time. A ZDNet blogger notes that the bill, introduced by a Democrat in a state whose politics is dominated by Republicans, faces chances that "...fall somewhere east of slim and west of none."
from /.
jlynch | March 21, 2009I've been using my Macbook for two week now and am very comfortable with it. While I'd never become a rabid Apple fanboi, this comment by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer strikes me a simply assinine:
"Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction. The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be."
Um. No. Sure the logo is nice, but I'm willing to pay the $500 (an…
gregladen | March 21, 2009Why is Linux the coolest erector set in the world, that you should be willing to pay for? In part because Linux lacks the kind of freaky design oddities that arise when the makers of the software must go to meetings with a marketing department and a bunch of liability conscious lawyers, alternatively. In part because the fundamental design of the system is such that it is powerful yet lean at the same time. In part because basic security is so much easier to manage in Linux that it is not necessary for the processor to spend a sizable amount of time (using big chunks of memory) fighting…
bcohen | March 20, 2009Eight choices for the best example of a design flaw.
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These were forwarded to me by a colleague, who had them forwarded to her by a friend, who, guess what, had them forwarded from somewhere else. I thus do not know their origin. The pictures are either (a) legitimate, (b) fabricated, or (c) doctored versions of legitimate things. I don't know.
gregladen | March 18, 2009As has been predicted, with the economy in a down turn, businesses (and everybody) are abandoning sucky proprietary software for free and excellent OpenSource software ...
A February survey of IT managers by IDC indicated that hard times are accelerating the adoption of Linux. The open source operating system will emerge from the recession in a stronger data center position than before, concluded an IDC white paper.
Sixty-five percent of the 330 respondents said they plan to increase Linux server workloads by 10% or more this year. Sixty-three percent said they will increase their use of…
drorzel | March 18, 2009I needed to generate an electronic recommendation letter for a former student yesterday, and printing the letter on paper and scanning the paper copy seemed a little too... 1998 to be worth doing. As a result, I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling around with Microsoft Word to come up with a template that looked like the official department letterhead.
Of course, there's nothing in the many pre-installed templates that could easily be modified to suit, because Microsoft employees have the aesthetic sense of a syphilitic squirrel, but I was surprised to discover just how many absurdly…
drorzel | March 18, 2009Yesterday's bad graphic post spurred me to finally get around to doing the "Why Does Excel Suck So Much?" post I've been meaning to do for a while. I gripe about Excel a lot, as we're more or less forced to use it for data analysis in the intro labs (students who have taken the intro engineering course supposedly are taught how to work with Excel, and it's kind of difficult to buy a computer without it these days, so it eliminates the "I couldn't do anything with the data" excuse for not doing lab reports). This is a constant source of irritation, as the default settings are carefully chosen…
razib | March 17, 2009This bloggingheads.tv about war robots is pretty fascinating. One of the issues with robots is that people are fixated on androids and really human-like artifice, and that hasn't really panned out. But it seems that technology is becoming a seamless part of our lives in a way that we're not even particularly aware of. The new shuffle isn't just a technology story, it's a lifestyle & fashion story. I'm very interested near the end when Peter Singer recounts how someone with a chip implant began to consider un-augmented humans "cows." I'm moderately skeptical of extrapolating from this…
gregladen | March 16, 2009This is really good, because I can never get those damn chess sets to go down in one flush.
null - Watch more free videos
And that was perfect toilet music, don't you think?
illconsidered | March 16, 2009If you're in the same boat as I am (ie, you have a job and/or a life) you probably never get a chance to read every last article linked to in the latest "Another Week of GW news" posting (or even 1 in 100!) So I just wanted to point to the set of stories about "spin batteries" or nanoball-batteries (scroll down a couple of pages from this page anchor), an example of which is here at New Scientist.
Cell phones recharging in 10 seconds and electric car batteries in 5 minutes, sounds promising!