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hrynyshyn | March 12, 2010
One Strawbarb Pi, an entry in the Second Annual Pi Day Contest.
Recipe:
The pastry
250 ml of whole wheat flour
250 ml of white all-purpose flour
two-third of a stick of butter-flavor vegetable shortening
dash of salt
Blend all ingredients using whatever technology is most convenient. Form resulting dough in to two hamburger-sized patties, wrapped in waxed paper. Refrigerate for approx. 15 min.
The filling
Approx 500 g of strawberries, chopped into 1 cc pieces B.C.-grown are the best, followed by South Carolinian varieties when in season and purchased from the side of the road from some…
agelman | March 12, 2010Sanjay Srivastava writes:
Below are the names of some psychological disorders. For each one, choose one of the following:
A. This is under formal consideration to be included as a new disorder in the DSM-5.
B. Somebody out there has suggested that this should be a disorder, but it is not part of the current proposal.
C. I [Srivastava] made it up.
Answers will be posted in the comments section.
1. Factitious dietary disorder - producing, feigning, or exaggerating dietary restrictions to gain attention or manipulate others
2. Skin picking disorder - recurrent skin picking resulting in skin…
gregladen | March 12, 2010A current study in Science from the Tokyo Institute of Technology seems to demonstrate how Thalidomide causes birth defects. Here's the abstract from the paper:
Half a century ago, thalidomide was widely prescribed to pregnant women as a sedative but was found to be teratogenic, causing multiple birth defects. Today, thalidomide is still used in the treatment of leprosy and multiple myeloma, although how it causes limb malformation and other developmental defects is unknown. Here, we identified cereblon (CRBN) as a thalidomide-binding protein. CRBN forms an E3 ubiquitin ligase complex with…
gregladen | March 12, 2010A lesbian student wanted to wear a tuxedo and accompany her girlfriend to the prom in a Northern Mississippi school district. Chaos ensued. It turns out that Itawamba County school district has an explicit policy requiring that senior prom dates be of the opposite sex. (This is the same school district that got in trouble some years back for intercom-led prayer and bible sessions.)
The AClU dove in. The school district canceled the prom but refuses to say exactly why.
So, look for a private non-school related anti-gay prom-like "event" to occur in Itawamba County this spring.
"It is…
gregladen | March 12, 2010In which the Isis and Zuska Tag Team takes down Laden (temporarily) and a free for all breaks out on the blogosphere.
Is this another intrablogule iron cage death match? No, it's the real thing! In cartoon form....
kcollins | March 12, 2010Deadline for the tournament sign up is April 30, 2010 so there is still a little bit of time to sign up for the Rubik's cube tournament!
Are you a teacher and looking to incorporate the Rubik's cube contest into your teaching lessons? There is an orientation workshop on April 10th at the National Electronics Museum (1745 West Nursery Road, Linthicum Hts, MD 21090-2906) where we will show you how to solve the Rubik's Cube and you will hear from Teachers and Educators who already use the Rubik's Cube in their classroom. To sign up for this workshop, simply state so on the tournament…
mspringer | March 12, 2010In the Stealth in Space post earlier this week, we discussed the problem of detecting the thermal emission from a spacecraft. If the interior isn't generating a lot of power, there's not much thermal radiation being emitted, making it a tough job to detect.
But it was pointed out in the comments that the heat from the sun would itself warm the spacecraft exterior, increasing the thermal signature by potentially a large amount. Let's verify this. If you take a perfectly absorbing sphere and set it in orbit around the sun (say, at the distance of the Earth), it'll absorb all the light from…
palmd | March 12, 2010Our beloved, beat-up laptop is ill--very ill. The family is considering consenting to a Do Not Resuscitate order. Symptoms of this grave illness include inability to exit the start up screen and freezing up in "safe mode". The agonal Blue Screen of Death has not yet appeared, but is believed to be immanent.
grrlscientist | March 11, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is less than two weeks away and it is seeking submissions! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The most recent…
pharyngula | March 11, 2010Not as nasty as I feared, but the consecrated hunk o' Jesus I put it on was ghastly.
gregladen | March 11, 2010It's been a long time coming. While Arthur C. Clarke's satellites have taken to space, and James Bond's futuristic mobile technology has become common place, still the dream of sustained personal flight has eluded us. But the future is here! Finally we can all take flight as Martin Aircraft in New Zealand releases the first commercially-available jet pack!
Click here to buy your jetpack!
gregladen | March 11, 2010I have yet to see a computer language that offers anything not available in Basic, in so far as the language itself goes. But Basic has been maligned as the ruination of computer coding. There is an alternative opinion out there.
gregladen | March 11, 2010As we all know, the Skepchicks are all about boobs and nothing else. Typical chicks. Can't think of anything else. And their boobs have commanded me to make one more request from my readers to consider donating some money to the senseless no-account purpose-free orgy that they will be hosting here in the Twin Cities here in July.
Click here for details.
And if you think I'm being sarcastic, that's funny. Because you're only reading what I'm writing. Your not seeing what I'm thinking.
gregladen | March 11, 2010If you are old enough to have seen the original release of The Empire Strikes Back at the cinema in 1980, you almost certainly remember the extraordinary short film that preceded it. Otherwise you won't know a damn thing about it: with not one picture or accurate plot summary anywhere on the web, Black Angel has become a bit of an internet holy grail in itself.
... check it out
gregladen | March 11, 2010The information in this post has been updated, expanded on, and moved to THIS LOCATION.Please click through, and sorry for the inconvenience.
dblum | March 10, 2010After I wrote my last blog post on mercury, readers wrote to ask about the old-time antiseptic Mercurochrome which - as you might imagine - was named for the poisonous traces of mercury mixed into it.
One man wondered about childhood toxic exposure. Another noted that her mother still liked to tell the story of when she was a little girl and dumped Mercurochrome "all over her beautiful white bedspread." Â I had to laugh (my mother likes to tell the story of how I colored all over her white bedspread). But if you know Mercurochrome, you know that it would have made an incandescently brilliant…
mspringer | March 10, 2010While doing some poking around online, I came across a website called Project Rho, which tries to provide some science background for science fiction writers who want some degree of technical accuracy in their imaginative work. Generally it looks like they're on the right track.
In their section on stealth in space, they explain with the weary air of repetition that there's no such thing. The flare of a rocket is bright enough to be seen from basically anywhere, and the thermal signature of even a spacecraft with rockets off is visible from clear across the solar system. The first I can…
gregladen | March 10, 2010Well, you could be dead, I suppose. But the American Family Association says that you can X-out your gayosity by starting a relationship with Jesus Christ. They don't specify the nature of the new relationship you'd be having.
Anyway, Joe My God suggests that you Freep this poll.
cortex | March 10, 2010In response to my post on the effects of mood on cognition, which also referenced the possibilities of self-medicating ourselves into the ideal mood, Andrew Sullivan offered up the following anecdote:
I was talking with a fine artist the other day and he was telling me how blocked he was on a piece, and how he then smoked some pot and everything came together.
It unleashed what he wanted to express, by suppressing the analytic portion of his mind that was inhibiting him. I know this is the bleeding obvious to anyone who has a brain and an ounce of human experience but it is a truth we are…