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mspringer | May 30, 2009There's a lot of important things going on in the world. Kim Jong Il is exploding nukes and launching missiles over Japan. A Supreme Court justice has been nominated. The treasury bond market experienced its steepest yield curve ever.
Whatever. Today we talk about Jon & Kate Plus 8.
Jon and Kate, should you have happened to miss all the Sturm und Drang, had twins before they were famous. They wanted one more and were biologically predisposed to difficulty, so they used fertility treatments and ended up with sextuplets. Correctly sensing an interesting drama, TLC offered them a show…
sjurvetson | May 29, 2009For those of you near Silicon Valley this weekend, Maker Faire is a cornucopia of geek delights and sights.
And if you want to learn rocketry 101, the local rocket club - LUNAR, which happens to be the largest in America - will be running workshops throughout the weekend where you can build and fly your own rocket. Here is the schedule detail.
In prior years, we demonstrated the construction of some rockets at different scales... and met many interesting people. The first guy that came up to the booth asked a number of questions, and after a while, he casually mentions that he used to…
gregladen | May 29, 2009Diversity and Conflict
We don't like conflict. We try to avoid it instead of learning how to engage in it appropriately and productively, and the end result of our incompetence is horrendous enough to fully reinforce our avoidance.
Read it here.
mspringer | May 29, 2009A few days ago we had an interesting discussion about the actual nature of light waves with respect to the informal qualitative presentation of light waves found in intro textbooks. Because I have the best set of physics blog readers in the world, a fascinating discussion ensued with CC and Neil among others. One of the points that was brought up was polarization, by more than one commenter:
How do polarized lenses work then? I was always under the impression that they worked on the fact that light waves had a physical 'up and down' movement.
And I'm not at all surprised that this…
sb admin | May 29, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
As flu season ramps up in the southern hemisphere, the US, Europe and Asia are keeping an eye on it to see what will happen as swine flu finds new pieces of meat to sate its appetite for human flesh. Sorry about the overheated image. I've been reading what's going on in Australia. Because another lesson the southern hemisphere can teach us is how not to react to a pandemic virus.
Consider the Carnival Cruise Line ship, Pacific Dawn. It docked three days ago in Sydney onroute to the Great Barrier Reef to take on new passengers and let off others.…
cortex | May 29, 2009Apologies for the radio silence - I've been traveling and away from a reliable internet connection. (Taking a break from Google is one of the true pleasures of travel. I'm afraid, however, that it's an endangered pleasure, like train travel. I'm always impressed by all the places, from airplanes to remote beach hotels, that are now wireless.*)
David Brooks has an excellent column today on the emerging neuroscience of morality and the "useful falsehood" of the rational judge:
In reality, decisions are made by imperfect minds in ambiguous circumstances. It is incoherent to say that a judge…
gregladen | May 29, 2009The I and the Bird Carnival is now soaring at Living the Scientific Life. Please visit I and the Bird, 101th
The Carnival of Space 104.5 has launched at the Bat Page.
gregladen | May 28, 2009... At our co-opted thread, here. Please join us if you are in the Twin Cities.
clock | May 28, 2009Usually on Thursday nights I take a look at all seven PLoS journals to see what strikes my fancy. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Africa's 32 Cents Solution for HIV/AIDS:
By preventing urogenital schistosomiasis in sexually active females through simple and low-cost methods, we have…
gregladen | May 28, 2009Rhoda nearly dropped out from school in 2005 as her friends used to laugh at her in class due to her poor performance. Most of the days, Rhoda could not do her home work because she had no time, as she spent most of her afternoons helping her mother fetch water.
"Now that there is a borehole in my community, the scarce potable water has become easily accessible; the distance to the water source has been much reduced; and this rainy season I have not suffered from diarrhea. I now spend less time collecting water than before and have more time to do my homework and concentrate in school. My…
gregladen | May 28, 2009Last time I looked here, there was a content, but small and thinly scattered group of chimpanzees. Then there was a big noise last night and this morning an entirely new troop has arrived at this location on the internet and taken over! On further inspection, it turns out to be Doc Bushwell, Jim and Kevin Beck.
I think they ate the chimps that were here before.
jwilbanks | May 28, 2009So, I was supposed to go up to Montreal and Ottawa the past couple of days, but a series of miserable luck in terms of planes made it unworkable (it's complicated).
Instead, I tried to record a presentation and get it onto the web so we could play it for them, and then take questions by skype. That also didn't work.
However, we were successful in the end getting the video online. So if you're interested in what I say when I talk to the libraries, but haven't been to one of the conferences where I've spoken, take a look.
gregladen | May 28, 2009How to knock out your children: Use PediSedate.
PediSedate is a medical device consisting of a colorful, toy-like headset that connects to a game component such as the Nintendo Game Boy system or a portable CD player. Once the child places it on his or her head and swings the snorkel down from its resting place atop the head, PediSedate transparently monitors respiratory function and distributes nitrous oxide, an anesthetic gas. The child comfortably becomes sedated while playing with a Nintendo Game Boy system or listening to music. This dramatically improves the hospital or dental…
gregladen | May 28, 2009Diarrhea: The Unfashionable Disease
Ever hear about the World Concert for Diarrhea? Or the Celebrity Chefs Fundraiser for Diarrhea? Diarrhea just isn't a disease that gets rallied for. It's hard to understand that diarrhea can kill you. In the USA, it is an inconvenience. In developing countries, it is a killer. Why?
There are more than 100 microbugs that can cause diarrhea. A child who lives in village that has a bad water supply, limited water for hand washing, and no toilets, is likely to pick up one or more of these bugs at any time. These children can get one case of diarrhea after…
pharyngula | May 28, 2009Read his own words and see what he thinks is "the most important part" of the announcement of a major scientific milestone. He's welcome to his own religious beliefs; the problem is that he has the arrogance to think they need to be trumpeted as part of the science.
mspringer | May 28, 2009Continuing from yesterday's post on approximation methods in quantum mechanics, here's another common method worth a close look. It's one of my favorites, because it's a rare technique in which you can just make something completely up from thin air and it will very probably work well nonetheless.
Let's say you have a particle floating around in some potential. Maybe it's a perturbed square well, an anharmonic oscillator, or just about any weird potential you can think of. You have no idea what the actual wavefunctions are for the potential. After all, even simple solvable potentials…
sb admin | May 28, 2009By Alison Bass (cross-posted)
In order to truly stabilize the economy and rescue Medicare from financial collapse, the Obama administration knows it has to do something about the elephant in the room: ever-rising health care costs. In this week's New Yorker, surgeon-writer Atul Gawande presents an eye-opening discourse on why American health care costs have ballooned in the last decade and what can done about it.
To make his case, Gawande visits McAllen, Texas, which is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. In 2006, Medicare spent $15,000 per enrollee in McAllen (…
gregladen | May 28, 2009... during its design ... the ship became known as "Godzilla-maru", so unusual and top-heavy were its projected lines.
"We started planning the Chikyu about 15 years ago, and there were some people who thought we were too ambitious," he recalled.
"But now we can see that the ship is doing what it is designed to do and is opening up new possibilities."
...
The idea was simple. Scientists wanted to drill down into the Earth's crust - and even through the crust - to get samples from the key zones 6 or 7km down where earthquakes and lots of other interesting geological processes begin; but that…
gregladen | May 27, 2009A person once told me that I was exactly the same thing as Adolph Hitler. That was a crazy person who also thought that I had special x-ray vision enabling me to see deep into the earth. But no one has ever. ever called me Osama Greg Laden....
.... until now.