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ddobbs | September 11, 2008Gotta love this. The geeky (but attractive) blog Radio Bantik: Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek, runs a comparative politico-coding analysis of the website engineering behind the McCain and Obama websites. Great stuff, brought to my attention by the Columbia Journalism review.
I spent some time this morning examining the technology policies of Barack Obama and John McCain. Policies aside, I was immediately struck by the differences between their web sites. So what do the two sites say about the candidates?
Two Different Platforms
The candidates’ platforms could not be more different:…
ddobbs | September 11, 2008An amusing (and revealing, when Carrell asks McCain about pork) look at Steve Carrell's on-the-job training as a political journalist on the Daily Show.
Hat tip to:mediabistro.com: FishbowlNY .
Tags: JohnMcCain, journalism, Steve Carrell, Daily Show, Straight Talk Express
tlambert | September 10, 2008
All readers of this and any other ScienceBlogs blog are invited to a party in Sydney on Wednesday 17th September from 7pm onwards. We'll be in the Attic Bar of the Arthouse hotel. Daniel MacArthur, who will also be there, has a map. Finding the Attic Bar once you're in the Arthouse hotel is a little tricky -- you have to go out the back door and up the stairs on the outside of the hotel. To help you recognize our group we will have a ScienceBlogs mug on the table. If you are on Facebook please RSVP here.
And if you're not in Sydney, there are lots more ScienceBlogs parties all around the…
kevin z | September 10, 2008Eric has the latest edition of the taxonomy and biodiversity blog carnival up, Linneaus' Legacy. Go there and learn some stuff!
mspringer | September 10, 2008If you're here for the physics and not the politics, skip this entry. I wouldn't blame you. It irritates me to read politics on science sites too, but with the election only about two months away it's hard to resist the temptation. Here we go.
Neurotopia links to an article criticizing Sarah Palin. Nothing unusual. What raises an eyebrow is the contents of the criticism. In short, she's being accused of making rape victims pay for their own rape kits. Here's the news article from 2000, which mentions Wasilla in passing. Palin was mayor at the time.
Let's see what the article actually…
grrlscientist | September 10, 2008This is for all my Seattle and Vancouver, BC, area friends, especially all my bird pals, whom I have maintained contact with all these years after moving to NYC: there are several ScienceBlogs millionth comment parties in your areas that you are invited to. These parties, hosted by Seed Media Group and ScienceBlogs, are celebrating the success of ScienceBlogs to reach the public and will provide free food, drinks and prizes to those who attend.
First, the Seattle area party details;
Date: Saturday, 27 September
Time: 4pm PT
Location: the upper mezzanine of Ozzie's Roadhouse at 105 W Mercer…
cortex | September 10, 2008Let's say I flash you a picture containing a mixture of blue and yellow dots for one-fifth of a second. You clearly don't have time to count the dots - you barely have time to register the image - but I ask you to guesstimate the ratio of blue to yellow dots anyways. Sounds like a pretty meaningless quiz, right? If anything, it would seem that I'm testing your visual cortex, or the ability of the brain to quickly make sense of its senses.
Well, a new paper in Nature argues that I'm actually testing your mathematical intuition. Furthermore, this intuition strongly correlates with your past…
mspringer | September 10, 2008Ever wondered why it takes a tremendously huge rocket to launch people from the earth, but the Apollo astronauts managed to launch from the moon in a comparatively tiny lunar module? Easy, the whole thing was faked and NASA forgot to come up with a plausible explanation!
Wow, it was almost physically painful to type that even as a joke. The real reason is some very easy but still pretty cool physics. Shall we take a look?
For a given object, the gravitational potential energy per kilogram with respect to distant space is given by this easy little equation:
So to pick up one kilogram of…
cortex | September 10, 2008This makes me sad:
If ever there was a car made for the times, this would seem to be it: a sporty subcompact that seats five, offers a navigation system, and gets a whopping 65 miles to the gallon. Oh yes, and the car is made by Ford Motor (F), known widely for lumbering gas hogs.
Ford's 2009 Fiesta ECOnetic goes on sale in November. But here's the catch: Despite the car's potential to transform Ford's image and help it compete with Toyota Motor (TM) and Honda Motor (HMC) in its home market, the company will sell the little fuel sipper only in Europe. "We know it's an awesome vehicle," says…
sb admin | September 10, 2008Our post on preventing falls among the elderly has been included in the latest edition of Hourglass, a monthly blog carnival devoted to the biology of aging. Alvaro at SharpBrains has assembled recent aging-related posts in a creative format; for more, check out Ouroboros for the Hourglass archive, submission info, and upcoming schedule.
Blog carnivals are regular compilations of blog posts on a chosen topic. Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock provides a comprehensive overview of the carnival concept and regularly links to new carnival editions. Here are just a few more carnivals related…
petnoyer | September 10, 2008GrrlScientist is having a sailfish appreciation day over at Living the Scientific Life. She's posting hot links to the online story at National Geographic about their cooperative fish herding techniques. Its really amazing.
I trolled a "maori-style" sailfish image that could make a nice tattoo. It's shown here on a t-shirt from Google images.
Sailfish are "oceanodromous", which means they occur widely throughout the world's oceans, live and migrate wholly in the sea. As opposed to anadromous fish, like salmon, which migrate to freshwater to spawn; or catadromous eels, like Anguilla sp.,…
petnoyer | September 9, 2008
Naturally, one of the favorite pastimes here in the Cone of Probability is to monitor as many websites as possible for different forecasts and projections of Hurricane Ike. The more the models stray away from Corpus Christi the less anxious you feel. Currently three models veer to the north before landfall, so CC has a small chance of escaping the storm.
The image above is from my favorite hurricane web interface so far, called Stormpulse. It's full screen, and very interactive, almost like a video game. If you're looking for in-depth analysis, grab a cup a' joe and dig in to Jeff Masters…
ddobbs | September 9, 2008From the "Where Do They Find the Time" Dept, via Clive Thompson's collision detection:
Chinese scientists unveil "the anti cloak" -- technique for defeating invisibility shields
Okay, the war over "invisibility cloaks" has officially begun. A team of Chinese scientists have just announced that they've figured out how to defeat invisibility technology -- and render "invisible" objects visible.You may remember the famous experiment in 2006 in which Duke University scientists created an "invisibility cloak" -- a wave-morphing shield that allowed them to render an object mostly invisible to…
ddobbs | September 9, 2008
Today's Very Short List Science item is one I am happy to have dug up and, as it were, spat out. It's about the Barf Blog, a blog about food safety.
From the VSL Science site:
Cupcakes, cold cuts, E. coli -- the paths to food poisoning are many, but they all lead to the same ignominious place: emesis, or, as we grew up saying, barfing. It sure isn't pretty, and it smells terrible, but this grossest of bodily functions is also one of the most essential. Once the network of sensors in the stomach detects a poison -- these cells act like a gastrointestinal early-warning system -- a signal is…
sb admin | September 9, 2008The recent issues of Newsweek and TIME both carried sobering articles about the state of cancer research. Newsweekâs Sharon Begley reports that cancer is on track to claim 565,650 lives in the U.S. this year, and that number isnât a whole lot better than it was in 1971, when President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act and made âthe conquest of cancer a national crusade.â
Using age-adjusted figures, 199 out of every 100,000 Americans died of cancer in 1975; in 2005, it was 184 per 100,000. Much of the decline is due to improved survival rates for breast and colorectal cancers, and those…
grrlscientist | September 9, 2008Have all of you heard about the one millionth comment contest that ScienceBlogs is having? This contest is in honor of the upcoming one million reader comment that will be left sometime around the 25th of October (unless PZ has another crackergate before then). In honor of this upcoming one millionth reader comment to the site, ScienceBlogs is holding a contest where all readers who leave comments (accompanied by a valid email address so we can contact you) are eligible to receive a fabulous prize: a trip for two to New York City and exclusive science adventures that only ScienceBlogs could…
cortex | September 9, 2008Oliver Sacks, writing on mania and manic depressive disorder in the New York Review of Books:
One may call it mania, madness, or psychosis--a chemical imbalance in the brain--but it presents itself as energy of a primordial sort. Greenberg likens it to "being in the presence of a rare force of nature, such as a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too." Such unbridled energy can resemble that of creativity or inspiration or genius--this, indeed, is what Sally feels is rushing through her--not an illness, but the apotheosis of health, the release of a deep,…
mspringer | September 9, 2008There's been a lot of discussion about NASA administrator Mike Griffin's leaked email about the future of the space station. It's a fascinating, honest, and cogent look at where we stand now at the crossroads of the Shuttle and the eventual Ares/Orion system. He's precisely right on the facts. He's also too pessimistic. The failure and danger he foresees can be turned into opportunity.
Here's a quick precis of the situation as it stands. The shuttle is being retired. There is a non-negotiable finite number of possible shuttle launches remaining due to the fact that the external tanks…
cortex | September 9, 2008What a vivid example of human irrationality:
An erroneous headline that flashed across trading screens Monday, saying United had filed for a second bankruptcy, sent the airline's stock plummeting.
United Airlines shares fell to about $3 from more than $12 in less than an hour before trading was halted, wiping more than $1 billion in value. Its shares closed at $10.92, down 11.2 percent.
By the end of the day, fingers were pointing in many directions to assign blame.
The episode was a reminder of how negative news, rumors and even outdated articles can travel at lightning speed, with some…