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mspringer | August 22, 2008Congratulations to all the Olympic athletes who have competed thus far, especially Michael Phelps, Nastia Liukin, and Shawn Johnson. Gymnastic events are all great to watch, and I don't think you could find a more colorful analyst than Bela Karolyi. The balance beam is probably the most classic and thrilling gymnastic event - the Summer Olympics equivalent of figure skating - but the men's high bar and women's uneven bars are just absolutely jaw-dropping. It looks like magic.
Now the track meets take center stage. My younger brother ran track in high school, and he tells me the track…
ddobbs | August 22, 2008And some good news, from Inside Higher Ed:
'U.S. News' Sees Drop in Participation
Even though many colleges will boast today about their placement in the annual rankings by U.S. News & World Report, more colleges than ever are declining to participate in the survey that makes up the single largest part of the magazine's formula.
Only 46 percent of colleges returned the "reputational" survey, where presidents rate similar institutions. This peer survey is particularly controversial because it is viewed as unscientific and likely to reward colleges that had great reputations in the past.…
ddobbs | August 22, 2008from the NY Times:
Sour Grapes
The news that Wine Spectator magazine was scammed into giving an Award of Excellence to a non-existent restaurant has been greeted with guffaws by schadenfreude fans and with fury by the magazine's editor.
But longtime readers of the Dining section might have seen this coming. Five years ago Amanda Hesser wrote that the magazine granted the award, the lowest of three levels of recognition by the magazine, without actually inspecting the restaurants involved.
Some of the reader comments at the Times site, however, note a more complex story:
When I first read…
ddobbs | August 22, 2008Man uses Barbie fishing rod to make record catch - Boston.com
You can't make this stuff up. I love the look on the guy's face. Is he weeping from happiness, or just strugging to hold up that 21# fish?
From the AP via the Boston Globe:
ELKIN, N.C.--David Hayes' granddaughter just asked him to hold her Barbie rod and reel while she went to the bathroom. He did. And seconds later he landed the state record channel catfish at 21 pounds, 1 ounce.
...
Hayes said his granddaughter worried he would break her rod. He landed the 21-pound…
petnoyer | August 22, 2008
All good things must come to and end, so they may have a new beginning.
So begins the next chapter in the history of deep ocean exploration...
The NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer was commissioned this week in Seattle, WA. The vessel will be equipped with two deep-sea ROVs capable of broadcasting high-definition video from the deep-sea in real-time using Dr. Robert Ballard's "telepresence" technology. Word on the street is the Chief Scientist's quarters come equipped with an inflatable hot tub, sushi bar, and wine rack Dr. Ballard keeps in a briefcase chained to his wrist at all times. ;)
NOAA's…
kevin z | August 22, 2008I found this interesting picture illustrating how extensible the belly of the anglerfish is. They gulp more than their share in body weight! Quite a nice adaptation when you never know another meal will pass you by.
Culled from a classroom page at Warrensburg Schools in Missouri. Way to go learning about the deep sea!
petnoyer | August 21, 2008"Sizzle" is a global warming comedy, a film directed by Randy Olson of the Shifting Baselines blog.
Sizzle has been making the rounds between our respective research institutions here at Deep Sea News. Mine arrived about one month ago in a brightly colored envelope marked "your XXX photos have arrived!" Thanks, Kevin. Appreciate that.
So, I finally had a chance to sit down and watch the movie. It wasn't bad, really. I got a few good chuckles out of it. In the movie, Randy is literally trying to grasp the issue of an untenable problem - climate change. It becomes more of a farce with every…
cortex | August 21, 2008I've often suspected (based on a highly unsystematic series of conversations with classic New Hampshire independents) that most undecided voters are really just low-information voters, who have actually made a decision but don't quite know how to explain their decision. If you prod, you'll typically find that they're "leaning" in one direction or another, or that they "like" one candidate a little bit more, but they can't articulate the reasons behind their choice. As a result, the bias remains mostly subterranean: they don't know what they really believe.
I don't mean to sound condescending…
ddobbs | August 21, 2008MONTPELIER, Vt.--Ben & Jerry's is pulling the plug on its scoop shop in Vermont's capital.The ice cream maker announced Friday it's closing the store in Montpelier next month, after more than 20 years in business.The ice cream maker, which owns and operates scoop shops in Burlington, South Burlington and Williston, in addition to the one at its factory in Waterbury, says the Montpelier store is the smallest in its system.Spokesman Sean Greenwood says it's not that the store was doing badly, it's just that it's small and in a small city, with much less volume than other stores.
Ben &…
sb admin | August 21, 2008Itâs World Water Week, and officials from around the world are meeting in Stockholm to discuss how to get adequate water and sanitation to the worldâs population â even as drought and other environmental problems threaten the global water supply.
The conference organizers explain the problem and what WWW intends to do about it:
For a staggering 2.6 billion people, lack of access to adequate sanitation is a major and daily threat to their health and well-being. This bears tremendous social and environmental costs, of which premature deaths, degradation of living quarters and the environment,…
cortex | August 21, 2008Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo highlights one of my favorite William James quotes:
The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.
Notice his emphasis on the inherent unknowability of the mind, the way so many of our thoughts and sensations are constantly falling into the "abyss of oblivion". This was, in…
pharyngula | August 21, 2008
I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish
Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to
show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father,
Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine.
Charles Darwin
The counter to the side is ticking off the number of people who have died since you opened this webpage. The vast majority of those people are entering Hell. Christ commanded his followers to share the Gospel with those who are perishing... who have you shared with today?
The Surretts…
mspringer | August 21, 2008You can break the laws of your local jurisdiction. It might not be a good idea, but if you want to drive 60 in a 45, you can. You'll pay a hefty fine if you get caught, but you'll still have been able to do it.
There's no penalties for breaking the laws of physics because you can't break the laws of physics. On the other hand, technicalities in both legislative and physical laws can sometimes allow you do to things you wouldn't expect. Take this one:
You can't go faster than the speed of light.
Clear enough, until the lawyer chimes in. "What," he says with a raised eyebrow, "do you mean…
grrlscientist | August 20, 2008Here's more blog carnivalia for you to read;
Making money and Business advice carnival for 19 August 2008. Who would have ever thought that an unemployed research scientist had anything of value to tell the business community?
cortex | August 20, 2008Here's Seth Godin:
A journalist asked me, Most people have a better standard of living today than Louis XIV did in his day. So why are so many people unhappy?
What you have doesn't make you unhappy. What you want does.
And want is created by us, the marketers.
Marketers trying to grow market share will always work to make their non-customers unhappy.
It's interesting to note that marketers trying to maintain market share have a lot of work to do in reminding us that we're happy.
I think it's also important to note that our central nervous system conspires with advertisers to make us eternally…
cortex | August 20, 2008Over at Mind Matters, we've got an interesting article on how believing in free will can affect our ethical behavior:
In a clever new study, psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara tested this question by giving participants passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis, a popular science book by Francis Crick, a biochemist and Nobel laureate (as co-discoverer, with James Watson, of the DNA double helix). Half of the participants got a passage saying that there is no such thing as free will. The passage…
mspringer | August 20, 2008
This is Zhang Juanjuan, immediately after applying an impulse to an arrow. Impulse is something which gets less airtime than work in freshman physics, but it's nonetheless very important. It's sort of momentum's version of work.
You'll remember from Monday that there are two main things to keep in mind about work.
1. Work is defined as force through a distance
2. Work equivalent to the change in energy
You can think of impulse the same way.
1. Impulse is defined as a force thorough a time
2. Impulse is equivalent to the change in momentum
Crucially, impulse is a vector and work is not.…
gregladen | August 19, 2008
The Four Stone Hearth Blog Carnival, most recently hosted on Almost Diamonds, by Stephanie Zvan, who is Almost an Anthropologist, will be hosted next on Tangled Up in Blue Guy. However, TUIBG needs YOUR SUBMISIONS!!!! Send him your anthropological bloggery! Here
NOW!!!
kevin z | August 19, 2008Ahram Biosystems just released a handheld PCR machine affectionately called the Palm PCR. Oh yeah baby. Now you can just strap this 330 g (with battery) puppy to your arm when you go out for a jog. Wait! Is that dead body? Throw a hair in there and amplify as you wipe the sweat of your brow (make sure it doesn't fall inside the Palm PCR though...). But don't get too comfy, you'll have your 2kbp product in only 15-30 min.
"Palm PCR is powered by a Li-ion battery that enables more than 4 hours of continuous operation on a single charge. It is designed to adapt the standard 9 mm-spaced well…
kevin z | August 19, 2008Conservation is more than saving a species or a habitat. Conservation, at a meta-level, places people in stewardship of the planet and its inventory. Some of the most amazing places and their inhabitants are located in some of the poorest nations or communities. So when the passionate bloggers at 10000 Birds formed a partnership with the National Museum of Kenya to support the conservation work of Dominic Kamau Kimani, we at Deep Sea News asked how can we help?
We recognize that our readership, you guys, come from all walks of life but are unified by your love and appreciation of the natural…