OK, let’s see if we can close a whole bunch of tabs on my desktop, and maybe bring something interesting to you at the same time. Hollywood might have some cool special effects, but Nature can really create a 60km long rift! One that threatens to carve out a new ocean. Damn that’s cool in a “can you imagine the… Read more →
Category: Science and Technology
RFID Guardian
You know, I would totally buy a tool that would show me information about all the RFID tokens in my “area of influence”, and allow me to block (or, perhaps more interestingly, spoof) selected ones. It would cater to both my urge to hack things, and my tinfoil hat paranoia. You know, if more and more stores move to using… Read more →
I have too many fillings.
You know, I’ve always expected to see a couple of things in my lifetime: a cure for baldness and a way to scientifically regrow teeth. For both of those, I expected the solution to be some kind of biological one–we would trick the body into regrowing these things the same way it had grown them in the first place. Well,… Read more →
Markup Languages & Politics
Because one of my job roles is keeping on eye on some markup language specifications that are relevant to our product line (hell, I even helped author the initial version of one of the ones that’s important to us). Mostly this means I have to occasionally subject myself to incredibly boring markup minutiae, but sometimes it means I get to… Read more →
Quickies
Darwin strikes again: Kung fu fan tries to stop train. I swear I am totally going to learn how to pronounce “Xianglongshibazhang!”, and I am totally going to yell it out whenever I see someone being unutterably stupid. Ha-ha: Roy Moore Loses. Not a judge anymore, not a governor either. Apparently even in Alabama there’s some people who can’t get… Read more →
250 million years == “strange aeons”??
When I read today about the discovery of a giant asteroid impact crater in Antarctica my immediate amused thought was that they had discovered the Plateau of Leng. Everybody in the world has read At The Mountain of Madness, right? (If not, what’s your excuse? The story is online. Besides, if you haven’t read it then how are you supposed… Read more →
I can mock the hick parts of my own country too.
Yes, there are crazy religious people-that-time-forgot in Canada too: CBC Montreal – Darwin’s theory not allowed in North Quebec schools Teachers in some northern Quebec communities are being told not to talk about the evolution of humans because Darwin’s theory offends some Inuit people. Alexandre April is a teacher in Salluit, Que., who says his school principal told teachers not… Read more →
Raising My Kid With Science
A while back Paul Myers made a list of books for evolutionists. The list included a number of items “for the kids”. I really liked the idea of starting Sarah’s science education early–why not learn about science along with math and vocabulary, etc–so I decided to order some of these books “sometime”. (I figured the odds of them being in… Read more →
Does rejecting God make for a dreary world? Hell no!
Quoting from the When God is gone, everything is holy post at Science Musings: Once we reject the absolute truth of one thing, whatever it might be — God, a holy book, a law of nature — then everything, even the smallest element of reality — an insect, a leaf, a grain of sand — becomes infinitely interesting. The physicist… Read more →
Professor Membrane’s Science Roundup
I really love the idea that Titan has seas of sand. It’s so ‘pulp science fiction’. You can totally imagine some John Carter analogue, riding some kind of beast adapted to the thicker atmosphere and lower gravity (not to mention temperature!) across the dunes of Titan’s Sea of Shifting Sands. Yay also for the fact that Titan’s winds are apparently… Read more →
Artificial Life and Competition
I’ve always been kind of interested in Core Wars. (See also the main Core Wars page, and the King Of The Hill page.) Not enough to actually compete, you understand, but enough to run a local server and let some of the more “famous” programs battle it out, and maybe to throw in one or two of my own. I… Read more →
Speaking of obvious science…
I wonder if there are resources out there to help a parent raise a “media literate” (read “advertiser-proof” and “immune to image pressure”) kid? I should look during my next chunk of free time. Children’s viewing time may increase requests for advertised products Children who spend more time watching television and movies and playing video games may be more likely… Read more →
Science And The Obvious.
Popular Science has a nice round-up of ten different studies where science confirms the obvious (with a bonus page about science disproving a few bits of conventional wisdom). The ten conclusions are: Combining Drugs and Alcohol is Bad For You Gun-Toting Drivers are More Prone to Road Rage Faraway Objects Are Tougher to See The Beer-Goggle Effect is a Bona… Read more →
Where did he get the money?
The Guardian has an interesting story today about research into the effects of very high ecstasy use. Perhaps not surprisingly, given a guy to study who has taken over 40,000 pills in his lifetime, they find that he may have suffered some permanent damage to his ability to concentrate and to his memory. Perhaps the more surprising thing is that… Read more →
Practical applications of fluid mechanics
We actually learned this important lesson in my undergraduate fluid mechanics class: For those of you who didn’t have the benefit of my exciting engineering education, the full technical explanation is online. Read more →
