Wikipedia Article of the Day

Red Mercury:

He goes on to claim that the reason this is not more widely known is that elements within the US power structure are deliberately keeping it "under wraps" due to the scary implications such a weapon would have on nuclear proliferation. Since a red mercury bomb would require no fissile material, it would seemingly be impossible to protect against its widespread proliferation given current arms control methodologies. Instead of trying to do so, they simply claim it doesn't exist, while acknowledging its existence privately.

Not to be confused with Red Matter:

The rare mineral decalithium is processed into red matter that creates a black hole when it comes in contact with nuclear matter. It is used in an attempt to avert an impending natural disaster, and to destroy a planet.

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Football vs. Basketball

One of the major reasons TAE loves football over basketball is that basketball is best played by tall people, a group of which I am not a part!

But another reason is that every football team, basically, plays the same number of games around the same time. But with collegiate basketball, you get weird situations where Texas Tech is 6-0 and unranked, while Michigan has only played two games, and is ranked #15 in the AP Top 25.


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Quote of the Day, Climategate Edition

A commenter writes in reply to this post:

"This issue has become so much like a religion that its followers operate on blind faith. There is nothing you can do to have them look at it from a different perspective let alone change their minds."

I do not worship man-made climate change - I loathe it. But as far as your assumption that I, or any of my co-believers, operate on blind faith, I humbly submit that climate change skeptics do the same. They (while bashing AGW proponents) fail to offer a single explanation for "WHERE IS THE CO2 GOING?" or "CAN YOU MODEL WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN FIFTY YEARS IF WE DON'T CURB EMISSIONS?", they just sit on their high horse and pontificate that AGW arguments are false. I asked one AGW skeptic "if the CO2 humans are producing isn't causing the global warming that occurred for 147 of the last 150 years, then what is?" and she gave me a vague "Earth's cycles," response, but upon pressing her for data...any data...she said "I leave it to the experts."

So I ask you experts; please tell me: the Texas-sized flotilla of trash in the Pacific Ocean: is it negatively affecting the environment? The near-exctinction of several thousand Ocean species due to human sushi consumption: is it negatively affecting the environment? The hole in the ozone due to human use of hair spray and refrigerant: is it negatively affecting the environment? The hunting-to-extinction of most apex predator species on Earth: is it negatively affecting the environment? The millions of gallons of wastewater that manufacturing plants and chemical plants dump directly into the rivers: is it negatively affecting the environment? The tons and tons of artificially produced hormones pumped into the water that scientists have proven turn male fish into female sterile fish: is it negatively affecting the environment? The damming of rivers, then the redistribution of that freshwater into arid regions to produce crops for human consumption, causing animal populations like salmon to face extinction, while inducing dust bowl conditions in areas that do not receive enough water: does it negatively affect the environment? The massive dumping of spilled oil into the Ocean that causes huge numbers of animal deaths (and basically destroys an entire ecosystem): does it negatively affect the environment?

Here's the thing: huge flotillas of plastic trash, dead albatross chicks, huge warehouses of dead bluefin tuna, overpopulated prey species (due to predator loss) eating people's flower gardens, polluted water (and signs warning you to not eat your catch), dead fish, dams, dust storms, dead animals covered in oil...these are all things that climate change skeptics will readily admit are caused by humans, and will also usually admit negatively affect the environment. This is because the climate change skeptics only believe something they can see with their own eyes. But because airborne pollution is invisible and they can't freaking see it, they dismiss it with a wave of their arrogant hand.

You notice there isn't a single climate change skeptic from Tianying, China, because most of the people there are too busy dying from lead poisoning. Nor do you find climate change skeptics in Norilsk, Russia, where it is difficult to see ten feet on a good day.

So no, I don't believe in global warming based on blind faith. I take forty million other examples of humans harming the environment and surmise that CO2 is most likely example 40,000,001.


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Deep Thought on the Large Hadron Collider

Why do "control rooms" always feature computers with four or five monitors hooked to them? Is it really that bourgeois to hit ALT + TAB?


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Deep Thought on Population Control

At a local city park, they are "thinning" the deer herd, which has reached approximately 700 deer over 1,236 acres, or a population density roughly 2 acres/deer. This equals about 86,000 square feet per deer. They are doing this because they feel that a density of deer that high cannot be sustained by the park ecosystem.

The human population density in Lenexa, KS, the town in which the aforementioned park exists, has a population density of 1,266 people per square mile, or roughly 22,000 square feet per person. This is four times denser than the troublesome deer population.

The human population density in New York, New York is about 27,440 people per square mile. This equals about 1,015 square feet per person, or roughly 85 times denser than the local park deer population.

But it is the deer that have thrown the park ecosystem out of balance, and unless thinned are in danger of causing their own demise. And global warming is a myth.


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Coaching Carousel Watch

Here at TAE, we love watching college football coaches promise they'll be dead and buried before they would quit the coaching position they are in and move to another school - and then promptly quit the coaching position they are currently in and move to another school. The poster-boy for this "I am not concerned with truth, only with money" attitude is Rich Rodriguez, who repeatedly promised to not leave West Virginia...and then did so to Michigan (where he has been mediocre).
Other examples include Nick Saban promising to not leave Louisiana State and then doing so to the Miami Dolphins, then saying rumors he was leaving the Dolphins for the University of Alabama was a lie then leaving the Miami Dolphins for the Crimson Tide. Also Bobby Petrino promising to not leave Louisville then leaving Louisville.

So when I see Urban Meyer claim he would "never" leave Florida for Notre Dame, I just sit and wait.

For my part, I predict Charlie Weis will be in Kansas City by next spring, either as the new offensive coordinator of the KC Chiefs, or as the new head coach of the Kansas Jayhawks.


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To Simulate a Cat Brain

Consider me completely unsurprised that IBM was the company that got the DARPA contract to build a cat brain simulator. All too often, DARPA "open" BAA's sound basically like this: "DARPA seeks a contractor to build a Lockheed Fighter Plane, built in Lockheed's factory by Lockheed employees."
This is because companies have people buttering up DARPA employees 24/7 for contracts. One way to do that is to suggest research to DARPA, which they might fund if they find it suitable to DARPA's mission and also quality research with high-risk/high-reward potential.

Anyway, so IBM got tax dollars to build a cat-brain simulator using their supercomputers, and their lead researcher announced last week that they had "10 billion neurons connected by 10 trillion synapses." Ignoring the entire part of this article where other neuroscientists blast the research as a "scam" and a "hoax" let me just make my own criticism: the whole project is occurring in virtual space.

What good does a virtual cat brain inside a building-sized supercomputer do me? The real research is in making brain-mimicking hardware the size of an actual brain. And though my understanding of electronics is low, I believe the problem with that is the non-plasticity of integrated circuit layouts coupled with the low number of junctions between processing units.

My solution: nanobots. Build nanobots with hundreds of legs, each about the size of a neuron. Each nanobot connects to other adjacent nanobots via its legs. Control signals sent to the nanobot can alter the leg connections of that bot (or double/triple/etc the connections between two bots to strengthen the electrical path and lower resistance) leading to memory making pathways. The nanobots don't need their own power supply, they could each contain a radio frequency receiver that would generate power merely by being in contact with radio waves (essentially the way RFID works).

Nanobiomecharobotic neuroengineers: ready, GO!


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Re-publican-diculous

This morning I heard a sound byte of David Obey saying that President Obama must find the billions for any troop surge in Afghanistan before he acts. After a few minutes, my laughter turned into tears.

I at first couldn't remember if Obey was a Republican or a Democrat, and assumed the former, because the Republican party has reached a point where when someone says something completely stupid, and arrogantly hypocritical, I automatically assume they are a Republican. You can understand my shock when I realized Obey was a (D) not an (R).


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An Open Letter to "Lady Gaga"

Dear Lady Gaga,

Don't hate your dad.

Sincerely,
TAE


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Front Loading Washing Machines

I was just talking to Mrs. TAE about this the other day: why were washing machines top loading for 50+ years, and suddenly front loading washers have taken the nation by storm? Seems the matching, boldly colored washer/dryer set is so en vogue now.

But there had to be a reason the top-loading washer was so popular for so long, right?

Turns out there is: mold. Front loading washers have a mold problem, as many unfortunate owners are discovering:Consumer Reports subscribers from across the country have complained about smelly front-loaders. In fact, the editors have received so many complaints, they now warn about the problem when they review washers.

But these high-efficiency washing machines save money, right? Turns out the fix for the mold is expensive:

Lembersky could see what was causing the stink. She found “black, gooey, slimy stuff” growing inside the rubber gasket which goes around the glass window on the washer door. That was quite a surprise because she regularly cleans the machine and runs loads with bleach and hot water. “It just gives me the willies,” she says. “I don't like the thought of mold in my washer.”

Desperate for relief, she hired technician Scott Wiseman to remove and replace the disgusting rubber gasket. Once he took the washer apart, Wiseman found mold inside the machine, too. The job cost $300.

Wait, the savings she reaps from having a more energy efficient washer have been completely offset by the cost of maintenance? Almost like a Toyota Prius!

In engineering we learn: stick with what works.
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Engineers

An engineer: "Someone who is half-robot super genius."

Sounds like an accurate description to me!


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Alien Invasion Explanation and Justification

As I mentioned before, the absurd idea from the original V series that the aliens had arrived to steal our water made sense in the 80's, when widespread water in the Solar System had not been discovered. Science since has proben that one of the primary constituents of asteroids (and several planetary bodies including the moon Europa (which may contain three times the amount of water on Earth) is water, and it would be much simpler to extract water from a low-gravity moon than from the surface of a strong gravity planet like Earth.

So I was, and still am, curious what the premise will be of the aliens arrival on Earth in the newest iteration of the V series.

So after careful consideration, I have developed two possible reasons that aliens would arrive on Earth and not just irradiate the surface immediately. Because honestly, if an alien race had the tech to actually get to Earth they would either not need to come here, or need to come here for non-diplomatic reasons.
1. Beryllium/Aluminum Harvesting: It turns out that in the known univese, Beryllium (element 4) is not formed in the furnaces of stars; most beryllium was formed during the Big Bang, or when the gamma bursts of star supernovae hits interstellar dust particles. These are both fairly rare events (the Big Bang only happened once...or did it???). The aliens arrive on Earth, and inform us that their interstellar drives rely on the spontaneous oxidation of water when in contact with beryllium, and they need more beryllium for the war fleet they are building to attack the other aliens.
Earth, as it turns out, has a decent amount of beryllium. So the aliens begin harvesting beryllium. Unfortunately, that means they basically dig up and superheat the crust of the planet, which wipes out human civilization and causes wide-spread tectonic chaos. Once the aliens extract all the beryllium they can, they move on, leaving our planet a barren, lifeless rock.
Or alternately, the aliens could show up, and mention that 96% of the matter in the universe is useless dark matter and energy, and of the 4% of the Universe that is matter, 98% of that is hydrogen and helium (which doesn't do them much good considering their star drive runs on beryllium), and of the 2% of matter in the Milky Way galaxy that isn't hydrogen or helium, about 0.29% percent of the remaining matter is aluminum, which they use to build their interstellar warships. As it were, Earth contains tons and tons of aluminum, so the aliens proceed as above, mining and superheating the crust of the Earth to extract the metal, turning our world into one big barren, toxic strip mine. Then, with all the usable aluminum mined, the aliens depart. Or worse yet, they set up their shipyard in space, and plunder our atmosphere for gasses for their welding equipment.

2. Xenoforming: Turns out the aliens that arrive above our cities are outlaws from an interstellar union, and have been driven from their homes. They arrive at Earth and find the humans both pathetically low-tech and easily manipulated. They quickly and easily set up a slave state for themselves, and whenever an uprising occurs, they just brutally and quickly vaporize the city in which the uprising occurred, forcing the kowtow of humanity. When the interstellar union forces arrive at Earth and find the aliens deeply ingrained in the human culture, they simply glass the planet, eliminating both the outlaw aliens and us.


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Creepy Wiki Article of the Day

My brother-in-law would love this one:

The first allegedly strange death of livestock comes from near Alamosa, Colorado, in 1967. The real name of the animal was Lady, but the media quickly adopted the name "Snippy" (the name of another horse at the ranch), which stuck.

On September 7 of that year, Agnes King and her son Harry noted that Lady, a three-year-old horse, had not returned to the ranch at the usual time for her water. This was unusual, given the heat and the arid conditions.

Harry found Lady on September 9. Her head and neck had been skinned and defleshed, the bones were white and clean. To King, the cuts on Lady seemed to have been very precise. There was no blood at the scene, according to Harry, and there was a strong medicinal odor in the air.

The next day, Harry and Agnes returned to the scene with Agnes’ brother and sister-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Berle Lewis. They found a lump of skin and horse flesh; when Mrs. Lewis touched it, the flesh oozed a greenish fluid which burned her hand. They also reported the discovery of fifteen "tapering, circular exhaust marks punched into the ground" over an area of some 5000 square yards. (Saunders and Harkins, 156) The medicinal odor had weakened somewhat, but was still present.

Mrs. Lewis contacted the United States Forest Service, and Ranger Duane Martin was sent to investigate. Among other tasks, Martin "checked the area with a civil defense Geiger counter. He reported finding a considerable increase in radioactivity about two city blocks from the body." (Saunders and Harkins, 157) Later, Martin would state, "The death of this saddle pony is one of the most mysterious sights I’ve ever witnessed ... I’ve seen stock killed by lightning, but it was never like this."

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Earth is a Strange BUT AWESOME Place

Weird but cool science emerging in the field of "dead whale ecosystems":

They found that the worms begin life as microscopic larvae floating through the deep ocean. When the larvae encounter a dead animal, such as a whale or elephant seal, they settle onto its bones. The worms then sprout up, looking a bit like tiny trees. At one end are root-like structures that grow into the bone. The scientists suspect that bacteria in these roots break down proteins within the bone, which supply nutrients for the worms. At the other end are feathery appendages called "palps," which take in oxygen.

When these worms sexually mature, they all turn into females. But larvae that land on the female boneworm's palps develop into male worms, although they remain microscopic in size. The male worms fertilize the females' eggs, which are then released to start the cycle over.

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Andrew Sullivan's Obsession With Sarah Palin

Many of us in the blogosphere have been unable to ignore the nearly constant tittering of Andrew Sullivan as he exposes every single bit of misinformation former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin states.

I can't speak for anyone else, but personally I am fine with it, and I think the reason Sullivan is so obsessive over this is that he shares my fear that the 2012 election will feature Sarah Palin. The conservative movement in this country has no real candidate. The GOP, bless there little hearts (if you can find them) has seemingly decided that conservativism isn't as fun as anti-Democratic-shouting, and has seemingly adopted the attitude that Barack Obama is a Dalit, and despite anything Sarah Palin says (gems like "Levi's [Playgirl] pictures are like porn" obviously they are like porn, Sarah, that is why they are in Playgirl) is probably the Fifth Canonical Gospel.

I have this real fear that I won't have a candidate in favor of large budget cuts, just Obama vs. Lying Liar. I have nitemares where I can't vote for a candidate that argues for state rights over Federal consolidation of power, instead I'll have Obama vs. What Are the Anti-Federalist Papers? I have this suspicion that I won't have a candidate that is pro-science while still fiscally conservative (e.g. with NIH budgeting), instead I'll have Obama vs. In God We Delude Ourselves.

It's not like Sullivan, or I, can waste our vote on Barr. And although Obama has done a fair job by my book, and I voted for him (happily) in 2008, it was as much a vote against the GOP as it was a vote for Mr. Obama. My hope is that a true conservative, an old school one, that will reduce Federal spending (including and especially military spending and efforts) will emerge and take the GOP nomination. Right now, however, it looks like there is a very real chance a narcissistic sociopath will be the Republican candidate.

Sullivan documents all her lies, all her hypocrisies, and all her egomania not as much because he is obsessed with her, but because he, like me, is mortally afraid of a world where she is the best opposition to unchecked liberalism that can be mustered.

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Texting While Driving

1/3 of teens admit texting while driving.

In other news, 2/3rds of teens are liars.


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2012, Ctd

Peter Suderman reviews:

And with its never-ending parade of glorious, ludicrous, and utterly improbable catastrophes, it more or less succeeds. 2012 is the sort of movie so aggressively hyperbolic and devoutly over-the-top that it makes traditional descriptive labels obsolete and thus requires the invention of whole new words. My suggestions? How about catastrophaganza--the subgenre to which 2012 (and most of Emmerich's oeuvre) belongs--and retardiculous--a combo word to describe its barfy blend of low-quality yucks; treacly, social-welfare obsessed melodrama; buzz-word-laden psuedo-scientific babble; and gleefully apocalyptic pyrotechnic spectacle.

Unfortunately (perhaps), that spectacle requires not only the cataclysmic collapse of most of civilization, but the untimely deaths of several billion people

Actually makes me think I might enjoy it. I'll just have to turn my internal science fact-checking dial down to zero.


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The Moon is a Soggy Cheeseball

Somewhere, perhaps there is a little kid, who upon reading inflated claims that the moon is basically a gigantic soggy mud-flat, will be inspired to study science, eventually joining NASA. He eventually will become the Director of NASA, and will terminate all moon missions, all ISS missions, and instead concentrate all of NASA's energies at robotic exploration of deep space, in search of other habitable planets. The search will be a success, and shortly before he leaves his position at the top of NASA, he'll direct a ship filled with supplies and robots and human embryos to embark on a 100 year trip to the newly discovered habitable planet, succeeding at both the first interstellar travel and human extraterrestrial colonization for the first time.
Perhaps, as the Gospel of Mark says; this one little data point suggesting water on Mars will not make any obvious difference, but it will be a tiny mustard seed planted, and one day grow into a bush providing shade for birds.

That is my hope.

Because there are no obvious ramifications to the current problem of colonizing the Moon, solely because 24 gallons of water were found in the shadow of a crater near the Pole. And the biggest question we should be asking anyone who suggests moon colonization is "why?" There is no real good reason to colonize there. Should Earth's environment fail, or should a giant meteor blast the surface of Earth, or should a deadly virus wipe out mankind, or should any number of apocalyptic events occur, the moon colonists would also be doomed. Without eventual resupply, they would either vacate the moon or die.
No, in terms of human colonization, planets with habitable atmospheres are the only real option. The Moon, for what its worth, might make a neat tourist attraction for the obscenely wealthy. But as far as government-funded space exploration goes...the Moon is a waste of money and time.
"Water on the Moon is a game changer." American astrophysicist Jack Burns said last Thursday. You mean it goes from a 10-year, $150 billion game to an even bigger boondoggle? And if water on the Moon really were such a big event, why didn't you say it back in September when the Indians found water all over the moon? The American media downplayed that discovery, so that two months later when the American exploration found water, they could trumpet the discovery, almost as though they were the ones who got there first! One American even had the presumption to say that the Indian satellite data supported the American mission. Supporting data was created before the intial data was collected! Now that is pioneering science! That would be like me claiming Microsoft's Xbox replacement is awesome, before the actual device is ever built! Then when it turns out to be awesome, Microsoft points to my precognitive review as supporting data!

In any case, the Moon could have vast liquid oceans and it wouldn't change my opinion about colonization. Until the moon has a breathable atmosphere (it never will) and until an Earth-clone ecosystem can be set up there (we never can), I will argue that Moon missions are a egregious waste of taxpayer dollars that could be better spent on real, actual science. Like methods for interstellar exploration.

And honestly, you should just laugh at NASA's obsession with extraterrestrial water. Between the Asteroid Belt, the Kuiper Belt, and the Oort Cloud, the huge, vast, massive, overwhelming majority of non-gaseous objects in our solar system are made almost entirely of frozen water.

And here's a question: if asteroids have been bombarding the Moon for millions of years, and one of the primary components of asteroids is frozen water, and scientists found the recently announced water in the crater of an asteroid...why is this not obvious to anyone else?


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What is "enough"?

The daughter of a woman at church found out about 9 months ago that she was pregnant. This was a big deal because the woman was 40, and did not think she could get pregnant, to her, that window had closed. The whole extended family rallied around the pregnancy, her first, and excitement rose. There were complications, however, and a Caesarian was scheduled. Tensions were high, but so were expectations. Four days before the C-section, doctors learned the baby's umbilical cord had wrapped around its neck, and the baby was stillborn.

When things like this happen, my gutcheck reaction is to immediately wonder where God is, and why the hell he lets this shit happen. This, to me, is the truest sense of the word 'atrocity.' Pile the miracle of an unplanned, and against-the-odds, first-time pregnancy on top of a family that was so in love with the child, and then sweep the rug out from under it, then point and laugh at the family as they lay on the floor moaning. Then pour vinegar in their eyes. Like I said, atrocity.

And then, as I calmed down and stop railing against the Almighty (not a wise long-term strategy I am told), it really dawned on me how charmed my life has been. Born in a solid, loving family with two devoted-to-each-other parents, I have never known a broken home. My parents both took Federal jobs, my mom a school teacher and my father an air traffic controller. Both made decent livings, and both retired comfortably. We were never rich. But more importantly we were never poor either. I can remember eating entire boxes of Nutri-grain bars in a single sitting as a teenager, and somehow my parents kept more food coming. When I was 4 we moved to an affluent suburb of Kansas City (the Kansas side), where I attended top-notch public schools. Purely as a factor of my genetics, I was labeled "Gifted/Talented" and got a free pass for most of my abberant behavior, authority figures would just say I was "mischievous" as opposed to the non-gifted/talented kids, who upon doing the same abberant behavior were labled a future criminal. No one suggested to my parents that I be medicated. After 18 years of easy, middle/upper class white America, I went to college, where life was not as easy, but once again I really never suffered. When my finances were in disarray, someone was there to bail me out, be it the DoE or Mom and Dad. After college I went to grad school, did fine, met a beautiful woman and married her and had an adorable, smart, perfectly healthy baby girl. I work at a great job and have a comfortable apartment back in the suburbs of Kansas City. All four of my grandparents are alive and married, my parents are still married, I'm still married...everything is peachy-keen!

In all honesty, I have not suffered. Not once. Not really. I could go on and on about how easy my life has been, but let me just say that through some combination of God, Fate, genetics, good parenting, and luck, I've ended up with a charmed, easy life.

And so it sickens me to think I might sit in a cube, in a large room filled with other cubes, and work at some job, and at the end of my charmed, easy life, I will not have benefitted mankind at all, and the only people who will have reaped the benefits of my charmed, easy life will by my wife and kids.

To me, just doing a job is not enough. I certainly don't judge others who find that their job is a fulfilling way to enable them to get their "enough" outside of work. Some work terrible, thankless jobs like a slave so that their kids can have a charmed, easy life instead of them. My father is one of these people. Others work terrible, thankless jobs so they can afford to give mightily at church, or so they can take trips to help people in other countries, or so they can afford to send their kids on those trips. This is also a noble task.

And then there is the majority of the world. These people did not live a charmed, easy life. They had a tough childhood, or grew up in a tough neighborhood or a broken home. These people aren't (through no fault of their own, obviously) born in the 99th percentile of their peers, and don't have the luxury of barely studying and still making good grades. To these people, simply having a job might be a great success. Simply living might be a great success. To them, just getting through the day is their "enough."

But I am not those people. And neither is most of my regular readership. I know many of you personally, some very personally, and I know your backgrounds. I know what you have been through (or haven't) and I know of what you are capable. I know what you do with your free time, and I know what you don't do.

And to those of you who might, after reading this post, sit back and reflect on your own past and realize "I guess I have had it pretty easy, now that he mentions it" I have to ask you: are you doing "enough?" Are you going to retire an old man/woman and not think about how much better you made the world, but instead think how much better you made the world for your yourself and your kids, and hope they, instead of you, are the ones who don the mantle of responsibility to throw away their lives for mankind? Are you going to work at a thankless job, living for the weekend, so that your 'career' really is just a game of 'happiness hopscotch' endlessly repeated until you are too old to hop anymore?

To some, that may be enough. But people like me, the gifted, tiny little top of the social caste, who never knew oppression, or hurt, or hunger, or pain; it is truly the hardest thing you have thus far done in your life if you realize that your life is not normal and you should not be living it thusly.

I realize this may fall on deaf ears, because most consider their lives to not really be under their control. And to that I respond: "that is true for everyone except you." The only life you can control, the only path you can define, the only person you can really, truly affect is you.

And so I beseech you blessed few; you rich, white kids reading this: live your life for others. I'm not talking about dropping coins in the Salvation Army bucket in front of Target, that's chicken shit. I'm talking about seriously looking at your life, and saying "in the bell curve of human existences, I am waaaaaaaaaaay down at the far right end, and I didn't really do anything to deserve it, so maybe I should start acting a little grateful."

For my part, I would be amiss if I didn't practice what I preach. Although my 9-5 job does directly help humanity (developing bio/chem warfare sensors), it isn't "enough." Starting tomorrow, I will be recruiting a small group of richly blessed, charmed people like me to join in a non-secret society whose primary purpose will be to engineer cheap, effective technologies for the poor. The rules of the society will be this: all intellectual property rights from technologies developed are equally owned by all members of the society, all revenue from the technologies will be given to charity, and each member will be required to donate all time, resources, and ideas to the effort. I may not be good at much, but I am good at engineering and at pushing people into doing something.

And so having been given everything by the world, the best thing I can give back is my mind.

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Weekly Poetry Burst, 2

yes is a pleasant country:
if's wintry
(my lovely)
let's open the year

both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure,
when violets appear

love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april's where we're)

Yes is a pleasant country, by e e cummings.


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Weekly Poetry Burst, 1

"Gotta make a plan, gotta do what's right,
Can't run around in circles if you wanna build a life."
But I don't wanna make a plan for a day far away;
While I'm young and while I'm able all I want to do is play.

-J.A.R., by Billie Joe Armstrong.


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Water on the Moon

Let's draw huge conclusions about the Moon and suggest billions in spending based on a SINGLE DATA POINT.

More on this to come.


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You know you are old when... UPDATED

You are trying to figure out something on your computer and you feel the need to talk out what you are doing out loud, subconsciously hoping a Millennial will come by and rescue you.

...
You know you are a Millennial when annoyed by the mumbling of a computer-illiterate Boomer, you blog about it and then put on your earbuds and play Fall Out Boy at a high volume level.

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2012

This weekend, when you go see the movie, keep in mind 2 things:
1. If all the ice in the polar ice caps melted, and all the water in the atmosphere fell to the ground as rain, and all the glaciers and mountaintop snow melted, and it all went into the ocean...the level of the ocean would rise less than 150 feet.

2. In order to crash an aircraft carrier into the White House using a tidal wave, you would need to either drive the tidal wave in from the Atlantic, which is over 165 miles away, or drive a tidal wave up and over the Delaware Peninsula, an overland trip of nearly 35 miles. For this to happen, the earthquake would shake apart the planet.
For reference, the second strongest earthquake recorded in human history happened in the Indian Ocean in 2005, and sent a wall of water 33 feet high as far inland as 1.24 miles. So basically we would need an earthquake around 10.3 on the Richter scale to achieve ten times the power of the Indian Ocean quake. The strongest earthquake ever recorded was a 9.5 on the Richter scale.
And that is just the beginning. By the end of the movie, tsunamis are rushing up the sides of the Himalayan mountains. The earthquakes required to do this would imply the Earth is splitting into pieces, and the cracks in the crust would be so large that all water on Earth would evaporate in the heat of the escaping molten core material.

But enjoy the movie.


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NASA watch

The 150 million dollar urine recycler is broken again.


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Deep Thought on Dances With Wolves Avatar

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that countless westerns and movies about colonial America depict the savage American Indians as bloodthirsty killers and the helpless colonists/farmers/townspeople as nothing more than simpletons trying to extract a meager living, and the white male who rescues the colonists/farmers/townspeople from the natives (usually by killing a lot of them) as a hero, but the move Avatar instead paints the colonists as bloodthirsty killers and the natives as graceful, zen creatures that only want to live in peace...yet they need a white male hero type to "save" them?

When are we going to make a movie where the battle between tech-savvy, disease-resistant cultures and low-tech, disease-susceptible cultures is accurately depicted as one-sided and vile?

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President Obama as an Engineer

Now of course when Obama makes a poor decision, like his backpedaling on gay rights, I don't like to associate him with the field of engineering, which is filled with people who typically are contractually obligated to fulfill promises to clients in a timely manner. In this case his clients were the gay voters, and he contractually obligated himself to them when he promised swift action on gay marriage and DADT policies.

But the news that Obama is continuing to mull options in Afghanistan not only pleases me, but it would seem to be a very engineer-like strategy to decision making, so of course I approve. Obama refuses to back down on patient rumination, he considers several designs with equal care, he is confident that given enough time to consider the problem, a successful strategy can be developed, and although his subordinates believe in their strategies, he refuses to just delegate responsibility for the decision making, because he acknowledges responsibility for failure will rest nearly entirely on his shoulders. These are exactly the types of behaviors that are developed in young engineers to make them successful old ones.

I humbly submit that if he continues to think like an engineer our young President will grow to be a successful old one.


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Deep Thought on Garbage

If the garbage island in the Pacific is twice the size of Texas...and researches suggest others may exist in the Atlantic Ocean and elsewhere...why can't astronauts just point us at it? There are literally thousands of satellites orbiting our planet...why don't they spot said garbage piles?


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Pardon my french, but...

NEWSWEEK YOU DAMN IDIOTS!

For the last time, centuries start with year 1. Decades start with year 1.

Ask your kid to count to ten. DO THEY START WITH ZERO AND END WITH NINE?! NO!

But when the year 2000 rolled around, and the fourth digit changed from a one to a two, everyone hopped on this "its a new century, let's write tons of articles about the last 100 years," even though the century wasn't over yet! Was the First Century from year 0 to year 99? No, it was from 1 to 100. All base ten counting starts with 1 and ends with zero (moving the one over one place, obviously).
So why is Newsweek making this blunder, again? Because they want to be the first mag to write "looking back" articles. They can't be late to the "looking back" game, they must be there first. So why let a thing like "math" and "logic" get in the way, let's declare 2010 the first year of a new decade...I mean, it is, if you go on the assumption that 2000 was the first year of the new century...and therefore the first year of the last decade...

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Cars that Drive Themselves, Ctd - IntelliDrive

The Department of Transportation has started a program, "IntelliDrive," which is basically a wifi network that will connect all the cars on the road and report traffic density to a central server. Almost like I suggested it.
I am afraid, however, that boneheads will scuttle the potential of this idea.

[The IntelliDrive] can also include additional information such as whether cars’ headlights and windshield wipers are on, which would indicate the exact location of where rain or snow are falling.

“Who would have ever thought of a windshield wiper as a sensor?” asked Rod MacKenzie, vice president and chief technical officer of ITS America, an intelligent transportation advocacy group. “Now it is.”

Of course, the answer is that General Motors thought of it. Almost all Cadillac cars come with an automatic rain sensing device utilizing infrared light, and have since the 90's. Here's a pdf of how the system works.

All in all though, I am pleased to see the government stepping in to fund technical development of "hands-free" cars. It is a significant step in the right direction towards lowering the number of vehicular fatalities.

“Cars cannot prevent all the accidents and deaths that occur, but this should put a big dent in it,” said Schmidt.

This is true. Some estimates put the number of preventable vehicular fatalities near or around 97%, and the other three percent are caused by sudden failures in the road or nature, for example the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis or a moose stepping in front of someone's Prius. But nevertheless, I hold that we could save 97% of people killed in or around cars, easily, if we just got rid of human drivers. That's over 40,000 Americans a year. Talk about job-saving stimulus! That's another 40,000 tax-payers!

I could go on, and have done so before, but really, I'll save your time and just say that this is a really good idea.


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Reinventing College

TAE holds that the increasing cost of tuition is not increasing the quality of college education. Graduates are not smarter than they were, and graduation rates do not correlate with tuition costs (nor does tuition rate increase correlate with inflation).

Meanwhile, students are becoming more and more heavily strapped to the boat-anchor of their student loans, which often haunt them for the majority of their adult lives (disclosure: TAE is heavily strapped to the boat-anchor of his student loans, which will haunt him for the majority of his adult life).

Is there a fix? Could the screwed up awesomely awesome American health system suggest this fix? What if we could set up college tuition/student loans the way an employee's PPO works: you go to the doctor, the doctor charges whatever they want, then your PPO slaps the doctor in the face and pays the doctor whatever they want, and you don't pay the doctor anything...but you pay an arm and a leg to the PPO provider.

If we adopted this system for college tuition, an overarching authority could use graduation rates, quality of professors, post-graduation employment rates, post-graduate education acceptance rates, and a variety of other factors to place a numerical value on that college, which is what the student loan people would pay for a student's tuition.
This would allow Haaaahhhhvud to still accept the elite 1,600 uberstudents to their school, and charge what they wanted, but would require them to back up their rates with deliverables, like students that are gainfully employed, not out-of-work liberal arts majors who are crutched by their student loans for-ev-er. Other schools, who graduate an abysmal number of students but charge lower rates, would find incentive to increase their graduation rate; it means they could charge more. Expensive, private schools would not lose their haughty identities in this system; they would merely have to produce quality education to justify their price.
Suppose a school charges more than their accredited value? Well, the student loan only pays what the school is worth, and the school has to eat the rest.
But what if the school refuses to accept students who are on the student loan valuation program? Well, fine. If a university doesn't want to be a part of the student loan valuation program so they can charge more, they certainly have that right. However, no students requesting loans will receive them towards those schools that are not in the student loan valuation network.
What about schools that charge less than the student loan valuation amount? The student loan valuation amount is simply the "cap" amount a school may charge a student. If a school charges less, the student loan will cover the amount of tuition, whatever it is, up to the "cap."

It is pretty much foolproof. That's why the country's medical system works so well. Right?

Right..?


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My wife told me I was a jerk when I suggested this post to her.

While I watched the tragedy unfold in Texas, during which 13 people were killed and 30 wounded, I couldn't help but think to myself: "118 people died today in America in preventable traffic accidents, while another 5,000 Americans were involved in preventable traffic accidents that will leave them permanently disabled."

While I do not mean to downplay the events in Killeen, Texas...I just want to point out that for every person murdered on Nov. 5th at Fort Hood, there were nearly 10 people killed by motor vehicles that same day. For every person wounded by the shooter, there were 220 wounded by cars.

In the time it took me to write this short post, 14 Americans have died from the flu.


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The science of being normal

Simply being outside is good for your vision.


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Cars that Drive Themselves, Ctd - The Terror of Two Floating Points

MSNBC reports that cars are becoming increasingly autonomous.

The current set of semi-autonomous safety features can quickly combine into something more. For example, a car could use Lane Keep Assist and Adaptive Cruise Control together to drive itself under highway conditions, sticking to one lane and not hitting the car in front.

The next step is to expand these capabilities. Adaptive Cruise Control currently works only over 25 mph, but the next version (called Full Speed Range ACC) lowers that number to zero so that cars can begin to handle traffic jams in the city.

The problem with this is that each car is autonomous. TAE holds that you cannot build a network of completely autonomous robots without an immediate cascade failure. In mathematics we call this "one equation with two unknowns." You need a second equation to drive a value for each unknown. Or if there are three unknowns, you need three equations. Or if there are five hundred thousand cars commuting one morning in Nashville, you need fifty thousand equations...in each car.
Or, conversely, you could have a single control mechanism running all the cars. Suddenly you go from five hundred thousand organisms to a single organism with five hundred thousand legs. A superorganism. And these have already been on Earth for millions of years.

Take this example. If two fully robotic, fully autonomous cars are going down the highway, and up ahead there is a traffic accident, they will just slow and crawl through traffic like the rest of the cars around them. However, if a central architect is running the flow of traffic, and an accident occurs, it can automatically divert one of the two cars onto other highways or side roads, and the traffic is lessened so that both cars potentially do not lose time on their trips.
A reader might argue that the cars could still be autonomous, while having the advantage of the traffic diversion techniques. That is true, and is probably a logical step that will occur in the gradual evolution of autonomous vehicles. An accident occurs, the vehicle informs you of it and you elect to take a different route. However, you are already giving up your autonomy.
And consider this, would a traffic diversion protocol be better served if people had the option to ignore it's suggestions? Or should an autonomous vehicle, for your expedience (and others), just divert you around traffic accidents without your input?
A better system would be to mimic, on a much more intricate and low-altitude scale, the system used by Air Traffic Control to keep airplanes from colliding in mid-air. Micro-management of airplanes is done by a pilot, he/she takes off, climbs to altitude, changes direction and pitch, yaw, etc., descends, and eventually lands. However, the actual flightpath of the plane is determined by an Air Traffic Controller sitting in a dark room at several locations across the nation, who is specialized in calculating vectors and intersection points, and carefully keeps planes from ever coming within a few miles of one another.
Why is this a good idea? Other than the obvious reduction in airplane collisions, we are returned to the "two floating points" problem. In lieu of ATC vector-guidance, a pilot, up in the sky, might have a radar screen and see a nearby airplane approching. So the pilot might adjust their course. Which might compel a third airplane pilot to adjust his/her course. Which might compel a fourth pilot to adjust, and so on and so forth until we come around to the original pilot, who has to move to avoid the nth airplane, and the circle continues. If this free-floating directional guidance were to happen, planes would zigzag across the sky and waste valuable time and fuel. They'd hit weather patterns unexpectedly, be unable to avoid turbulence, and potentially a large number of airplanes might reach their destination at the same time, snagging an airport in a quagmire of landing airplanes.

This system would work for cars. The autonomous driving systems, like those suggested in the MSNBC article, could provide micromanagement of the car in its current location. But an automobile traffic control system, sending simple navigational data to the cars to optimize the entire traffic system would produce the most efficient system for traffic. The traffic system could say "take highway 50 to Smart Street and take Smart Street to 56th Avenue." and the autonomous vehicle could then do so. Should an accident occur on Smart Street, the traffic system could update the car: "take Alternatate Avenue 2 miles then turn south and divert back to Smart Street, continue on original path from there."

Basically, what I am suggesting, is that everyone on earth has a GPS device in their car and all the GPS devices are linked to a central optimization database, which runs on 3 rules:
TAE's Three Rules of Traffic Robotics. 1. Provide the shortest (time) path possible from point A to point B for each car.
2. Minimize the number of cars at any given point at any time, without violating rule 1.
3. Do not divert a car's path mid-travel unless the new path is shorter (time) than the existing path.

You can read my other thoughts on cars that drive themselves here, here and here. As you can imagine, I feel strongly about this.


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Explaining the human soul with Legos.

Brilliant.


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Weekly Poetry Burst, Fort Hood Edition

into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness, friends

i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight

i smilingly glide. I
into the big vermilion departure
swim, sayingly;

(Do you think?) the
i do, world
is probably made
of roses & hello:

(of solongs and, ashes)


into the strenuous briefness, by e e cummings.


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Deep Thought on Grey's Anatomy

Last season "the Chief" bought a Da Vinci machine to lure Bailey back to general surgery, this season the hospital and a nearby hospital are merging because of a fiscal crisis. Many high-quality surgical residents are laid off.

A da Vinci system costs $1.5 million plus several hundred thousand in maintenance fees annually. And since it was shown off in the season 5 finale, it hasn't been used.


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Sign Me Up! Just Don't Tell My Wife.

JSO thinks we need elite manhunting units to track down and kill baddies.


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Going to the Ovens for Gravity

Yesterday I happened to run across the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego going to the furnace because they wouldn't bow before the statue of the king; and I wondered "what would I do in that situation?"

Though I do not consider myself weakly principled nor a coward, I think I'd probably bow, and my inner monologue would mutter things about how I didn't agree with what I was doing, but preferred survival to principles.

I say this because if someone put a gun to my head and said "I will shoot you in the head right now unless you state out loud that gravity is not real." I would absolutely say gravity was not real, even though it obviously is. The reason for this is that my speaking out loud that gravity does not exist in no way lessens the body of evidence in support of gravity, hell, the Universe is still here as I type "gravity does not exist" (and gravity does not smite me).
Or if someone said to me "every day at such and such time you will read "What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs" or similar books OR ELSE YOU WILL BE PUT IN THE OVENS!" I would more than happily read Young Creationist garbage to avoid the ovens, because my death in the ovens would not further the cause of Evolution (there'd be one less evolutionist writing a blog!) nor would my reading of books about dinosaurs with children saddled to their back weaken the case of evolution, the body of evidence is not strengthened nor weakened by my not standing by my "principles."
Or if someone captured me in a war and forced me to say "America is a clown-nation full of yellow-haired pansies" every day or be ruthlessly tortured, I would probably pony up and say that "America sucks, dude." Of course, I do not believe America sucks, nor would I when I said it.
So why is it any different with God? Why do people go to the gallows so many times throughout Christian history because they refuse to refute the ultimate power of God? It seems to me, that like gravity and evolution, God is an immutable part of existence, and no amount of fingers-crossed lying will ever change that. If everyone on Earth became a spineless weasel like me and denied gravity in exchange for not getting shot in the head...if not a single person on Earth believed in gravity...would that in anyway cancel gravity's effect on the universe? Would we spontaneously float in to outer space?
Or would we simply replace gravity with a new term, like "intelligent falling" to explain phenomena that are universally true and immutable, and behave the way they behave independent of what they are named and how many people believe in them?

Perhaps I am trying to justify my own squeamishness and lack of courage. But on the other hand, perhaps I am seeing the bigger picture better than hard-headed people obsessed with principles. So while I enjoy the Old Testament stories of persecuted peoples dying before they'd deny their God, I have to ask...did they really think so little of God that they were afraid their personal denial of Him would reduce His power? Seems a little egotistic. Or if instead their fear was that God would feel betrayed and cast them to the outer darkness (where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth), didn't they know that God saw what was in their heart, and would have known the tyrannically-forced, vocal God-denial was a lie?
I suddenly have a gun to my head. A lunatic is holding the gun and demanding I say gravity is a lie and intelligent falling is the truth. I can either refuse, and die, or acquiesce, deny gravity is real, and eventually I will hopefully escape this situation, at which point I will obviously go back to acknowledging that gravity is an immutable part of life. In the meantime I can secretly still believe in gravity. Hmm, what would Newton do...what would Newton do...


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Mega-Cruise Ships

Of course, my immediate thought upon learning that the Oasis of the Seas has a twin sister being built in Finland was "so twice as many people can get food poisoning..." This is, of course, hyperbole, as the number of passengers of cruise vessels that get sick per year is very small. Nevertheless, occasionally some food on a cruise ship goes bad and everyone on board eats it and gets sick. The ship pulls into the nearest port and unloads hundreds of passengers into the local medical system.
But if Oasis of the Seas, or her sister ship Allure of the Seas, were to suddenly have a passenger-wide food poisoning epidemic, could the medical facilities at some watering-hole Caribbean island support that many patients? The Oasis is designed to hold 8,300 people including crew.
This problem might solve itself, really, as the Oasis and Allure are so massive, so gigantic, that they might not be able to pull into harbor of many islands in the Caribbean, and would therefore be forced to enter larger ports where higher-capacity medical care is available.

But as the "Oasis class" fleet grows from one to two, ask the question I asked before: how long before a single individual buys one to stroke their wealthy egos? With the price tag in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion the Oasis class ships aren't impossibly expensive, and with Royal Caribbean having trouble maintaining stock value, the scenario where a multi-billionaire buys one is becoming more and more plausible every day. Maybe the global economy needs to recover first, but I humbly submit that it will happen.


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Quote for the Day, Tsavo Edition

"The researchers did note that their study covers only the number of people eaten, while the number killed may have been higher. They said the death toll may have been as high as 75."

Here.


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Yet another quiet hurricane season is coming and going

Back in 2008, I wrote (and linked Easterbrook) that 2008 and 2007 were forecast as "above average" hurricane seasons, and people that know stuff about hurricanes told us to prepare for several major Category 5 hurricanes. As we are all aware, this did not happen. And now that August - October, the peak Atlantic hurricane season is over, I feel we should all take stock of the bizarre fact that since Katrina, the United States has not had a major destructive hurricane other than Ike in 2008.

So why has it been so calm out there in the Atlantic? I'm sure there are Climate Change experts that gnash their teeth at the lack of hurricanes; many scientist predict that increasing ocean temperatures will increase evaporation of water...which will in turn increase hurricane strength. This year, there wasn't even a named Atlantic storm until mid-August.

Colorado State University's Dr. William Gray, a perennial overachiever, predicted in 2006 17 named storms with 5 major hurricanes; there were 10 named storms with 2 major hurricanes. In 2007, the CSU team predicted 17 named storms with 5 major hurricanes, there were actually 15 named storms and only 2 major hurricanes. In 2008 the guru at CSU finally appeared to calm down, he predicted an "active" season with 13 named storms and 3 major hurricanes, instead there were 16 named storms and 5 major hurricanes. Maybe they should stick with what works! For 2009, they went back to panic mode, and predicted 14 named storms, with 3 major hurricanes. So far, with less than a month left in Atlantic Hurricane Season, there have been only 8 named storms, and 2 major hurricanes.

It's almost as if these people don't know what they're doing!


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Deep Thought on the Apocalypse, "V" Edition

When the aliens arrive with their giant intergalactic drill to suck the iron ore out of the core of our planet for their intergalactic smelting factory, our pleas of mercy are heard. They pause what they are doing, and for a few weeks, careful negotiations between the humans and the alien race, who calls themselves "the baybea" are held. It is tentatively agreed that the aliens will instead take the moon, and for now spare the planet. That is, until an alien finds a Youtube video of Republican bobbleheads shrieking "Drill Baby Drill" and misunderstands completely.


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Art Education

Longtime readers and personal friends of TAE know that Mrs. TAE is finishing up her studies to be a Middle School Art Teacher. Regardless of that, TAE has always had a tender spot in his heart for The Arts. Although I scoff at Pollock (mostly for the satisfaction of watching my wife twitch violently), there are so many painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, actors, and singers who have captured the free, random firings of the human mind - the side of the brain I so often have no ability to use - and turn it into an amazing expression of what I consider to be the shining gift of our species: our ability to create and enjoy activities that have no obvious evolutionary benefit. How many species of creatures on this planet hold concerts? How many go to art museums simply to stare at walls? Our species is bizarre. But I digress.
Jonah Lehrer points to and then expands upon this article by Posner and Patoine in which the authors argue that the while quantifiable results have potential gains for normal education (and by normal education I mean "core curriculum"), they hurt Arts education that does not have clear quantifiable results on a multiple-choice exam. However, Posner and Patoine point to some solid, trackable numbers emerging that defends the necessity of The Arts:

In 2004, E. Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto at Mississauga published results from a randomized, controlled study showing that the IQ scores of 72 children who were enrolled in a yearlong music training program increased significantly compared with 36 children who received no training and 36 children who took drama lessons. (The IQ scores of children taking drama lessons did not increase, but these children did improve more than the other groups on ratings of selected social skills.)

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience in March 2009, researchers Ellen Winner of Boston College, Gottfried Schlaug of Harvard University and their colleagues at McGill University used neuroimaging scans to examine brain changes in young children who underwent a four-year-long music training program, compared with a control group of children who did not receive music training.⁴ In the first round of testing, after 15 months, the researchers found structural changes in brain circuits involved in music processing in the children who received training. They did not find the same changes in the control group. The scientists also found improvements in musically relevant motor and auditory skills, a phenomenon called "near transfer." In this case, the improvements did not transfer to measures of cognition less related to music—termed "far transfer." We do not know why far transfer to IQ, for example, was found in the Schellenberg study and not in this one.

Posner and Patoine go on...and on. Their article is rich and compelling, and like Jonah I came away with a renewed feeling that the loss of Art Education in America will have long-term negative effects:

But I think that even this clinical evaluation of arts education misses an important benefit: self-expression. I shudder to think that second graders, at least in most schools, are never taught the value of putting their mind on the page. They are drilled in spelling, phonetics and arithmetic (the NCLB school day must be so tedious), and yet nobody ever shows them how to take their thoughts and feelings and translate them into a paragraph or a painting. We assume that creativity will take care of itself, that the imagination doesn't need to be nurtured. But that's false. Creativity, like every cognitive skill, takes practice; expressing oneself well is never easy.

Lehrer then makes an interesting point I had not considered: art is a method to teach concentration. A typical math problem may take a bright student mere seconds, a painting might take hours. Lehrer refers to this level of concentration as flow:

Finally, I think arts education, and the self-expression it encourages, can give children a tiny taste of an essential mental state: flow. First proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, flow is a condition of complete and effortless focus, characterized by total immersion in the task at hand. We don't notice the clock, or think about what we're eating for lunch - we're just thinking about what we're doing. (Not surprisingly, people are exceedingly happy while engaged in flow activities, be it composing a poem or constructing a Legos set.)

Children have an extraordinary natural capacity for flow. (I've always loved this Auden aphorism, which he adapted from Nietzsche: "Maturity - to recover the seriousness one had as a child at play.") Unfortunately, I think most school kids never experience a taste of flow at school. Instead, they are drilled in all the usual subjects, from arithmetic to reading. The downside of this pedagogy is that it leads kids to conclude that learning is a dry and tedious pursuit, where we will always count the minutes until recess. Perhaps arts education improves our attentional system because it shows children that attention isn't always hard work. Sometimes, we want to focus, because we enjoy what we're focused on.

You mean letting kids do art might increase their focus?

What are the odds that in today's society, when kids are increasingly portrayed as spastic and diagnosis of attention deficit disorder is on the rise, the cause of this isn't just the television or video games or bad parents, but the cause is also school axing art and music and drama in order to cram more science and english down students' throats? And the scary thought here is that none of that extra science may produce better engineers, it instead may, through omission of the arts, produce bad ones.


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Anti-Vax Loons Prepare to Massively Ignore Science

Deborah Mackenzie writes for New Scientists "Short Sharp Science" blog that we must "fight the anti-vaccine brigade with science. She explains that the number of people who get side-effects, like Guillain-Barre Syndrome (which got a lot of misappropriated press coverage), are actually higher in instances of people who get the flu than are in cases of people who get the flu vaccine.

Some 40 times as many will get Guillain-Barré after flu than would have got it after flu vaccine.

But how can that be? You mean actually having the flu is worse than not having it? Who'd have thought?

But Mackenzie is making a mistake if she thinks we can fight the anti-vax lunacy with science. Clearly, science and statics mean nothing to these people, nor do logic and reason. Sometimes the only way to fight fire is with fire. So here are three foolproof arguments in favor of vaccinations that will surely not stand the test of statistics, but make compelling arguments anyway (which is the methodology of the anti-vax lobby):

1. Preliminary research shows that people who get the swine flu vaccination typically get more promotions at work.
2. A report out of Britain shows women are subconsciously more willing to have sex with men who have been vaccinated, and less willing to have sex with men who have, or have had, the real swine flu.
3. Early studies show that kids who get the swine flu vaccine score better on the SAT.

Argue these things, ignore what "scientists" or "people with factual, real evidence" argue against you, and surely you'll win the insane war against the anti-vax nutsoes!


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Wolves Suffer Mid-Life Crisis Too

At first, when I saw this headline, I thought it was a metaphor for human males. Alas, no, my sense of humor wasn't appeased, the article actually is about wolves.

Apparently wolves physical ability decreases with age. Shocking, to be sure.

But what really shocked me was when Dan MacNulty, "post-doctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota" (which means Dr. MacNulty holds a PhD in something but is not ready to get a real job; post-docs are basically PhD students who refuse to quit their research phase of life) said "wolves are like 100 meter sprinters."

Forgive me, but when I was younger, and I loved biology and animals, I learned that wolves are high-endurance predators that rely on their endurance to run down their prey. In fact, peer-reviewed research on the very wolves Dan MacNulty is discussing in this article has shown that wolves are better predators against running prey than they are against prey that is stationary...a bison who stands its ground typically fares better than one that flees. Wolves feet are designed to help them stay up in snow, while caribou and elk cannot do so, often the wolves will literally run the caribou or elk or moose or other ungulate until the poor animal overheats and goes into lactic acid shock, then the wolves kill and feed. Videos can be seen on youtube, including a beautiful high-definition aerial shot of a wolf chasing a caribou infant for nearly a mile before the prey finally tripped and collapsed.
Other peer-reviewed research has shown that wolves who have not eaten for 14 days showed no outward muscle fatigue upon hunting. The same research discussed a wolf that chased its prey for 36 kilometers without pause.

And while most wolf hunting behavior involves sprints of 200 yards or less, this does not reflect the wolf anatomy, but rather the wolf hunting behavior. Dr. MacNulty, I deeply respect you for getting your PhD, but next time you analogize the physical performance of 2-3 year old wolves, use "marathon runners" instead of sprinters.


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