jfiore | August 6, 2007Is walking to the store "greener" than riding there in your car? Here's an interesting article from The Times UK arguing for the car. The upfront argument is specious. Consider:
"Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere," he said, a calculation based on the Government's official fuel emission figures. "If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You'd need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.
This is damning information regarding beef production, but…
jfiore | August 3, 2007It's short, but mildly amusing in a dumb, almost pitiful sort of way. Behe tries to come off as a serious scientist but he may as well just put a cracker box over his head and drool conspicuously.
jfiore | August 3, 2007It's amazing what you can find on the Internet. Yes, it seems that God has written an autobiography. Apparently, God's name is Thomas O'Donnell.
Not really much more I can add to that, except that author O'Donnell also goes by the name Jesus and Satan. Is it a tad presumptuous to pen "autobiographies" of this sort?
In any case, that's what I call a trinity.
jfiore | August 3, 2007Here's a nice article by Froma Harrop on Real Clear Politics. The upshot is that all is not well in the Heartland, that there is a growing unease in America, and it's not just about Iraq. Consider the opener:
Now and then, a conservative columnist wonders why Americans have grown so sour about the country's future. After all, unemployment is low and stocks are rising. Sure, there's anger over the Iraq war and immigration, but things can't be that bad with the economy humming happily in the background. The implication: There's little troubling you that a trip to Circuit City couldn't fix.…
jfiore | August 2, 2007On the audio front, National Semiconductor, long a player in analog semiconductors, has announced a couple new op amp families producing a total harmonic distortion plus noise spec of 0.00003%. These devices are aimed squarely at higher end audio applications and also offer a very low voltage noise spec of 2.7 nanovolts per root-Hertz with a flicker noise corner of 60 Hertz. I find these numbers to be pretty impressive, especially considering a starting price of $1.35 per unit in 100's (up to about $10 depending on package and other details).
During my college days it was something to find…
jfiore | July 27, 2007I'm just getting sick of the whole "atheism is a religion" crap that I seem to keep running into lately. Here's a little story for your entertainment.
Once upon a time there was a land called Cardia. In Cardia, everyone played cards. Some people played blackjack, some poker, others pitch, and so forth. While many used the same 52 card deck, others opted for different decks (such as the pinochle-ists). Depending on the particular group, some would get together to play cards weekly, some daily, and some played several times per day. The rules varied, but most groups had specific "high…
jfiore | July 26, 2007And now for something completely different:
There are a lot of intelligent folks out there in sci-blog gadget land, so please allow me to pick your brains for a moment.
I am looking for some recommendations on a DV camera. I am looking for a fairly basic unit but not one that is totally stripped. A top end unit is right out. By comparison, I have two digital still cameras: a Fuji FinePix F440 which is a very compact point-and-shoot and a Canon Digital Rebel XTi SLR. I am looking for the DV version of the Fuji. I can throw the Fuji into my pocket when we go skiing or whatever and it takes up…
jfiore | July 25, 2007This week's NOVA Science NOW on PBS has an interesting piece on the Kryptos sculpture in front of CIA headquarters. The segment does a decent job of showing some of the basic techniques used such as substitution and transposition, in just a few minutes.
I am not a cryptographer but it is an area I have studied a little. It's a great topic to introduce to my first and second year programming students. Some of them really perk up when we start talking about it. Invariably, someone will ask if I can show them how to "crack" protected software. I always tell them that, although I have the…
jfiore | July 16, 2007Last Sunday was the 30th annual Boilermaker 15k road race in lovely Utica, NY. This is perhaps the biggest event in central NY during the summer. This year, the Boilermaker attracted over 12,000 entrants along with an elite field of national and international talent. In other words, it's not your average Sunday morning 5k benefit run won in a blistering 19:36 by a guy wearing Teva sandals. If you're interested in the results, you can find them here or use the database found here to find results from prior years along with news clips and such.
One of the things I like about this race is the…
jfiore | July 16, 2007It's amazing the things you can learn from a simple quiz on a morning radio show. But not the item that was intended, that is. A station that my wife listens to while getting ready for work often has one of those "Seventh caller who gets this question correct wins free tickets to the phone polishers convention" or some such crazy event. Usually, the questions are very easy. Things like "What color was the brick road that Dorothy followed in The Wizard of Oz". Something you could answer in your sleep (which is probably appropriate as I'd venture that most listeners ARE half asleep at that…
bushwells | July 13, 2007
This spicy babe doesn't need a thong to look good. The plant is colloquially known as Brazilian Jasmine and more formally as Mandevilla sanderi. Its original habitat was in the hills above Rio de Janeiro, but it no longer grows in a native state there. Here it struts its stuff to a bossa nova beat on my front stoop in Einsteinville.
The not so hirsute blossoms declined to comment on their preferred waxing procedures.
bushwells | July 12, 2007When one thinks of a house mouse, a meek cheese-nibbling furry little critter is most often visualized Don't be fooled. These are nasty beasts. Just ask the chicks of the stormy petrel, Tristan albatross and Atlantic petrel.
The vast majority of avian extinctions have occurred on islands. Rats, an invasive species on many islands, are often blamed for such extinctions. Mice were thought to pose no threats to seabirds' nests. However, once their ratty brethren were removed from the competitive scene, the mice moved in on delicious territory. The little fiends have been caught in the…
jfiore | July 12, 2007Curious about what's inside an iPhone? Well, the good folks at Audio Design Line (via EE Times) have a teardown.
Mind you, it's not like the old days when you could just pop off the cover of your new electronic doohickey and look at the manufacturer's part numbers on the chips. These are the days of self-branded ICs. So what did the folks at the technology evaluation/investigation company Semiconductor Insights do?
To get inside the chips, SI resorted to decapping, a process that involves immersing the chips in acid to dissolve the outer packaging and then manually scraping away any residual…
jfiore | July 11, 2007There is a darkly humorous thread at letsrun.com, a very popular site for runners, which may be of interest.
The upshot is that a surprising number of people are saying that they do not wash their hands after using restrooms and arguing that they are better off because of it. I don't think there is anything unique about the running population with regards to this topic except for the fact that runners seem willing to openly discuss anything that has to do with their bodies. All I can say is that it makes me happy that I seldom dine out.
bushwells | July 11, 2007As a belated follow-on to my rant on ol' Hissy Chrissy Hitchies' contention that women aren't funny, I offer this film clip via LiveScience: Humor and the Sexes. Be forewarned that you must suffer through a Yahoo ad in the beginning which pokes gentle fun at Incompetent Men and Their Tools, a subject that is always a knee-slappper. In the meat of the film, Allan Reiss discusses the tantalizing observations that men's and women's brains respond differently to humor.
From Hitchen's Vanity Fair article:
The researchers found that men and women (10 each - Doc Bushwell) share much of the same…
bushwells | July 7, 2007So last year we had the dreaded 06/06/06, and lo! No apocalyptic beasts appeared in the heavens. This year, it's our lucky day: 07/07/07!
Seven is considered a "lucky number," a prime of a magical, mysterious signficance. So where does the source of this luck derive? Why, from the Bible, of course! At least in part. From LiveScience, 07/07/07: Is This Your Lucky Day?
The number seven is considered lucky due to its frequent and favorable appearance in the Bible, say historians.
"As the number of the days of God's first week, of the levels of heaven...of the numbers of angels and trumpets…
bushwells | July 6, 2007Speaking, or rather screeching, as a menopausally-crazed, cognitively-impaired winged harpy, I feel it is my duty to swoop in and squawk about the recent hormone replacement therapy free-for-all that's goin' down at Science Blogs.
Links are hardly necessary given that this is front page news but those of you who have wandered into this mess of bonobo scat and banana peels called the Chimp Refuge can scurry off to Neurotopia v.2 where another insidious primate provides extensive and authoritative reviews in three parts. I'd just like to point out a couple of things. I may have missed these…
bushwells | July 2, 2007A friend visited from Boston this past weekend, so we took a jaunt into The City on Saturday. Our prime destination was the American Museum of Natural History where Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns and Mermaids is now playing as a special exhibition.
The imaginary bestiary was entertaining and informative. The basis of myth was explored nicely, and provided testament to the power of human imagination when confronted with natural phenomenon. A seventeen-foot winged green dragon greeted us at the entry, and a plethora of dragon, unicorn and mermaid flavored tchotckes awaited the…
bushwells | July 2, 2007To the approximately half-dozen or so of my regular readers:
The Refuge has been very active recently thanks to the capers of the young males of the troop. As a consequence, those few entries I offer are likley to be buried quickly. Should you have a burning desire to read my blathering specifically, I have added a "Doc Bushwell" category so that my meager number of entries can be sorted from the piles of overripe banana peels.
And now back to your regularly scheduled brachiation...
jfiore | July 2, 2007An earlier installment noted the large sums of cashola being used in the construction of what can nominally be described as Multimedia Entertainment Venues for Christ (MEVCs). The Gardendale First Baptist Church in Alabama dropped $110,000 for a Yamaha digital mixing console for example, let alone all of the goodies that go along with it. Seems like a lot of money that might be better used more directly in their community. But these guys are small time.
This month's issue of Pro Audio Review features a cover article on Houston's Lakewood Church. We're talking amphitheater with all the…