Free Thought
drorzel | June 20, 2011
Minneapolis
"[Don] Rawitsch, a lanky, bespectacled 21-year-old with hair well over his ears, was both a perfectionist and an idealist. He started dressing as historical figures in an attempt to win over his students, appearing in the classroom as explorer Meriwether Lewis.
By now he'd made it through to the western expansion unit, and he had in mind his boldest idea yet.
What he had so far was a board game tracing a path from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The students would pretend to be pioneer families. Each player would start with a certain amount of money…
drorzel | June 11, 2011
The National Oral History - Grantland
"The National Sports Daily, on the one hand, is a long-dead and short-lived newspaper that, for 18 months, between January of 1990 and June of 1991, attempted to cover sports in a way that no other American publication would, could, or had ever even imagined. On the other hand, the paper is emblematic of the parts of culture and media that were not yet ready to converge. Typewriters and satellites. Mexican titans of industry and American daily news. Content in too many forms. Born from an impetuous whim only a billionaire would call a business plan, the…
drorzel | June 1, 2011
I've Gone and Done It Now: What It's Like Without the Muslim Headscarf « Inner Workings of My Mind
"I experimented last week. I took off my hijab - the headscarf many Muslim women wear to cover their hair.
I have been wearing a headscarf when I leave the privacy of my home for 25 years, since I was 17. That's a long long time in human years.
I took my hijab off during a recent trip to Europe. I wanted to know what it would feel like. I wanted to know how people's perceptions of me would change and how my perception of myself would change."
(tags: culture world religion society blogs gender…
drorzel | May 31, 2011I heard David Kaiser talk about the history of quantum foundations work back in 2008 at the Perimeter Institute, and while I didn't agree with everything he said, I found it fascinating. So when I heard that he had a book coming out about this stuff, How the Hippies Saved Physics, I jumped at the chance to get a review copy.
This is, in essence, a book-length argument that I owe Frijtof "Tao of Physics" Capra, Gary "Dancing Wu Li Masters" Zukav, and even J*ck S*rf*tt* a beer.
The book expands on things that Kaiser said in that PI talk (which was really good-- you could do worse than to spend…
drorzel | May 31, 2011(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Adam DeConinck, who works at a company providing supercomputing resources. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I work as a systems engineer at R Systems, a company that provides high-performance computing (HPC) resources to the commercial and academic research communities. We own and operate a number of…
drorzel | May 24, 2011
Is the Launch Speed in Angry Birds Constant? | Wired Science | Wired.com
"Does the Bird's Launch Speed Depend on the Angle?
If the bird is indeed shot from an elastic cord, then technically the bird should go faster when shot horizontally than when it is shot straight up. Why? Physics."
(tags: science physics education blogs dot-physics games computing)
The Clean Fossil Fuel? Natural Gas Under Fire | Txchnologist
"The good news is that it seems the effects of methane gas can be limited through action by industry. But the economics of drilling, mediated by the actions of regulators, will…
oracknows | May 23, 2011Let's face it, Dr. Andrew Weil is a rock star in the "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM) movement. He is one of its founders, at least a founder of the its most modern iteration, and I am hard-pressed to think of anyone who did more in the early days of the CAM/IM movement, back before it ever managed to achieve a modicum of unearned respectability, to popularize CAM. In fact, no physician that I can think of has over the course of his lifetime done more to promote the rise of quackademic medicine than Dr. Weil. The only forces greater than Dr. Weil…
mikethemadbiologist | May 21, 2011Hopefully, I'm somewhere in New Orleans, and reasonably sober. Links for you. Science:
How KFC and the Tea Party Kill TigersMonkeys protect Indian government officialsSending data to the cloud? Stick it in the post
Other:
Grifters attract grifters...Misleading advertising or something much worse?The language they can understandShould the next Commerce Secretary be part of the Koch machine?A Country Without LibrariesPublic health advocates pleased by smaller budget cutsNATION PAYS STEEP PRICE FOR HIGH RATES OF UNINTENDED PREGNANCY If Bachmann Can Run (and Vote)...
drorzel | May 21, 2011
SLR Camera Simulator | Simulates a digital SLR camera
"Practice using an SLR camera...
Experiment with the lighting, ISO, aperture, shutter, and distance settings while observing the readings in the camera viewfinder
Click the "Snap photo!" button
Review your photo!"
(tags: technology pictures internet computing)
Astrogator's Logs » Blog Archive » Area 51: Teen Commies from Outer Space!
"Jacobsen's addition (asserted with a completely straight face and demanding to be taken seriously) is that this craft contained "genetically/surgically altered" teenagers engineered by Josef Mengele at…
bioephemera | May 16, 2011Physicists are ontological detectives. We think of scientists as wholly rational, open to all possible arguments. But to begin with a conviction and then to use one's intellectual prowess to establish support for that conviction is a methodology that really has worked for scientists, including Deutsch. One could argue that he dreamed up quantum computing because he was devoted to the idea that science can explain the world. Deutsch would disagree. In "The Fabric of Reality," Deutsch writes, "I remember being told, when I was a small child, that in ancient times it was still possible to know…
drorzel | May 6, 2011In comments to yesterday's post about precision measurements, Bjoern objected to the use of "quantum mechanics" as a term encompassing QED:
IMO, one should say "quantum theory" here instead of "quantum mechanics". After all, what is usually known as quantum mechanics (the stuff one learns in basic courses) is essentially the quantization of classical mechanics, whereas QED is the quantization of classical electrodynamics, and quantum field theories in general are quantizations of classical field theories. I think saying "quantum mechanics" when one talks about something which essentially has…
drorzel | May 4, 2011
Blog U.: 4 Reasons Why Local Meetings Should Be Conducted with Web Meeting Tools - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed
"Adobe Connect, WebEX, GoToMeeting, LiveMeeting, Skype, Elluminate (what am I missing?), these web conferencing tools are not just for meeting at a distance.
Here are 4 reasons why you should hold more of your meetings online, even if everyone meeting works together on the same campus:"
(tags: academia meetings business inside-higher-ed culture)
Princess Masako - "She's Useless" | The Royal Universe
"Crown Princess Masako of Japan turns 47 on 9 December. It'd be…
mikethemadbiologist | May 3, 2011Jon Walker argues that worrying about how to keep Social Security 'solvent' for 75 years is silly. After all, predicting the future 75 years out is difficult. Something like this might happen:
Epidemics caused by drug-resistant bacteria in 2020 could kill a disproportionally large number of seniors.
Or:
By around 2060, the exponential growth in computing power could result in humanity reaching the technological singularity giving us almost god-like powers to control ourselves and our environments to an extent that is unimaginable.
Walker is being facetious, but I also think there's a more…
jdupuis | May 1, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, is from February 26, 2008.
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I try and spread around the disciplinary love in my science book reading. Some physics, some math,…
jtoney | April 27, 2011Source.
I had a dream last night of harvesting MMORPG time to save the planet. Let me explain.
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) are deeply engaging millions of players, spending some 21 hours per week in a virtual world according to The Daedalus Project. The World of Warcraft alone has more than 12 million subscribers, part of an industry that exceeded revenues of $1 billion in 2008.
Consider the scale of the time investment - 12 million players averaging 21 hours per week!
MMORPG's allure is understandable. They offer an alternative experience in which one is freed…
drorzel | April 26, 2011
Amazon's $23,698,655.93 book about flies
"A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence's The Making of a Fly - a classic work in developmental biology that we - and most other Drosophila developmental biologists - consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping)."
(tags: amazon books economics business technology computing silly science)
The Intern: Guest Post: The Tricky Territory of Publishing Blogs
"On my…
drorzel | April 13, 2011
The Defenders - NYTimes.com
"One of those on the ramparts peering out into the night was a blue-eyed, dark-haired young Irishman named John Thompson, a private, who left what may be the only surviving description of the battle by a rank-and-file soldier: a long letter that he sent two weeks later to his father back in County Derry, Ireland. Even though he planned to return home to the old country as soon as his enlistment expired in a few months' time, Thompson felt a surge of pride as "we hoisted our colors the glorious 'Star Spangled Banner' and quietly awaited the enemies fire."
As an…
sciencepunk | April 5, 2011What games would a robot play? It's a question that struck me last night, and kept me up as I sketched out diagrams for android puzzle toys.
For a start, we have to imagine why a robot would play games. We're not even able to explain why we enjoy them so much. To say that games trigger the reward system in the brain doesn't add anything by way of an explanation. Enjoyment, pleasure, is an atomic building block of behaviour, it's impossible to break it down any further. So why ask why robots would play games when we can't explain our own fascination with them? They just do. We can give…
jdupuis | April 3, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become, is from May 2, 2008.
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Ambient findability describes a fast emerging world where we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. We're not…
tlambert | April 1, 2011There are two climate related rallies in Sydney tomorrow. The rally for climate inaction (What do we want? Inaction! When do want it? Now!) has been heavily promoted on talkback radio and the facebook page has 709 people saying they are attending, while the rally for climate action has relied on new media and the facebook page has 2,765 saying they are attending.
I can't attend either one, I'm helping run a round in the Australia and New Zealand Algorithmics & Computing League.