Prime Stream
thescian | April 2, 2007How can I not point out a study that says coffee is good for the liver. Read this in a New Scientist article on Liver troubles:"Doctors have a saying that everything you enjoy is either illegal, immoral or bad for you, so it's nice to discover that coffee is good for you," says Arthur Klatsky, an epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California. His team has found that drinking four cups of coffee a day reduces the risk of non-alcoholic cirrhosis by 30 per cent and of alcoholic cirrhosis by 80 per cent.
The research, published last year, is the latest in a string of studies showing…
thescian | March 30, 2007So, Bono is knighted. But, hey, don't call him Sir and displease the Queen. He's Irish and shall not be sir'd. Know who else was knighted by a Queen? John Hawkins. John Hawkins who? John Hawkins, the first slave trader. He began his business of capturing and selling african people in 1562. Queen Elizabeth I was proud.
This is the 200th year since slavery was abolished in the UK. I am contrarian. This is how I remember titles and their history.
Have a good weekend.
thescian | March 29, 2007Google is busy building it, scanning books and scaring publishers off their pants. An article at Speigel:The little Google search window would be the gateway to the content of the 32 million books, 750 million articles, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 films, 3 million television programs and 100 billion public Web pages that Wired writer Kevin Kelly estimates humanity has published since the days of Sumerian clay tablets. To store all of this gigantic volume of data -- estimated at 50 petabytes -- would still require a building the size of a small town's library, Kelly wrote in…
thescian | March 28, 2007You may know by now what Kathy Sierra, a wonderfully smart blogger at CPU, has gone through. She has been the target of disturbing and sexually loaded comments, images with death threats.
She is a writer I greatly admire. She and her team has done more with her books and her blog to raise the level of discourse in IT than anyone in the recent past. It is a loss to see her withdraw because of a few people who are psychotic, demented and cowardly to exhibit their perversion online anonymously.
All social interactions have a code of conduct, explicit in some cases, implicit in many others.…
thescian | March 28, 2007The Albert Einstein Memorial in Washington DC. Light played on the puckered bronze figure that seemed to be at the cusp of another enlightening idea. A majestic triumph for Robert Berks, the sculptor who created this work of art. The posture is relaxed, mellow and exudes subdued happiness that comes from seeing truth with a clear mind. The notebook has three simple equations. Simple and profound. They carry the essence of a man who showed us how to explore the universe.
I took a picture. Just after I took the picture, a school bus stopped on the side road and more than a dozen children poured…
thescian | March 26, 2007I was having breakfast with a friend last week. I noticed him avoiding sugar substitutes and asked why. He didn't know of any scientific studies but said he preferred food that doesn't pretend. His reasoning went like this: Sweeteners mimic natural taste. This is dishonest and not the way we should treat our biology.
That was a more nuanced reasoning that isn't the same as "natural is good, artificial is bad" (the natural-artificial reasoning is, IMO, luddite - a sorry excuse for being lazy). It is still not the same as conclusions drawn from scientific studies. Nevertheless, it strikes…
thescian | March 16, 2007There's more than sufficient water at the poles on Mars [via /.]. We could soon be surfing on the red planet. A few minor things to take care of: Dig out frozen water from a few kilometers beneath the ground, thaw it, install a surfdrome and we are in business.
thescian | March 13, 2007Saw this news about two children mauled by street dogs and the consequent culling in Bangalore.
Episodes like this are symptoms of the economic, social and organizational troubles palguing Indian cities. There are no quick and easy solutions.
thescian | March 13, 2007Stir your immobile self out of that chair and do something physical, would you. If you don't, you may suffer flat balls (women excused), square bottoms and other assorted syndromes.
thescian | March 8, 2007Read the transcript of a speech Sapolsky gave on biology and religion [via PZ] The audio of the speech is here.In the last 30 years we've seen a whole new psychiatric disorder, of people whose rituals take over and destroy their lives. OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. These are people who don't merely find themselves counting when they go up a flight of stairs--these are people whose lives are destroyed by this disorder. They wash their hands eight hours a day. They stop eating most foods because of the conviction of contamination, germs. They get very ritualistic and phobic about entering…
thescian | March 6, 2007Does morning coffee fix help? Beebs chimes in with some coffee research news.
I drink coffee in the early morning and it appears to nudge my brain to its proper place. "Really?", you ask, "Your brain moves in the night? Where to?". I suspect it moves down the body. There's some circumstantial evidence. On the days when I haven't had coffee, Ramya worries aloud if a kidney has slid into my brain's place. So, apparently the brain slides down to where my kidneys are during the night.
thescian | March 4, 2007Bruce Sterling gives a rundown from Serbia."Serbia may be the world's single-greatest locale for a professional futurist. Awful things happen there faster than awful things happen anywhere else. The Balkans is a tragic region that denied stark reality, broke its economy, started multiple unnecessary wars, and basically finger-pointed and squabbled its way into a comprehensive train wreck. It suffered all kinds of pig-headed mayhem, all unnecessary.
That's just how the world behaved with the climate crisis, too. The time for action isn't now. The time for action was 40 years ago. Today we live…
thescian | March 4, 2007Taken by yours truly using his wobbly hands and a Sony DSC H2 camera from the backyard between 8 PM and 10:30 PM.
I thought I'd see a reddish hue as noted here. It was better. It was blue. A pebble in the sky. Magnificent.
thescian | February 28, 2007Too skeptical for our own good. That's how someone characterized many scientists and science teaching on BBC Radio 4. I was listening yesterday morning where Lewis Wolpert*, the scientist and another gentlemen - apparently religious, whose name I forgot - were guests. Wolpert is an avowed atheist who was startled at one point when the other gentleman pulled the Origin of Universe question from his hat. Here's my recollection of the discussion.
"Surely, the origin of the universe has an explanation", he said.
"Perhaps, but saying god made the universe explains nothing. Who created god then…
thescian | February 25, 2007 To Martin Gardner
"Lines that are parallel
meet at Infinity!"
Euclid repeatedly,
heatedly,
urged
Until he died.
and so reached that vicinity:
in it he
found that the damned things
diverged.
*Poem quoted from the book Imaginary Numbers
*Piet Hein
thescian | February 22, 2007Over here. Arunn of Nonoscience takes the second prize in Sci/Tech category. Wonderful. Congrats to all the winners and pariticipants. Cheers, beers, etc.
We should hopefully have separate categories for Science and Technology next year. There are lot of excellent science blogs and it would be good not to lump them with tech blogs that are not focussed on science.
thescian | February 22, 2007So, you read my story a while back and want to know how are things now. Thanks for asking. Things have gone from 'no more tech support' to 'my mother does her own installation'. She has installed amsn to do video chat with us (take that Skype). amsn works across platforms and uses my iSight webcam just fine.
Of course, I walked my mother through the installation. As she says, she didn't educate me for nothing. She hit all the right buttons on Synaptic ( and sometimes the wrong ones too - luckily with no harmful effects.). Hey Presto! She saw me digging my nose via iSight video and felt all…
thescian | February 22, 2007A Beebs report on the looming sex ratio problem in China that caught my attention.