It’s just extraordinary to me what a boon the PS3 is to the scientific community.
“Overall, a single PS3 performs better than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. And there is still tremendous scope left for extracting more performance through further optimization. More on that soon.”
http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html
Tags: ps3, cluster computing, gravity
I’ve been talking about software radio for a while, and wondering when it would become cheap. Basically, all wireless devices are just radios of different kinds, and there’s no theoretical reason why one device couldn’t talk to them all. Except that it was prohibitively expensive, but apparently it’s not anymore.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70933-0.html
This is very very cool.
The software’s open source, and the hardware is cheap:
Tags: software radio, gnu, wired, ettus
Wow, the future is now!
The Italian expert has used the robot surgeon for at least 40 previous operations, some of which have been described in detail in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The novelty of this latest experience is that the robot was able to conduct the entire procedure by itself. In the past it needed specific orders from its operator along the way.
http://ansa.it/main/notizie/awnplus/english/news/2006-05-18_1186367.html
Tags: robot surgery, future, heart surgery, arrhythmia, holy crap
Wow. That’s pretty.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-05/dnnl-bmr051206.php
A developer in Oklahoma has built a zero-energy home prototype for $200k. It’s a combination of energy efficiency, and photovoltaic and geothermal power production, mostly built with readily available off-the-shelf components. That’s fantastic.
“Ideal Homes built the first zero energy home in the country priced under $200,000. The modest one-story, three-bedroom, two bathroom home produces as much energy as it consumes in a year, achieving net zero energy consumption.”
http://www.housingzone.com/article/CA6332828.html
Tags: zero energy home, efficient, housing, environment, photovoltaic, geothermal
The Star Tribune wrote a fluff piece asking scientists to come up with their (seemingly) most disappointing question that every high schooler should be able to answer. (via Kottke)
http://www.startribune.com/389/story/369290.html
MJD (hey, man - what happened to Advocacy?) rightly savages the list:
http://www.plover.com/blog/physics/questions.html
The analysis is mostly very strong. My only complaint is that he failed to note that evolution doesn’t actually “choose” anything, and saying that it does is just typical “owning the terminology” ID doublespeak.
And what is up with that last paragraph in the article about family life interfering with remembering things you learned in high school?
My choice for this question would probably have been “What is the scientific method?”.
Tags: science, high school, questions, star tribune, mjd, dominus, plover, kottke
Al Gore has made a movie about global warming, in case you needed some more convincing.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount_classics/aninconvenienttruth/trailer/
Tags: global warming, al gore, aninconvenienttruth
Nokia phones are going to use a heat disassembly process that allows them to be broken down into their constituent materials, which can then be separately recycled. It’s not quite unmanufacturing, but it’s the first thing I’ve heard about a step in the right direction.
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,6771,27610,00.html
Tags: nokia, unmanufacturing, heat disassembly, recycling
Scientists at UC Irvine are planning to equip pigeons with small bird-sized backpacks containing pollution detectors, GPS, and wireless data access, so they can post realtime smog data to a blog.
The mind boggles.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925376.000&feedId=online-news_rss20
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time.
It’s a low-cost portable still for purifying water with a pretty ingenious design.
http://www.watercone.com/product.html
Tags: water, purification, plastic, potable
They’ve perfected a technique to allow, for the first time, protein activity to be directly monitored. They’ve focused on RNA polymerase, and have proposed a mechanical action theory about how RNAP moves up the DNA chain.
The technique is directly applicable to a whole host of other biochemical processes.
That’s just incredibly cool.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/2005/pr-dna-110905.html
I don’t remember who originally sent this to me, but I got it a few times. This is apparently a patent for a warp drive.
” A cooled hollow superconductive shield is energized by an electromagnetic field resulting in the quantized vortices of lattice ions projecting a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly outside the space vehicle. The spacetime curvature imbalance, the spacetime curvature being the same as gravity, provides for the space vehicle’s propulsion. The space vehicle, surrounded by the spacetime anomaly, may move at a speed approaching the light-speed characteristic for the modified locale.”
They’re off their rocker.
Conclusion: tinfoil hat makes it easier for the gummint to read your brain. It’s a conspiracy!
Long article copied shamelessly from Esquire about”Idiot America”.
“Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the result of millions of decisions made and not made. It’s the development of a collective Gut at the expense of a collective mind. It’s what results when politicians make ridiculous statements and not merely do we abandon the right to punish them for it at the polls, but we also become too timid to punish them with ridicule on a daily basis, because the polls say they’re popular anyway. It’s what results when leaders are not held to account for mistakes that end up killing people.”
Via Novitz:
http://templeofpolemic.proboards42.com/index.cgi?board=theo&action=print&thread=1130126466
This is incredibly cool. A complete working ribosome has been described in a computer simulation.
Via Perry:
http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php?fuseaction=home.story&story_id=7372
Scotty’s getting his final wish. A CD with messages from fans will join him. Add yours here:
That’s cool. It’s wall paint that changes color with temperature fluctuations.
Obviously, this won’t be an alternative to oil field extraction, and I believe we should move to alternative energy sources as quickly as possible. But infrastructure shifts like that take time, and this may provide a needed buffer to ease the transition.
Some counter comments on the original article are here:
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200509/msg00203.html
Um. Holy shit.
Shell has come up with a way to extract oil from oil-bearing rock instead of oil fields.
Drill shafts into the oil-bearing rock. Drop heaters down the shaft. Cook the rock until the hydrocarbons boil off, the lightest and most desirable first. Collect them.
Please note, you don’t have to go looking for oil fields when you’re brewing your own.
On one small test plot about 20 feet by 35 feet, on land Shell owns, they started heating the rock in early 2004. “Product” - about one-third natural gas, two-thirds light crude - began to appear in September 2004. They turned the heaters off about a month ago, after harvesting about 1,500 barrels of oil.
While we were trying to do the math, O’Connor told us the answers. Upwards of a million barrels an acre, a billion barrels a square mile. And the oil shale formation in the Green River Basin, most of which is in Colorado, covers more than a thousand square miles - the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world.
And it gets much better than that. Go read the whole article.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4051709,00.html
“We have experimented with amputating or damaging several different organs, such as the heart, toes, tail and ears, and just watched them regrow,” she said.
Via my friend jdb:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16417002%255E30417,00.html
The Onion weighs in:
“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down,” said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
“I have a new theory - Unintelligent Design, which is the same as Intelligent Design, except that the creator is either a moron or Satan.”
http://www.davidgalbraith.org/archives/000912.html
Heh.
Here’s what I don’t get. What would it even mean to teach intelligent design in schools?
Chapter 1: Some things are too complicated to have arisen by evolution, specifically people.
Chapter 2: …..?
(Chapter 3: Profit?)
As far as I can tell, there’s nothing to it. It’s the opposite of science.
“I don’t understand this, so there must be no possible answer”.
It says not just that we don’t know, but that we can’t know, so there’s really no point in trying to figure it out.
Project Steve is a collection of scientists named Steve who support evolution, to demonstrate the stupitidy of compiling lists of scientists who don’t. 580 so far!
Bush thinks intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in schools -
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/editorial/12278405.htm
“I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” Bush said. ” You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”
That is, of course, the usual dodging of the real point. ID is not a theory, it is a vague notion. It is the embodiment of saying “we can’t know, so we’re free to imagine whatever we want”. It is as testable as the flying spaghetti monster “idea”. ID is useless as a scientific concept, because it closes off further investigation.
(I might accept ID as a valid theory if it was accompanied by some attempt to identify, and possibly vanquish, said creator.)
All ideas are not equal. ID should not be taught in schools any more than the “idea” that black people are inferior because they have smaller brains should be.
“Because I say so” is not a valid logical argument.
Why haven’t we put this idiocy to rest yet?
[Update: here's some good dissection of this point.]
I stopped watching the X-Files after the third or fourth time they found aliens without remembering the previous times.
A UC Berkeley student is reading the entire Encylopedia Britannica, and blogging the good bits. It’s healthy to have a hobby.
Apparently, it’s just been discovered that buckyballs are water-soluble and antibacterial.
I can’t wait for the nanobots to start fighting over molecule level tagging. Presumably, the coding of the DNA strands is protected by all sorts of interesting copyright law, too.
Bruce Schenier points out this new technology:
The system, called Sentry, works by fitting a box containing a powder spray above a doorway which, once primed, goes into alert mode if the door is opened.
It then sprays the powder when there is movement in the doorway again.
The aim is to catch a burglar in the act as stolen items are being removed.
The intruder is covered in the bright red powder, which glows under ultraviolet (UV) light and can only be removed with heavy scrubbing.
However, the harmless synthetic DNA contained in the powder sinks into the skin and takes several days, depending on the person’s metabolism, to work its way out.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/dna_identificat.html