My African tourJan 3 and 4thSo my first flight out of the USA got cancelledrescheduled to about 5 hours later only to have it delayed another 2 hours when I arrived at the airport. Then we boarded when were were supposedly leaving and then sat on the plane for about another hour. Good start. I did meet a cople of kids when I went though security that were studing abroad here for a few weeks I ov
Monthly Archives: January 2010
Day Ten Siem Reap to Bangkok
Day Ten Two Nights In Bangkok The Worldrsquos Our Oyster...It was with a heavy heart we left Cambodia the small taster we had was enough to convince me to return for a few weeks next time. The people are lovely and welcoming the poverty and recent history is shocking.We took a taxi to Poipet on the CambodianThai border a shithole that is infamous for its scams on foreigners entering fro
‘Lady where you from’ ‘England" "ahh Manchester or Arsenal"
So soince i last left a blog thingy i have made three australian friends moved to Kitengela taught a class been given work to mark at home risked my life on a matatu eaten using my hands and so many others i dont know where to start.Very briefly on sturday three australians arrived and i spen the next couple of days with them we went to a restaurant and ordered chicken stew. We were then to
On the road again…
So after dropping Luke off at the station and spending the day in Gokarna we headed back to Om Beach which is the closest you can get to Paradise Beach by road usually we just get a boat for the next part. This time we decided stupidly to take the one hour cliff walk just as the sun had gone down. Its pretty sketchy at the best of times but when its dark its pretty dangerous. We managed to do t
january and exotic fruits
today wei went to get a haircut and on the way home we stopped at a fruit market. i got my firstever dragonfruit some strawberries and some oranges. there was a lot of exotic stuff that i had never seen before google told me the purple things that look like a plumpersimmon cross are actually mangosteen i have mangosteen lotion but for some reason i thought the fruit would be more uh man
SCOTT BROWN PULLS AHEAD OF MARTHA COAKLEY IN MASSACHUSETTS SENATE RACE!!
BREAKING NEWS...
Fox and various other Media are reporting this morning a bombshell of a political development.
State Senator Scott Brown, who had been as much as 30 points behind Attorney General Martha Coakley in the race for US Senate, for Ted Kennedy's seat, is now 1 point ahead in the latest poll.
From Fox News:
The race to replace Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate is looking like a toss up, with Republican Scott Brown up 48-47 on Martha Coakley.
Brown is benefiting from depressed Democratic interest in the election and a huge lead among independents for his surprisingly strong standing.
The crosstabs indicate that candidate Brown has a much higher favorable to unfavorable ratio than candidate Coakley. Brown is at 57/25, while Coakley is at 50/42. And voter intensity/excitement is much stronger among those who had voted for McCain over Obama in 2008.
From the summary by polling firm PPP:
Brown is benefiting from depressed Democratic interest in the election and a huge lead among independents for his surprisingly strong standing. Those planning to vote in the special election only report having voted for Barack Obama in 2008 by a 16 point margin, in contrast to his actual 26 point victory in the state.
That decline in turnout from Obama voters plagued Democratic candidates for Governor in Virginia and New Jersey last fall. Beyond that 66% of Republicans say they’re ‘very excited’ about turning out while only 48% of Democrats express that sentiment.
Public Policy Polling (PPP), is generally regarded as a left-leaning firm. Another poll conducted just last week had Brown down by 8, 49 to 41.
Obama supporting actress Halle Berry gets to jump the line at International Airport
Halle Berry, was among the most diehard of Obama supporters in 2008. She made numerous appearances for Obama on MTV's Rock the Vote, and sported a t-shirt "Barack the Vote." She donated the maximum $2300 to his Presidential campaign. According to Politico, During the height of Obamamania back in February 2008, at a campaign rally in Philadelphia Berry declared:
"I'll do whatever he says to do," actress Halle Berry said to the Philadelphia Daily News. "I'll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear."
Now Berry is in a bit of hot water, and catching criticism from all sides for an incident that happened at the Montreal airport. Berry, her husband and baby daughter were allowed to bypass the security line at the busy airport, much to the dissapointment of other waiting passengers. A security guard simply lifted the red rope and allowed her and her family to got to the front, instead of waiting.
From Yahoo News Jan. 8:
Quebec journalist Marieve Paradis said on her blog Friday, she spotted Berry, her partner, Canadian model Gabriel Aubry, and their child, being led to the front of the security line at a Montreal airport Monday, while other passengers waited more than an hour.
Alexis Stodgeill of Black Voices news site comments:
Normally, this would not seem like a big deal -- Hollywood A-listers get led to the front of lines all the time. But following on the heels of the recent failed terror attack in the U.S., any breech in airport security seems like too much.
Various media are reporting that the individual who allowed Berry to pass has not been fired, nor even re-assigned duty. Though a supervisor has promised that they won't do it again.
Note - all Canadian security personnnel at airports are members of the Canadian Airport Worker's Union.
Libertarian Humor
“You libertarians are the types that would allow fornication in public parks!”
"What do you mean, public parks?”
Orzel Nails It on Science and Religion | The Intersection
I haven’t blogged on this subject in a while, due to the kinds of comments/blitzkrieg it always evokes. And I’m sure I’ll be accused of “arguing from authority” here, simply because I’m quoting someone I find particularly eloquent and persuasive.
But so be it: When I saw Chad Orzel’s post last week explaining why it is that science and religion can be compatible, I couldn’t help linking, as it so perfectly summarizes my own view, and in better terms than I myself can probably put it:
OK, fine, as a formal philosophical matter, I agree that it’s basically impossible to reconcile the religious worldview with the scientific worldview. Of course, as a formal philosophical matter, it’s kind of difficult to show that motion is possible.
We don’t live in a formal philosophical world, though, and the vast majority of humans are not philosophers (and that’s a good thing, because if we did, it would take forever to get to work in the morning). Humans in the real world happily accept all sorts of logical contradictions that would drive philosophers batty. And that includes accepting both science and religion at the same time.
So, in my view, it is not in any way an “unconscionable” political statement for professional scientific organizations to state that science and religion are compatible. It’s a statement of fact, an acknowledgment that in the real world, there are numerous examples of people who are both personally religious and successful, even prominent scientists. Guy Consolmagno, George Coyne, Bill Phillips, Francis Collins, and many more.
How do these people deal with the philosophical contradiction inherent in there beliefs? I have no idea. I don’t really care, either, any more than I care how philosophers resolve Zeno’s paradox. Religious scientists exist, and I can move from one side of the room to the other in finite time. End of debate, let’s talk about something that actually matters.
There is nothing unconscionable, in my view, in professional organizations stating publicly that these people exist. What would be unconscionable is the reverse–a public statement that science and religion can never be compatible amounts to a denial of the existence of the many men and women who find some way to reconcile science and religion in their own lives. I find that sort of rhetoric deeply insulting even on blogs, let alone from a professional organization.
Amen amen amen….and now, let the wild ruckus begin.
Crafty & Clever Neanderthals Made Jewelry 50,000 Years Ago | 80beats
The jewelry in Spain speaks mainly to the brains (of Neanderthals). So says a team of archaeologists this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers led by João Zilhão have turned up artifacts they believe to be jewelry dating back 50,000 years—a time only Neanderthals and not early humans occupied Europe—suggesting to them that those Neanderthals were capable of the abstract thinking necessary to make symbolic art.
Zilhão’s team found shells and bones that showed evidence of craftsmanship, the scientists say. First, some of the shells were perforated and could have been strung and worn as a necklace. It’s not out of the question that those holes could be natural, but the team says the finds also appear to have been painted. If the researchers’ analysis is correct, the Neanderthals could have mixed up reddish goethite and hematite, yellow siderite and natrojarosite, black charcoal and sparkly pyrite to create a spectrum of paints [MSNBC].
Scientists have found similar artifacts in Europe before. But those finds were roughly 40,000 years old – dating to a period where Neanderthals and modern humans would have shared the European continent. This has led other researchers to argue that the purported Neanderthal artifacts represented mindless imitation or were from later periods, but they somehow got mixed into the wrong soil layers of the archaeological digs where they were uncovered [Christian Science Monitor]. The new finds, however, date to a time 10,000 years before our ancestors migrated to the European continent. So if these fragments truly show signs of handiwork, and if the dating is correct, that points to Neanderthals as the creators.
For Zilhão, this means that Neanderthal mental capacity was closer to that of early humans than we often give them credit for. Objects and compounds like these would have been used to “tell other people who you are,” Dr. Zilhão said. “They are like socially recognizable identity cards.” What’s more, he said, “this is exactly how the same kinds of objects and finds are interpreted in early modern human contexts” [The New York Times].
That wasn’t Zilhão’s only Neanderthal study this week, either. He published a separate study in PNAS addressing the question DISCOVER posed last month: Did we mate with Neanderthals, or did we murder them? Analyzing the teeth of a 30,000-year-old early human child skeleton, he says that it shows similarities to Neanderthals—similarities that again raise the question of whether and how much early humans and Neanderthals interbred in Europe tens of thousands of years ago.
Related Content:
80beats: Did Spear-Throwing Humans Kill Neanderthals?
80beats: Controversial Study Suggests Early Humans Feasted on Neanderthals
80beats: Rough Draft of the Neanderthal Genome is Complete
DISCOVER: Did We Mate with Neanderthals, or Did We Murder Them?
DISCOVER: Cavemen: They’re Just Like Us
Image: João Zilhão
My God, It’s Full of Blogs | The Loom
Time for some livestreaming! At the end of this week I’ll be heading to North Carolina to Scienceonline 2010, a confab about all things scientific on the Tubes. I’m going to be talking in a session on Saturday morning at 10:15 am called “Rebooting Science Journalism In the Age of the Web” along with fellow rebooters Ed Yong, John Timmer, and David Dobbs. You can watch live on UStream and Second Life. Later, our session (and all the others) will end up where everything ends up sooner or later: on YouTube. (More details here.)
Here’s the official description of our session:
Are blogs and mainstream media the bitter rivals that stereotypes would have us believe, or do the two sides have common threads and complementary strengths? How will the tools of the Internet change the art of reporting? How will the ongoing changes strengthen writing about science? How might these changes compromise or threaten writing about science? In a world where it’s possible for anyone to write about science, where does that leave professional science journalists? And who actually are these science journalists anyway?
If you want something to read in advance, Bora Zivkovic, one of the prime movers behind this conference, has kindly organized a veritable banquet of food for thought on this topic. If you’re interested in the experiences and opinions I bring to the discussion, read this. Basically, I find kvetching and yearning for some global system a waste of time. I am interested in people doing new things.
ScienceOnline has a strong tradition of openness, and so you’re welcome to visit the session wiki and help us formulate the discussion in advance. You can also start a discussion here, which I will track.
[Image: 2001 Internet Archive]
Satellite Photo of An Entire Country Frozen [Image Cache]
Here's a satellite picture showing why I spent 48 hours stranded in London Heathrow's Terminal 5 last Thursday. I witnessed about 3000 passengers fighting for luggage, another 3000 waiting for hotel coupons. I left before the food riots.
This is Britain covered under the snow, from top to bottom.
I was lucky. I got the last seat on flight BA177 on Thursday. It was the last flight that left to New York that day, after an extra six hour delay (apparently, there's only one defrosting machine in Heathrow) on top of the two days. The previous day, they canceled two of my flights. The next day, they cancelled all flights again.
While the weather was bad, there was no excuse to what happened at Terminal 5 those days. British Airways and the people at the airport were nowhere to be found after 6pm. Before that, there weren't helpful, offering no directions except "we don't know" and "they haven't told us anything." They were the most incompetent, most idiotic people I've ever found anywhere in the planet, leaving all their customers unattended on the evening, and treating everyone like cattle the rest of the time. There was a point in which passengers had to step in and organize the baggage belts, because the machines were overflowing and jamming. At another point, there were passengers fighting for food in the departures area. Sad.
When the guy at JFK's customs asked me if I had anything to declare, I quoted Dennis Farina in Snatch, from the very deep bottom of my heart and soul: "Don't go to England." And don't ever fly British Airways. [NASA]
[A lot of you have written to me in protest of Jesús's post, claiming prejudice towards the British. I think the spirit of the post is Jesús expressing his frustration at BA, and his quote at the end of the post is from a movie, and a joke. Don't take it too seriously. Have a good weekend. —Blam]
This Boeing 747 Flies With a 15×14-Foot Door Wide Open [Airplanes]
This is Sofia. Like the Italian actress, it will turn heads everywhere it flies. Not because of its cleavage, but because this Boeing 747 has a 15 by 14-foot door on it, which opens to reveal a 2.5-meter telescope.
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy—which went through $500-million in modifications after two decades of engineering—has finally been tested after its construction, flying at 15,000 feet and 415km/h with the door fully open. The test was a complete success, and in 2010 they will start testing the telescope itself. [Flight Global]
The Smallest World Map in the Whole Wide… World? [Photonics]
Behold the smallest world map, created by the Photonics Research Group of Ghent University-IMEC. Its scale is one trillionth. That's a 40,000-kilometer equator reduced to 40 micrometer, half the width of a human hair.
The map was embedded in a silicon photonics test chip, using a 30-step etching process. The chip has optical circuits, submicrometer scale "tiny strips of silicon called waveguides or photonic wires." These developments will allow companies to integrate optics in packages that will be a million times smaller than today's glass-based photonics. The resulting chips will allow for inexpensive integration of photonics in every technology, from consumer gadgets to medical equipment. What does that really mean? Think more inexpensive high-speed network connections—like Light Peak, non-mechanical gyroscopes, and holograms. [Intec ]
The Ghost City of Ordos [Architecture]
China keeps growing like a giant red octopus fed by nuclear power and monosodium glutamate, a country that keeps spending money in pharaonic projects. Some useful, like the fastest train in the world. And some eerie and worthless, like Ordos.
The city of Ordos was founded on February 26, 2001. Ordos means "palaces" in Mongolian, and it's richer than Beijing. In fact, with a $14,500 GDP per capita, it's one of the richest in the whole country. With 1,548,000 inhabitants, Ordos is not exactly empty. But much of its modern architecture, sometimes awesomely futuristic, sometimes nafftastically overdeveloped and underdesigned, remains completely empty. The density of this city is only 17.8 people per square kilometer. By comparison, New York City has 157.91 habitants per square kilometer, San Francisco has 6,688.4, and Madrid 5,293.69. Even the city of Dubai, which has only grew in recent years, has 408.18 people per square kilometer.
And yet, the city of Ordos keeps growing like its motherland, with no control and making little sense at times. If at all. [Wikipedia]
Twirling Battery Provides Instant Energy for a Dead Cellphone
From INHABITAT:
This spinning kinetic cellphone battery is a smart solution for times when your phone is dangerously low on juice. With a simple twirl of your finger, you can charge your battery with enough energy to provide a couple more minutes of talk time or a number of minutes
Xbox Live Games Coming to (Possibly Only Windows) Mobile Phones [Xbox Live]
How do you take a great idea like Xbox Live games coming to cellphones and ruin it? By only bringing those games to Windows Mobile phones, which may be what Microsoft has planned.
As you can see by the image above, taken from some internal Microsoft marketing material from last month, Xbox Live is spread across the Xbox 360, Windows and...Windows Phone. Now, this could just be a stand-in for many phones, or a new branding for game content to be available on many platforms. But it also could mean the games are just heading to Windows Mobile phones, which would pretty much kill the entire initiative right off the bat.
Also conspicuously absent from these plans: the Zune. No love for the Zune, Microsoft? [Kotaku]
The Nexus One’s 3G Problem, Pt. II: The Damning Data [Nexus One]
Google's Nexus One support forums have been flooded with anecdotes about the phone's poor 3G connectivity, so one user decided to follow up with some reasonably scientific tests. The conclusion? The Nexus One is kind of terrible at basic cellphonery!
The test was simple and limited, consisting of one dude, user WV, wandering in and out of his house, recording signal strength as measured in dBm and ASU with Android's built-in metering app. Assuming the Nexus One is supposed to work like a normal cellphones—that is, it connects to 3G networks when they're available and EDGE only when they're not—something's wrong.
Since the phone is obviously finding and receiving the cellular signals just fine, but not handling them as you'd expect, randomly flipping between the two—and evidently preferring EDGE most of the time—no matter how strong its signal is. This points to a software issue, not a hardware issue. That, and this:
OK. I found "Phone Info" screen through "Any Cut". This looks like a screen not intended for average users. It clearly has settings that should not be messed with. However, it does have a pull down menu that was set to "WCDMA Preferred". I changed this to "WCDMA Only". The phone reset, and never again saw the f'ing "E" on the signal indicator- ALL 3G. After about 1/2 hour of speed tests (150k - 800kbps) and google satellite map downloads (all definitely faster), I switched back to "WCDMA Preferred". Guess what? After a few minutes, I was back on EDGE, even with a good signal. Switched back to "WCDMA Only", and 3G it remains.
This doesn't fully solve the problem, because as WV notes, if you fall out of T-Mobile's 3G coverage area with EDGE disabled, you're basically boned. But anyway, yes, this appears to be a software bug. Or, if you're feeling conspiratorial today, like WV, a software feature:
My concern is whether T-mobile is being sneaky about this and purposefully dumbing down the 3G to Edge to reduce cell frequency congestion and/or their back-end network congestion.
I'm not sure I want to draw that nexus (haw?) quite yet, since the issue was first brought to light by comparing the Nexus One's 3G/EDGE handling to other T-Mobile 3G Android handsets, and those, despite having the same data-sucking potential as the Google Phone, haven't been throttled in any way. While Google is silent and T-Mobile says they're "investigating," the evidence keeps mounting and the question looms larger: what's really wrong with the Nexus One's 3G? [Google Nexus One Support Forums]
Embracing Reality
Keith's note: Twitter has some 18 million active users. We've already seen how Twitter has started to alter how news and ideas are spread - instantaneously - with major TV networks scrambling to pay attention. To its credit, NASA was an early adopter and now makes remarkable use of Twitter - and is learning fast how to use other social networking tools. Twitter is paying attention - hence this banner - one that appears with regularity on Twitter.
Alas, while NASA has pushed the envelope with regard to social media, its Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs at NASA Headquarters, Morrie Goodman, has (privately) expressed deep skepticism with regard to the value of these tools. Is Morrie offering a reality check, or reaffirming the status quo of ideas and paradigms that are no longer relevant?
What is it that Twitter sees in NASA - that NASA does not see in Twitter?
Keith's update: Morrie Goodman does not agree with what I have posted. If/when he sends me a formal response, I will be happy to post it - verbatim.
Apple Approves Porn App in Under 12 Hours [IPhone Apps]
Proving once again that Apple's iTunes approval process is absurd and futile, an app developer got his porn browser approved in under 12 hours, even with all the latest rules in place. The funny thing: Apple doesn't know about it.
Until now, that is. Here's what the developer told us:
I developed an app that is currently available in the app store. It's called forChan and it is technically the first app with nudity that meets all of Apples requirements (hey, it was approved in under 12 hours believe it or not!).
It is a web browser/photo app. You have to enter URLs to browse different imageboards which do/don't contain nudity. You can switch between categories to decide which uncensored content gets delivered to the
previous URL (blondes, brunettes, etc, etc).There is currently over 100,000 pics spread between 15 categories with much much more coming soon.
It's pretty simple. When you get the app, you can only browse a gallery of dogs. They are naked, but they are dogs, so unless you are into furry butts and lipsticks, all is fine.
But after pasting the image board URL, forChan allows you to browse through your favorite smut with ease, including full frontal nudity. While I haven't seen any gallery with actual sexual intercourse yet, you can basically set this $1 iPhone/iPod touch software to browse whatever material you want. The app is 17+ and its description mentions nudity and sex, so Apple must know about it. However, no other 17+ iTunes Store app shows all the juicy bits.
Would Apple remove this app, like they did with BeautyMeter? That was a interactive application for teens, created to exchange photos and rate them. Porn was bound to happen. This one, however, is just a web browser for images. If they ban it, however, they will be consistent with previous cases: Any app that can be used to browse porn is automatically removed from the store.
But unlike previous cases, the software itself is truly innocuous until you enter a web address in the URL field (one could have argued the same about BeautyMeter, which was innocuous until you uploaded your bust or penis to ie). So, if they remove forChan, they will set yet another dangerous precedent.
I can think about another app in the iPhone that does exactly what forChan does. It comes from the factory.
Its name is Safari. [iTunes App Store]
