Flight Data Recorder
Whenever a plane crashes,investigators must find the black box to obtain vital information preceding the crash.
I realize there are a lot of planes constantly in the air, but with TeraByte drives becoming so inexpensive, why can't the information be transmitted to a receiving station and stored in
Twitter Buckles To Legal Pressure and Releases Confidential User Info [Twitter]
Twitter just gave into pressure from British councillors to release the private information of users who made some allegedly libelous tweets. This is a landmark case in the already-messy realm of online free speech and privacy. More »
Samsung Demands To See the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 In Court [Legal]
The legal slugfest between partners-turned-competitors Apple and Samsung continues: Samsung has demanded that Apple release the iPhone 4S/5 and iPad 3 to their lawyers as part of a discovery process to determine if there was any infringement on Apple's part. More »
Dance Police
Thank god these brave officers protected the public and arrested these dangerous dancers at the Jefferson Memorial. Imagine what would have happened if they were allowed to just boogie down!
Looking for Grinder Pump
Need manufacture's name of best available grinder pump for home pressure sewage application. Any recommendations are appreciated.
Loose vs. tight societies | Gene Expression
A new paper in Science, Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study, is making the media rounds. Here’s NPR:
…The idea for this study really dates to the 1960s. Back then, an anthropologist decided to evaluate a few dozen obscure cultures and see if he could rank them on a scale from “tight” to “loose.” He defined tight cultures as having a lot of rules, which people violate at their peril. Loose cultures are more relaxed in their expectations, and more forgiving of people who deviate.
The Tightness Scale
…
“So for example, you might have been asked, how appropriate is it to curse in the bank or kiss in a public park, or eat or read a newspaper in a classroom? And we were able to derive scores of how constrained, in general situations, they are, versus how much they have latitude in different countries.”
…
“Some of the cultures that are quite tight in our sample include places like Singapore, Japan, Pakistan,” Gelfand says. “Whereas many loose societies include countries like New Zealand, the Netherlands, the United States.”
The abstract from the paper is a little harder to parse:
With data from 33 nations, we ...
Iran Planning to Close Down Their Open Internet [Iran]
Iran's telecommunications chief has stated that, in two years, the Iranian people will have use a state-controlled internet as a way to enforce Islamic values and combat Western influence. Right. Because turning off the internet worked in the region before. More »
ASME VIII
1. 1- In ASME VIII, UW-3 welded joint category; the definition of category B include the circumferential welded joint connecting formed heads other than hemispherical heads to nozzles, while category D welded joint include circumferential welded joints connecting nozzles to heads. Is there a defe
Mosquitoes Bite Because of Your Smelly Feet [Health]
According to the research of one Remco Suer, mosquitoes might somehow be attracted to the bacteria in your sweat-soaked feet. That means finding a way to isolate these odors could reduce their nuisance and even slow the spread of disease. More »
Auto Sampler Installation and Termination
Hi guys,
I'm Installing an Auto Sampler on a Quality Loop System to Grab Sample from an Oil flow line. The Instruments Installed are Grab Sampler/Sample Drive 20CD (24VDC) from NuFlu Measurement Systems Company and Allen Bradley PICO Controller L12BWB. These Instruments are using Pulses, Now, ho
Installing Grab Sampler and PICO Controller Instruments
Hi guys,
I'm Installing an Auto Sampler on a Quality Loop System to Grab Sample from an Oil flow line. The Instruments Installed are Grab Sampler/Sample Drive 20CD (24VDC) from NuFlu Measurement Systems Company and Allen Bradley PICO Controller L12BWB. These Instruments are using Pulses, Now, how d
Alaska Airlines Moving To iPads For Flight Manuals [Blips]
The Symmetry of Sleep | The Loom
The World Science Festival is going to kick off on Wednesday in New York (I’ll be speaking Thursday on a panel, on telling the stories of science in print and online.) The festival organizers have been publishing a blog on some of the topics that will be explored next week. Riffing on the session on sleep, I’ve just contributed a piece on some wonderful recent research on what it means for us to be asleep and to be awake–and the surprising porous wall that divides the two states of mind. Check it out.
Zanran Numerical Data Search | Gene Expression
Via Kevin Drum, Zanran, “Your source for data & statistics – graphs, charts and tables.” I am just checking it out, but I think it will be of use to readers.
Attack of the Truthers! | The Intersection
Over on the Point of Inquiry forum thread for discussion of the show with Jonathan Kay, 9-11 Truther madness has descended. I also got a ticked off email from a Truther just now. Having never really dealt with them before, they are not making a good first impression. If you want to see an example of the capacity of human reasoning to go off the rails check this out:
Actually I think WTC7 is so obviously a demolition that it is boring. The obvious give away is how the roof line came down so simultaneously and remained so straight all of the way across the building. How could damage from the “collapse” of WTC1 create such ideal behavior? How could fire do it? It’s ridiculous to think such random phenomenon could cause such a precise result.
At least airliners smashing into skyscrapers is interesting.
OH yeah jet fuel. Sometimes known as kerosene. There were 34 tons of it. FEMA says about 50% of it was used up in the initial explosion. But how much mass are we talking about in the vicinity of the impact? They never tell us how much a complete floor assembly weighed. But it is easy to compute the weight of a concrete floor slab on the basis of dimensions and density. One concrete slab outside the core weighed 600 tons. How much all of the trusses and corrugated pans weighed I have never seen. I am guessing around 200 tons. There were 236 perimeter columns and 47 core columns. But we are completely missing data on the horizontal beams in the core.
Now with each level 12 feet tall that means there were 564 feet of vertical steel in the core on each level. But the cores were 86 feet by 136 feet. Now the columns were not in an evenly spaced 6 by 8 grid with one missing. I have never seen the layout of the horizontal beams specified. But the length of horizontal steel should be about 8 * 86 + 6 * 136 or 1504 feet of steel. Much more than double the length of vertical steel. So how are we supposed to analyze whatever happened when we don’t even know the tons of steel on each level inside the core?
Give us more data! So that we can twist it and come up with new questions!
Oh, and then there’s this:
So which part of the CIA do you work for young Chris?
Yes, these people really do exist, and there is some woodwork somewhere that they come out of. And the worst part of it is, according to surveys they are more likely than not to share my own political persuasion!
Blogging about conspiracies is not exactly an uplifting experience, folks. Not that I’m really surprised or anything…
Lego Fan Creates 250,000-Brick ‘Garrison of Moriah’ [Republished]
Usually, the only constraint on building a Lego creation is your imagination. Unless, that is, you build a giant structure that demands its own "Lego room." More »
PopSci on the "League of Performance-Enhanced Athletes"
I've been arguing for the establishment of performance-enhanced leagues for years now, so it's nice to see Ryan Bradley of Popular Science make the same case:
Through this openness the league creates an environment where cutting-edge science is discussed daily, and celebrated, alongside athletic triumph. Better still: legitimizing enhancement would make the enhancements better. More drugs hit the market, more treatments become available, and this would trickle down to non-athletes. Would all this openness and advancement foster a more honest, inviting, even wholesome environment? Maybe. Creating a separate league where drugs are legal would, without a doubt, make competition safer for athletes. Matthew Herper, who has covered science and health (and, by extension, athletes and drugs) for a decade at Forbes, says as much.
Science, Feature, athletes, competition, cycling, doping, drugs, lance armstrong, sports, steroids“To me, the most obvious solution has always been to legalize those drugs that work, and to experimentally monitor new entrants, including dietary supplements, for both efficacy and safety. Biological improvement would be treated much as athletic equipment like baseball bats and running shoes. This could improve both athlete’s performance and their health, and would be a lot better than having everybody trying whatever additive they can sneak, attempting to stay ahead of drug tests, and trusting anecdotes as a way of measuring safety and efficacy.”
But perhaps most importantly, by keeping advances off the field, we’re holding back possibilities. A few years ago I visited Hugh Herr, the director of biomechatronics at MIT’s Media Lab, who had just invented a robotic ankle that would soon revolutionize prosthetics. We ended up discussing the ankle a little bit, but mostly we talked about science in sports. Herr is an athlete. As a young man he was a world-class rock climber. A week before my visit, he had been busy trying to convince the International Association of Athletics Federations to allow South African runner Oscar Pistorius to compete in the Olympics. Pistorius has no legs below his knees and runs using Cheetah Flex-Foot carbon fiber limbs which, arguably, gives him an unfair advantage. Herr is also a double amputee, and walks and climbs using prosthetics. That day in his lab, while he showed me his improved ankle and described his work with veterans, Herr told me that he sees no reason why we can’t make “disabled” people stronger and faster than the rest of us. In fact, we already are: just look at Pistorius. The IAAF agreed and, weeks later, decided to ban the South African from competition.
Fiber Optic Cable
How to order fiber optic cable our spec call for at least 6 fibres less than 15km for single mode this is for main fiber optic cable. Hereunder are the specs;
single mode, index-gradient: 125um
core diameter: 9+/-10um
cladding diameter: 125+/-1um
coating diameter: 250 +/- 10um
Non circularity o
Massive Anchor From Blackbeard’s Flagship Raised From Wreckage [Video]
What you're seeing is the 3,000 pound anchor from Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, being raised off the coast of North Carolina. The wreck was found a few years back, but discoveries are still being made. Even swords. More »
