Tuesday morning links - 9/30/08

I promise I'll start posting more than links. Until then, here are some interesting ones.

Snow on Mars!

Why calories taste good.

Rainbow compression wave from a jet caught on film.

Why can't we divide by zero?

A syllabus from one of the late David Foster Wallace's Pomona College classes.

Lighting up the brain to illuminate its secrets.

Are disposals green? Related - this site shows water consumption and drought conditions all over the country, in case you were wondering.

Hubble has a problem.

Can animals feel pain?

Order this kit and you can have your DNA lineage mapped. And here, you can have a DNA portrait made.

Continue reading "Tuesday morning links - 9/30/08"!

Tuesday morning links - 9/8/08

The semester has started. I'm (more) busy again. Tuesday is my one day without any scheduled obligations, so I'll take the opportunity to pass along some Internet fodder.

WATER BEARS FROM OUTER SPACE!

NASA chief Mike Griffin laments Bush administration dissin' his space missions.

Stem cells for the troops.

Harvard biologists get closer to building synthetic life.

Ten things you didn't know about the Earth.

The science of religion (via Nick).

UK former chief scientist Sir David King calls on "brilliant minds" to tackle climate crisis.

Thai prime minister ousted after appearing on cooking show, receiving money.

Roger Ebert's favorite movie.

Diddy needs gas. (Amazing)
Continue reading "Tuesday morning links - 9/8/08"!

Tuesday morning links - 8/26/08

For your perusal:

Awesome space pictures from the Chandra Observatory.

Large-scale x-ray photography by Nick Veasey.

It's possible for humans to run faster than Usain Bolt, but his performance at the Beijing Olympics broke the mathematical model that has fit sprinters for 100 years.

Researchers using Google Earth have determined that cows tend to align their bodies with the North-South axis of the earth. No one is sure why.

An Indian film company is being sued by Warner Brothers for its production of a movie entitled Hari Putar.

Recent research sheds light on what it takes to increase the lifespan of your body's cells.

Continue reading "Tuesday morning links - 8/26/08"!

Visualizing science

This article from the Boston Globe on opening up science* pointed me to some really exciting online resources that are free and open for anyone to access. Most interesting is the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JOVE). This site publishes videos of experimental protocols submitted by researchers. Each is reviewed by a panel of experts, so quality and relevance are ensured. The videos range from basic wet-lab techniques and equipment-care tips to highly specialized imaging and brain recording methods. It's all free and open from the start, you don't even need an account.

This is extremely useful for other scientists, particularly those attempting to learn a technique for the first time. It's also a great example of transparency and camaraderie within the scientific community - a group that unfortunately, faced with trickling grant money and declining job prospects, are often forced to be quite competitive and opportunistic.

I see sites like this, however, as really important for educational purposes, for getting the word out on what scientists do day to day. Videos are especially useful for this because they get around technical learning curves that prevent most from comprehending scientific journal articles. You don't need to have an extensive background knowledge to understand what a scientist did in the methods section of a scholarly paper if you can see it. Ever wanted to know how scientists image individual neurons within a living brain? How stem cells are collected and analyzed? Now you have videos with pretty pictures to watch.

Any effort to remove some of the secrecy and mystery associated with research, to help the public see that science isn't just for stuffy Ph.Ds and nerds, but rather, can be an interactive, dynamic, and open exchange of ideas among researchers and everyday people, is worthwhile and necessary for progress.

*I plan to comment more about the open science movement. The linked article discusses some of the reservations old guard scientists and journal publishers have about giving everyone access to their data (so read that too), along with several web 2.0-esque science resources new to the internet. I think it's an interesting generational issue, sort of the Napster debate of science.

Continue reading "Visualizing science"!

Eat it

Busy day, so here is something fluffy to distract me (and you, potentially). I came across this food meme earlier. Are you an experienced eater? The foods I've eaten are below, bolded.


1. Venison
2. Nettle tea - No, but I've seen Survivorman make it.
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile - Alligator, once
6. Black pudding - Somehow I missed this one in London.
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich - My lunch today
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle - But never enough to really appreciate, that stuff is expensive!
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes - I think I've had some terrible rasberry wine.
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese - This isn't actually the brain, I think people think it's the brain.
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar - Cognac, no cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O - unfortunately
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat - Many other curries, but no goat.
42. Whole insects - Ants, as a kid.
43. Phaal
44. Goat's milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu - No, but I dare my brother to try it when he moves to Japan.
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal - Again, unfortunately.
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S'mores
62. Sweetbreads - Mmm, thymus glands.
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs' legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini - I think I had really bad caviar once, so maybe
73. Louche absinthe - Recently, actually. Totally overrated
74. Gjetost, or brunost - Tried to find it once, but failed.
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake
101. Elk
102. Ostrich
103. Moose
104. whole hog BBQ
105. wine that costs more than $400.00 a bottle
106. Home made bacon and sausage
107. chocolate and chiles
108. chittlins
109. moonshine - No, surprisingly
110. quail eggs

That's 66/110, 60%. Not bad, I've had variations on some of the non-bolded items (such as steamed lobster, sans thermidor treatment), and some are prohibitively expensive for a poor twenty-something student.
Continue reading "Eat it"!

Tuesday morning links - 8/19/08

For your perusal.

Inside brain surgery

Wild dolphins tail walk

Face your Manga

The neuroscience behind magic tricks (may post more about this later)

NSFW chimpanzee video of, erm, tool use

Finding NYC bagels in Beijing

Free 3D modeling program Google Sketchup (may also post on this more later)

Brief discussion of free will vs. determinism (again, more later)

Russian Proton rocket launches big satellite

Continue reading "Tuesday morning links - 8/19/08"!

Internet Memes

Check out this cool internet meme timeline. It's interactive! Zoom down to the month scale to see them all. After the jump.





This makes me nostalgic for those *simpler* days when I had to sign into AOL with my 56.6K dial-up modem to see the internet. My family was a little late to adopt internet usage, our first serious computer purchase was around 1996, if memory serves. I definitely remember the Dancing Baby meme, though that memory might be from something similar in an episode of Ally McBeal. Notable high school memes included the Blair Witch Project, Hamsterdance, Homestar Runner, and (unfortunately) Bonsai Kitten. From college, the Ashlee Simpson lip-sync snafu, Chuck Norris facts, Ask a Ninja, I Can Has Cheezburger, and (again, unfortunately) OK Go memes stand out in my mind.

I feel both young and old.

Continue reading "Internet Memes"!

Wordle me this...

I just discovered Wordle, a Java applet that creates word clouds out of text. The frequency with which a given word appears is represented by its size in the cloud, so you can look for patterns or themes in a block of text that might not be obvious when presented in a normal format. You can create your own at the site, adding text or links to a webpage or del.ici.ous site tags. The clouds can be customized by font, layout, color, etc. Once you've made your cloud, you can save it to the site's gallery, which now has over 100,000 additions. The Worldle Blog, written by the applet's creator, Jonathan Feinberg of IBM, offers a discussion. I've made a few clouds, shown below the fold. Not sure if they are particularly interesting, but these texts came to mind.



This blog



Beowulf



MLK Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" Speech



Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species



Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis


Continue reading "Wordle me this..."!