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Category Archives: Science - Page 6
Crazy nutbags. (AKA, this picture reminds me of homeopaths and their ilk.)
Posted by Dustin
on May 26, 2009
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Herein find out how to survive a nuclear war.
Posted by Dustin
on May 14, 2009
1 comment
- Image via Wikipedia
Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson Kearny. Some interesting stuff in there…
Kearny points out that many casualties in a nuclear attack might be due to people running to windows in major cities, looking at the sky lit up by SLBMs, only to be killed by blades of glass when otherwise-survivable ICBMs explode.
I don’t get Facebook.
Posted by Dustin
on May 5, 2009
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- Image via Wikipedia
What is the point of having a the feed when you click the “Home” link being a different thing from the feed in your Profile?
Why do I have to click multiple places to see all these different messages? How am I supposed to know when a friend posts something new to their profile feed? Why don’t their new posts in that area appear in my feed on my Home page?
Basically, Facebook is confusingly inconsistent. Especially for new uers.
On a side note, I want an application that posts my Twitter updates to the feed on my Facebook Home page. Or I want someone to tell me why that’s a dumb idea.
How to increase your son’s intelligence.
Posted by Dustin
on March 9, 2009
1 comment
Fifteen-year-old males who ate fish at least once a week displayed higher cognitive skills at the age of 18 than those who it ate it less frequently, according to a study of nearly 4,000 teenagers published in the March issue of Acta Paediatrica.
Eating fish once a week was enough to increase combined, verbal and visuospatial intelligence scores by an average of six per cent, while eating fish more than once a week increased them by just under 11 per cent.
So reports Science Blog on the results of a Swedish study.
I normally just kind of glaze over on studies such as this, but really … 11 percent is quite significant!
HFCS and your health
Posted by Dustin
on February 4, 2009
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New data: High-fructose corn syrup no worse than sugar – USATODAY.com
Now, the tide of research, if not public opinion, has shifted. This week, five papers published in
- Image by slworking2 via Flickr
a supplement to Clinical Nutrition find no special link between consumption of high-fructose corn syrup and obesity. One paper was written by Barry Popkin, a co-author on the original 2004 paper.
I’m sure this won’t convince many on the anti-HFCS bandwagon, but some of us prefer to live in the world of evidence. The evidence points to no ill-effects. Sorry, Charley.
Of course, we all consume too much sweetener. Period.
I’m a computer
Posted by Dustin
on October 12, 2008
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No, I’m not, but soon I could be.
In an experiment known as the Turing Test after the great British mathematician Alan Turing, the six Artificial Conversational Entities (ACEs) tried to fool human interrogators into thinking they were also human. All the ACEs managed to fool at least one of their human interrogators and organisers feel it will only be a matter of time before the test is passed. But none could pass the threshold set by Turing in 1950 of fooling 30 per cent of the human interrogators.
The news
Posted by Dustin
on October 12, 2008
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I’m constantly learning about new ways to look at things when reading one of my favorite sites, Overcoming Bias.
A recent post has me thinking a lot about what the stock market actually is.
Speculators were blamed for rising oil prices a few months back, but not for recent falling oil prices. Short-selling speculators were recently blamed for falling stock prices, and actually banned for a few weeks, but no one proposed banning buying speculators two years ago when stocks were rising. Now Steven Pearlstein of the Post wants to close financial markets for a week:
The author of this post, Robin Hanson, goes on to describe the stock market as a new outlet in which stock prices, and the market as whole, merely informs us about the future prospects of companies.
Aside from times when firms issue stock or buy it back, stock trades do not change a firm’s total capital; they just gives us news about its future prospects. Sure some of of these stock “reporters” can have incentives to mislead us, but newspaper reporters can also have incentives to mislead us. Systems for detecting and punishing misleading reporters are far stronger and more effective in financial markets than in newspapers.
In a galaxy far, far away…
Posted by Dustin
on October 12, 2008
No comments
… stuff is forming. Gizmodo posts about an image captured at the Keck Observatory which shows a spiral galaxy in the process of formation.
Two neat things about this:
- This galaxy is 11-billion light years away.
- It was caught at the detail it was because of gravitational lensing.
eXtreme bacteria action!
Posted by Dustin
on October 10, 2008
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Extremophiles are interesting because they’re eXtreme!
Ars Technica has a summary of recent work looking into one of the extremest of the extreme.
Faced with this evidence, it was fair to wonder just where the outer edges of survival might be. We may have a hint of that from samples taken from deep in South African mines, which show that life can make it nearly three kilometers down, but it’s far from the thriving communities we find in other extreme environments. In fact, it looks like the bacterial “community” in the mine may be comprised of a single species.
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