I love this deep sky image by Adam Block.
Originally posted on Google+ · June 3, 2014
The gulf between “rarely” and “never”
Posted by Dustin
on June 2, 2014
4 comments
It seems to me that there's a huge gulf between "rarely" and "never" and it's a little odd that they're lumped together.
Originally posted on Google+ · June 2, 2014
This supremely ugly plant is around 2000 years old
Posted by Dustin
on May 31, 2014
20 comments
This supremely ugly plant is around 2000 years old.
It's called Welwitschia mirabilis.
It is the last remaining plant in its genus, the last in its family, the last in its order.
It comes from a community of plants that thrived more than 200 million years ago. All of them slowly vanished, except for Welwitschia.
Welwitschia was "discovered" in 1859 by an Austrian explorer and botanist — Friedrich Martin Josef Welwitsch — but dinosaurs "discovered" them, too. Welwitschia plants were around when the killer asteroid hit our planet 65 million years ago. They stayed when the ice came. They stayed when the ice went. They have survived fires, pests, seen an endless parade of new insects, viruses, parasites, people, roads, local wars — and somehow, even today, there are thousands of them in the Namibian desert.
Originally posted on Google+ · May 31, 2014
Species extinctions rise with human population
Posted by Dustin
on May 30, 2014
5 comments
Extinctions on the rise.
Originally posted on Google+ · May 30, 2014
Wiio's laws of communication
Posted by Dustin
on May 14, 2014
1 comment
1 Communication usually fails, except by accident
1.1 If communication can fail, it will
1.2 If communication cannot fail, it still most usually fails
1.3 If communicaiton seems to succeed in the intended way, there's a misunderstanding
1.4 If you are content with your message, communication certainly fails
2 If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage
3 There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message
4 The more we communicate, the worse communication succceeds
4.1 The more we communicate, the faster misunderstandings propagate
5 In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be
6 The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance
7 The more important the situation is, the more probably you forget an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago
A commentary of Wiio’s laws
Wiio’s laws are humoristically formulated serious observations about
how human communication usually fails except by accident.
This document comments on the applicability and consequences of the laws,
especially as regards to communication on the Internet.
Originally posted on Google+ · May 14, 2014
More graphs of things that correlate
Posted by Dustin
on May 10, 2014
No comments
More of those graphs of correlations here.
Things that correlate
Why do these things correlate? These 20 correlations will blow your mind.
(Is this headline sensationalist enough for you to click on it yet?)
Originally posted on Google+ · May 10, 2014
Skiing revenue correlates with deaths by bedsheet tangling
Posted by Dustin
on May 10, 2014
5 comments
Stop it with the skiing!
Originally posted on Google+ · May 10, 2014
Chicken consumption correlates with crude oil imports
Posted by Dustin
on May 10, 2014
1 comment
Coincidence? I think not. Eating chicken requires crude oil.
Originally posted on Google+ · May 10, 2014
The photo blur effect on Google's Camera app is pretty neat
Posted by Dustin
on May 9, 2014
No comments
The photo blur effect on Google’s Camera app is pretty neat. Took this one outside my front door a few minutes ago with my Moto X.
Originally posted on Google+ · May 9, 2014
Menstrual cycle and mate preference studies may not hold up
Posted by Dustin
on May 8, 2014
2 comments
Anyway, there's a collection of studies over the past couple of decades that seem to show that the type of man a woman is attracted to changes based upon where they are in their menstrual cycle.
This new meta-study purports to show that those studies are wrong.
The thorough review of research on the drivers of human reproduction, in the journal Emotion Review, highlighted the importance of verification in the scientific method, as well as potential problems in how science is reported in the media. Wood and her team found that the correlations between menstrual cycle and mate preference declined over time, that is, most subsequent attempts to replicate the finding showed less of an effect.
The researchers also revealed that papers that did not show a link between menstrual cycle and sexual preference — that only showed no such correlation existed — were much less likely to be accepted for publication in a journal, often despite more precise methodology.
What do women want? Here’s what scientists might have gotten wrong
Over the last two decades, studies in reproductive biology and psychology have purported to show a correlation between what women want in a male partner and the time of the month — demonstrating that which guy catches a woman’s eye changes across the menstrual cycle.
Originally posted on Google+ · May 8, 2014