Archive for August, 2011
How To Use The Fibonacci Series Of Numbers To Build The Ultimate Solar Tree
Photo: Yzmo (CC)
What else could we learn from nature, one wonders, if we only paid attention. Andrew Michler reports on this amazing discovery for Inhabitat:
While most 13-year-olds spend their free time playing video games or cruising Facebook, one 7th grader was trekking through the woods uncovering a mystery of science. After studying how trees branch in a very specific way, Aidan Dwyer created a solar cell tree that produces 20-50% more power than a uniform array of photovoltaic panels. His impressive results show that using a specific formula for distributing solar cells can drastically improve energy generation. The study earned Aidan a provisional U.S patent – it’s a rare find in the field of technology and a fantastic example of how biomimicry can drastically improve design.
Aidan Dwyer took a hike through the trees last winter and took notice of patterns in the mangle of branches. His studies into how they…
Star Trek Background Scenery
The Space Trek tumblr is a collection of lushly colored, eerily beautiful establishing shots from Star Trek episodes — the brief moments on the show during which the actors were out of frame. It presents a vision of a calm, pristine, simultaneously alluring and foreboding distant future, and supports my theory that most television programs would be better minus the characters.
Why “Real Names” Policies Are Wrong
Google Plus’s decision to kill off accounts that are not “real names” follows a broader online trend of websites requiring users to utilize their birth names rather than “LimpBizkitDude69″. The idea is that this will make people more “responsible”. But in addition to its being a longstanding internet tradition, there are legitimate and important reasons why people use online pseudonyms. Apophenia compiled a bunch:
“I’ve been stalked. I’m a rape survivor. I am a government employee that is prohibited from using my IRL.”
“I am a high school teacher, privacy is of the utmost importance.”
“I have used this name/account in a work context, my entire family know this name and my friends know this name. It enables me to participate online without being subject to harassment that at one point in time lead to my employer having to change their number so that calls could get through.”
“I do not feel safe using my…
U.S. Troops To Get Silky Boxers For Safer Combat
Not only are US troops getting new helmets, but ‘ballistic boxers’ are also on the list to protect the privates’ privates. CNN reports:
Next month, the Army is going to start sending the “ballistic boxers” to soldiers in Afghanistan, and the Marines intend for each of their troops there to have four pairs of the “protective undergarments,” as they are formally known, before the end of the year.
The heavy silk boxers, which look like shorts that professional cyclists wear, won’t stop a bullet or shrapnel from an IED. But the silk can stop small projectiles like those kicked up by an explosion.
“It is expected to prevent fine sands and particles that are thrown up by explosives, so that the tissue wounds are cleaner, less ragged and easier to treat,” said Lt. Jamie Larson, a Marines Corps spokesperson. And since the silk is treated with antimicrobial agents, the boxers help protect injured troops from…
Scientists Crack Genome – Of Cannabis
Eliza Barclay reveals a major breakthrough in marijuana research for NPR:
Stoners and scientists alike may be stoked to learn that a startup biotech company has completed the DNA sequence of Cannabis sativa, or marijuana. But here’s something that could ruin a high: The company hopes the data will help scientists breed pot plantswithout much THC, the mind-altering chemical in the plant. The goal is instead to maximize other compounds that may have therapeutic benefits.
Kevin McKernan, founder and chief executive officer of the startup, called Medicinal Genomics, says Cannabis sativa has 84 other compounds that could fight pain or possibly even shrink tumors. But anti-marijuana laws make it difficult for scientists to breed and study the plant in most countries. That’s one reason he decided to publish his data for free on Amazon’s EC2, a public data cloud.
McKernan, who has an office in Massachusetts and a lab in the Netherlands where he can legally gather DNA…
Ancient Greeks Help Explain The Rioting Of Modern Britons
Dr. Mark A. Wolfgram writes a fascinating letter to the Financial Times:
Sir, The August 17 commentaries by Richard Florida (“The inchoate rage beneath our global cities”) and John Kay (“Why the rioters should be reading Rousseau”), as well as the excellent Financial Times series on “The Squeezed Middle”, are all making important observations about a similar social, economic and political factor — inequality. Inequality is a fact of human societies built on hierarchies. We come to accommodate ourselves to different levels of inequality, as long as we feel that our society, overall, is at some level just.
In a recent academic work, “A Cultural Theory of International Relations”, Richard Ned Lebow goes back to ancient Greek thought on human motivations and argues that we need to reintegrate their notion of spirit into our understanding of human behaviour. The Greeks argued that humans are motivated by both appetite (the pursuit of material…
Which Is Better: Execution By Needle Or Electric Chair?
That’s the choice given to prisoners in Virginia. Guillaume Decamme reports for AFP:
JARRATT, Virginia — Behind a blue curtain, the electric chair patiently waits its turn to take a life, but on this night in a chamber of a Virginia prison, murder convict Jerry Jackson dies by the needle.
“Fifteen days prior to execution, the inmate is asked which execution method he chooses,” explains David Bass at the Greensville Correctional Center.
“He may choose between the electric chair and the lethal injection.” For the most part, Bass says, “they prefer the injection.”
The man in the dark suit, speaking in a soft southern twang, is all too aware that most of America’s death row inmates pick the poison over the pulse of electrocution.
Of the various execution methods currently in use in the United States — electricity, firing squad, hanging, lethal injection and lethal gas — injection has become the standard.
As an employee of the…
Reporters Covering VP Biden In China Are Shoved Out
How do you clear a room full of press in China? Give Joe Biden a chance to speak. Only minutes after Vice President Biden’s speech, Chinese officials were directing journalists toward the exits. Los Angeles Times reports:
Vice President Joe Biden’s famously loquacious style has now become the source of some international tension.
At the senior levels, the American and Chinese delegations actually seem to be getting along quite well. But relations between the press and staff traveling with the vice president and Chinese officials guarding access to the leaders are another story entirely.
Biden’s schedule Thursday, his first full day in China, included two bilateral meetings with Chinese Vice President Xi Jingping. American and Chinese press were to be allowed in to hear the opening remarks at the start of the first, expanded meeting.
At least that was the plan.
Xi spoke first, calling Biden’s visit a “major event” in the U.S.-China relationship and expressing…
Tricked Foreign Students Stage Walkout Of Hershey’s Chocolate Factory
Remember that Simpsons episode in which Bart is conned into becoming a slave on a French grape farm through an “exchange student” program? The New York Times reports:
Hundreds of foreign students, waving their fists and shouting defiantly in many languages, walked off their jobs on Wednesday at a plant here that packs Hershey’s chocolates, saying a summer program that was supposed to be a cultural exchange had instead turned them into underpaid labor.
The students, from countries including China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine, came to the United States through a long-established State Department summer visa program that allows them to work for two months and then travel. They said they were expecting to practice their English, make some money and learn what life is like in the United States.
In a way, they did. About 400 foreign students were put to work lifting heavy boxes and packing Reese’s candies, Kit-Kats and Almond Joys on a…
Apple Plans New Headquarters Larger Than The Pentagon
Apple’s monolithic new base in California will have its own power grid and looks as though it could take off into space if conditions on Earth grow too dire. Via the Mac Observer:
New architectural information has been released about Apple’s proposed, so-called spaceship headquarters in Cupertino. Apple Campus 2 building include 2.8 million square feet of space in the ring-shaped structure with room for some 13,000 employees. Apple will be building its own power center to provide electricity for the campus and will require little supplemental power from the local grid.
According to the city, Apple will be restoring some of the area’s native vegetation with the assistance of arborists from Stanford University.
DARPA Wants To Send Humans To The Stars
.png)
Is this a good way to spend the money we’re borrowing from Chinese investors in U.S. Government debt? The New York Times‘ Dennis Overbye reports on DARPA’s bold step:
Alpha Centauri or bust.
The government agency that helped invent the Internet now wants to do the same for travel to the stars.
In what is perhaps the ultimate startup opportunity, Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, plans to award some lucky, ambitious and star-struck organization roughly $500,000 in seed money to begin studying what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically — to send humans to another star, a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years.
The awarding of that grant, on Nov. 11 — 11/11/11 — is planned as the culmination of a yearlong Darpa-NASA effort called the 100-Year Starship Study, which started quietly last winter and will include a three-day public symposium in…
Wannabe Vampire Arrested For Bloodsucking Assault
Why didn’t anyone tell the guy that you can buy Tru Blood from the HBO Store? Reuters reports:
The arrest of a Texas man who broke into a woman’s house, threw her against a wall and tried to suck her blood over the weekend has sparked discussion over the impact of vampire books and movies on U.S. youth culture.
Whether pop culture played a role in the attack remains to be seen, as 19-year-old Lyle Monroe Bensley awaits a psychiatric evaluation in jail on burglary charges in Galveston, Texas, southeast of Houston.
Found growling and hissing in a parking lot and wearing only boxer shorts, the pierced and tattooed Bensley claimed he was a 500-year-old vampire who needed to “feed,” Galveston Police Capt. Jeff Heyse said.
Vampires have been a focal point of literature since Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, “Dracula”. But fascination, particularly among young people, has peaked in recent years with the popularity of…
Internet Billionaire Wants to Create ‘Libertarian’ Islands
Via the NY Daily News:
Peter Thiel has made his fortune by being part of the next big thing: He was a co-founder of Paypal and one of the early investors of Facebook. But a new Details profile sums up his new plans: “Forget startup companies. The next frontier is startup countries.”
Thiel has donated $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute, the brainchild of Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer and grandson of economist Milton Friedman. Here’s the gist: creation of libertarian, sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters and free from the laws and moral codes of any other country.
Plans for the prototype include a movable, diesel-powered 12,000-ton structure that could house 270 residents. The goal would be to eventually link hundreds of the structures together. Friedman’s timeline is to launch offices off San Francisco next year, get a full-time settlement within seven years and eventually diplomatic recognition…
Canada Unveils The First Canadian Android, Then Touches Her Inappropriately (Video)
C3PO she ain’t. In the video “Aiko” is presented as Canada’s first android, and is promptly sexually molested against her wishes. Seems like a strange way to display her synthetic skin and vocal responses to pain:
An Epitaph for the American Dream
Photo: Reckon (CC)
Via Modern Mythology:
(Update: Since writing this entry, I recently discovered a Mother Jones article informing me that the Republican/Tea Party Governor of Florida, Rick Scott, founded a company called SOLANTIC that specializes in drug testing, among other “public services” … Could it be that this legislation stands to benefit the people who are passing it financially? Hrmm … Jigsaw falling into place.)
Recently, as many of you may have heard, Florida senators successfully passed a bill requiring welfare recipients to receive mandatory drug screenings. It is doubtful the legislation will stop there. In what seems to me to be an instance of VERY OBVIOUSLY blatant racial discrimination and discrimination of the haves towards the have-nots, they are now finding another way to invade all of our lives and rob us of more of our privacy. One gradual erosion of civil liberties at a time. The cruel and hilarious irony of the situation…
Appeals Court Deems Obama Healthcare Mandate Unconstitutional
Note to Obama: Don’t take ideas from plutarchist Massachusetts governors (I do not expect him to take my advice…) Reuters reports:
An appeals court ruled Friday that President Barack Obama’s healthcare law requiring Americans to buy healthcare insurance or face a penalty was unconstitutional, a blow to the White House.
The Appeals Court for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, found that Congress exceeded its authority by requiring Americans to buy coverage, but also ruled that the rest of the wide-ranging law could remain in effect.
The legality of the so-called individual mandate, a cornerstone of the 2010 healthcare law, is widely expected to be decided by the Supreme Court. The Obama administration has defended the provision as constitutional.
The case stems from a challenge by 26 U.S. states which had argued the individual mandate, set to go into effect in 2014, was unconstitutional because Congress could not force Americans to buy health insurance or…
Allies Planned To Slip Hitler Female Sex Hormones
The British plotted to lace Hitler’s food with estrogen so as to turn him “feminine” or into a mustached transsexual or something. Because that would bring about peace. Lesson being, if it hadn’t ended when it did, World War II would have grown continually stranger and stranger. The Telegraph writes:
Some tried bombs to neutralize the Führer, others tried bullets. Now it has come to light that British spies looked at derailing the man behind the German war machine by giving him female sex hormones.
Agents planned to smuggle doses of oestrogen into his food to make him less aggressive and more like his docile younger sister Paula, who worked as a secretary.
Spies working for the British were close enough to Hitler to have access to his food, said Professor Brian Ford, who discovered the plot. He explained that oestrogen was chosen because it was tasteless and would have a slow and subtle…
