The insect-powered plane project, aka Fly Plane
You might have noticed the ironically honeycomb shaped fabric mesh sealing the jar. It’s primary purpose is to retain the bees, but it also serves to aid in the sedation of the now irritated insidious insects. The chilling method proving fatal, I rendered them unconscious my means of gaseous intoxication.
Many insects were harmed in the making of this plane. He’s mad, I tell you.
Zapperz has stumbled across the ideal gift for that geek who loves to play prime-number-card stud, or superconducting supercollider hold ’em, or even CP-symmetry-not-conserved (e.g. deuces wild) games.
Physicist playing cards at the AIP store. “Historic” deck and “modern” deck.
I already have the Periodic Table playing card decks.
I ran across Tierney’s latest post in the NY Times, Politics in the Guise of Pure Science and, as it too often does, it left a bad taste.
Why, since President Obama promised to “restore science to its rightful place” in Washington, do some things feel not quite right?
First there was Steven Chu, the physicist and new energy secretary, warning The Los Angeles Times that climate change could make water so scarce by century’s end that “there’s no more agriculture in California” and no way to keep the state’s cities going, either.
I couldn’t help but notice that Tierny doesn’t actually rebut the claim, or give any context at all for it. Just simple appeal to ridicule, with fragmentary quoting, which always raises the question of whether the remarks are being quoted out of context. Not to mention that I think Tierney is missing the point. There is science, and there is policy. Policy will encompass more than science, but it’s critical that policy be based on science, rather than basing policy on ideology and rewriting or suppressing contradictory science.
Via The Inverse Square Blog I see that my spidey-senses were spot-on. Siegel at Daily Kos provides more complete quotes and context to Chu’s comments, and makes it clear that Chu was describing a range of possibilities, with the loss of agriculture and severe reduction in water for the cities at the extreme end of the spectrum of outcomes.
Update: Carbon Nation takes a swipe, too.
Under the broad heading of What causes hangovers? which is addressed in the link, along with some other alcohol-related information.
Congeners are toxic chemicals that are formed during fermentation, some liquors have more of them than others. These congeners are widely responsible for headaches.
Word to the wise: if you can’t pronounce “congener” anymore, stop drinking.
(h/t to YT and John)
(remember: Beer is good)
Getting soldiers acclimated to stress, and weeding out those who can’t handle the truth it.
During mock interrogations, the prisoners’ heart rates skyrocket to more than 170 beats per minute for more than half an hour, even though they aren’t engaging in any physical activity. Meanwhile, their bodies pump more stress hormones than the amounts actually measured in aviators landing on aircraft carriers, troops awaiting ambushes in Vietnam, skydivers taking the plunge or patients awaiting major surgery. The levels of stress hormones are sufficient to turn off the immune system and to produce a catabolic state, in which the body begins to break down and feed on itself. The average weight loss in three days is 22 pounds.
If It’s Difficult to Pronounce, It Must Be Risky.
ABSTRACT- Low processing fluency fosters the impression that a stimulus is unfamiliar, which in turn results in perceptions of higher risk, independent of whether the risk is desirable or undesirable. In Studies 1 and 2, ostensible food additives were rated as more harmful when their names were difficult to pronounce than when their names were easy to pronounce; mediation analyses indicated that this effect was mediated by the perceived novelty of the substance. In Study 3, amusement-park rides were rated as more likely to make one sick (an undesirable risk) and also as more exciting and adventurous (a desirable risk) when their names were difficult to pronounce than when their names were easy to pronounce.
I assume this is a correlation to “the risk of the unknown is often overestimated” in that difficult-to-pronounce is deemed “more unknown” than something that’s easy to pronounce.
via Schneier
And some interesting comments there — would you rather drink water distilled from urine or taken from a mountain stream?
Global-warming denialism as a conspiracy theory
One possible reason that global-warming denialism is more prevalent in the U.S. than elsewhere is that more Americans than Europeans are Biblical literalists. That involves believing that all biologists and paleontologists are either massively incompetent or deliberately trying to mislead the public about the central facts of their disciplines. [The alternative theory, held by some, is that the entire fossil record is a trick by Satan, intended to deceive those whose faith isn’t firm.] I haven’t seen any data on the overlap between global-warming denialism and creationism, but thinking about Sarah Palin and her fans you’d have to guess at a strong correlation between the two beliefs.
Global-warming denialism is a special case, of course: the policy implications of the facts about climate change threaten some very large economic interests and some dearly-held political beliefs. So global-warming-denialist brochures are printed on glossy paper. Other than that, though, it’s fairly standard-grade fringe pseudoscience, not much different from the folks who write endless papers full of gibberish proving that Einstein was wrong.
And yet the Washington Post continues to make op-ed space available for flat-earth climatology.
I think that you should take any science you read on the op-ed page with a huge grain of salt. But why is that? Why are the people writing and publishing these things thinking that they are opinion in the first place? One of the effects of scientific inquiry is to remove opinion from the analysis, and leave something that is objectively true. If you really think that there are multiple ways of interpreting the data, then you need to take a closer look at at the data you have, and possibly get more data. But in a lot of these cases, while more data is usually good, it isn’t what is required — the “alternative” interpretations don’t stand up to scrutiny. But this is the op-ed page, and making it up doesn’t seem to carry any penalty with it. On the contrary, one can lie to a large audience and then source amnesia takes over; nobody remembers that it was a lie or came from a disreputable source — all they remember is the claim. Which is a very different situation from scientific publishing, where publishing lies usually kills (or severely impedes) your career.
The Quantum Dimension Of Photosynthesis
In the initial steps of photosynthesis, the energy from a solar photon is transferred through the protein by sequentially exciting electrons in the organic molecules and is eventually delivered where it’s needed. Biologists have long thought that the energy moved like a hot potato: an excited electron in one molecule passes its energy to an electron in another, nearby molecule, and so on.
However, laser-based experiments have suggested other possibilities. In 2007 a team hitting a photosynthetic protein with laser pulses and measuring the time variation in the output light found strong evidence that some of the electrons were coherently coupled. The quantum wave nature of the electrons seemed to be connecting some of the chlorophyll-like molecules and helping energy flow through the protein like a wave on a string.
The Secret of Successful Kissing
Scientific evidence suggests that wet, sloppy smooches pack a bigger biochemical punch than dry kisses and thus may be more likely to lead to sex and reproduction
Just reporting what others have researched, my own anecdotal data to the contrary.