A few days ago I posted a link to a US Flickr and Tweet map. There is now a large set of regions and cities with this information.
Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures. Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both.
A particle physics private eye takes on the great interaction caper
MINERvA was starting to lose her cool. Of all the detectors in all the world, this proton walked into her’s.
After 23 hours of interrogating this proton about what he was doing at the time of the boson exchange, he wasn’t revealing sign one The had detector picked up the proton in the vicinity of the incident. His usual accomplice, the muon, was seen fleeing north, where he was apprehended by MINOS, the adjacent detector. Even with the proton refusing to talk, the greenest rookie could spot a muon and a proton in the final state and tell you this was a case of charged-current quasi-elastic neutrino scattering.
h/t to mooey
You may have read about photographer David Slater, and the tale of some monkey taking a self-potrait with a camera he left unattended. Techdirt wondered who owned the copyright. Monkey Business: Can A Monkey License Its Copyrights To A News Agency?
Technically, in most cases, whoever makes the actual work gets the copyright. That is, if you hand your camera to a stranger to take your photo, technically that stranger holds the copyright on the photo, though no one ever enforces this.
I pointed out the work-for-hire loophole in a tweet, but seriously doubt the macaque was in anyone’s employ. It gets better, though, because Techdirt got a takedown request, and inquired about the reason, given the questionable copyright claim.
Monkeys Don’t Do Fair Use; News Agency Tells Techdirt To Remove Photos
[W]e stand by our original analysis. We do not believe Caters News Agency has a legitimate copyright interest in the photo, and the company is in no position to issue a takedown of the images. Furthermore, even if it does turn out, through some convoluted process, that Caters does have a legitimate copyright interest in the photo, we believe that our use falls squarely into the classical confines of fair use under US copyright law. Thus, we have no plans to remove the photos or make any changes, barring Caters providing us with a sound basis for doing so.
Fukushima: Nuclear power’s VHS relic?
A brief history of nuclear power and the politics that goes along with it, in an attempt to determine whether we opted for designs we use because they were the best, i.e. did the US opt for light water reactors just because we had developed enrichment technology.
There is at least one omission, though.
The top US priority was to develop a reactor capable of powering submarines. A naval officer with a reputation for getting things done, Hyman Rickover, was appointed to lead the task.
Submarine reactors need to be small and compact, and avoid the use of materials such as hot sodium that could prove an explosive hazard.
The light water reactor, with the water under pressure to prevent it from boiling and turning to steam, was Rickover’s choice. It quickly entered service powering the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine.
The article fails to mention that the USS Sea Wolf (SSN-575), the second nuclear submarine in the US navy, had a sodium-cooled reactor. This kind of reactor has to have a secondary loop to make steam, and that means you run the risk of a primary-to-secondary leak. Sodium + water. As pointed out, and as any chemist or physicist who hangs out with those liberal alkali metals (way over on the left of the periodic table), or anyone who has seen a video knows, bad things™ can happen when you mix them. But the technology wasn’t simply ignored, which puts this account on a bit of shaky ground.
Builder Blames Navy as Brand-New Warship Disintegrates
There are technical terms for this kind of disintegration. Austal USA, Independence’s Alabama-based builder, calls it “galvanic corrosion.” Civilian scientists know it as “electrolysis.” It’s what occurs when “two dissimilar metals, after being in electrical contact with one another, corrode at different rates,” Austal explained in a statement.
A reason you aren’t supposed to mix aluminum and copper wiring in your abode.
If you have yet to run across posts on elevatorgate/rebeccapocalypse (over 9,000 Google hits on the former term) then you probably don’t read many science/skeptic blogs. If you have and are sick of it, don’t worry, because I’m not going to add my quanta of coinage. I have come to loathe participating in internet discussions of this ilk — despite the community supposedly being held among the science/skeptic minded, they have a tendency to stray from rationality and civility far too quickly and too much in magnitude for my taste. In many cases, if you don’t present the right answer™ as determined by the owner of the dais, you are quickly dogpiled into oblivion, and that can extend to any kind of criticism. Point out someone has misquoted Evil Protagonist (or note that EP was actually correct in some statement) and all of the sudden you are a staunch supporter of Evil Protagonist in the eyes of some (many?) participants.
However, in case you want more of the same or are otherwise interested in a somewhat related topic, here is a post by xkcd’s Randall Monroe on Google+’s insistence on publicly disclosing your gender, which does not seem to have descended into the usual quagmire, though it does include the predictable “it doesn’t bother me so it shouldn’t bother anybody” responses.
The bottom line is that there are a lot of reasons Google+ would want to ask about your gender. But there’s no good reason to pointedly make it the only thing in your profile that can’t be private—and many reasons not to, starting with basic courtesy. It may be a small issue in the grand scheme of things, but I think it’s worth getting right.
That would be a pentagaffe
Meet Your Sponsor: Metro Diverse Service’s Panterragaffe: A Pedal-Powered Walking Machine
Panterragaffe is a pedal powered two person walking machine, a walking bicycle. The name has a few elements to it. It’s a play on pantograph, which is a mechanism for copying drawings, since it’s similar to the leg mechanism. Also; Pan – all or spanning. Terra – earth. Gaffe – an unintentional act causing embarrassment to it’s originator or just goofy-ness. A bit of goofy-ness for everybody. To most people the name doesn’t mean anything, therefore its meaning is flexible.
North American detail map of Flickr and Twitter locations
Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures. Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both