Monthly Archives: September 2009

1st Successful Amateur Hi-Def Video from The Edge of Space

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The balloon and camera were launched at 7:44 AM, the balloon burst at 10:51 AM at 107,145 ft. and the camera landed via parachute at 11:40 AM, 89 miles from the launch site after a 3 hr. & 56 min. flight. The camera recorded a total of 4 hrs. & 22 min. of Hi-Def Video before it stopped recording 53 secs after landing, when its 32GB of memory was full. The only thing better would have been if the camera had recorded for several minutes more to captured the sound of us approaching and video of us opening its container.

If you get motion sickness or are annoyed at unedited video, either don’t watch this or skp to three or four minutes in.
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Oscar the Grouch Was My Landlord…Until He Died

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While I was living in an Armenian enclave near Boston, this happened: A Turkish-American jeweler with a shop in Somerville was driving his car somewhere around Medford, and was ambushed. Several bullets were fired into his car, killing him and totally ruining the Cadillac. The Armenians partied, and the secret organization of assassins took credit.

Please check out my latest post at Quiche Moraine. Thank you very much.

Human Brain Size: Does it matter? And has it decreased?

Race and Racism, ,

ResearchBlogging.orgSometimes people walk around with only half a brain, or a large portion of their brain disconnected, or simply having never developed, or an extra large brain, and we usually take little notice. But when there is a five or ten or twenty percent difference between two groups of people we are quickly willing to use that to decide (as in the Bell Curve) that those people with the (on average) smaller brain are inferior. The fact that all the well known studies comparing groups of living people that show such differences have been shown to be bogus (i.e. made up or doctored data) is often ignored.

Anyway, the following is the abstract of a 1998 paper by M. Henneberg that is still relevant of some interest:

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Palin fails to impress world

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Sarah Palin gave her first speech outside the US, to the CLSA Investors Forum, in Tokyo, on Reqaganomics, China and Human Rights, Tibet, and the economices of the United States and Asia. She apparently also covered Alaskan Moose. The speech was 90 minutes long. Several people left early, there was apparently some kind of non-disclosure agreement because the press could not get most people to issue any kind of opinion, and those who did opine were generally non-committal with some mildly positive, some mildly negative. Opinions gleaned from the CNN story:

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