This looks interesting: ATOMIC COVER-UP: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made
Monthly Archives: August 2011
Among Cannibals
I have lived among Cannibals, according to a lot of people who claim to know. The number of times that the “tribal” people of the Congo have been called cannibals is too great to be counted, most notably in great literature like The Heart of Darkness but most commonly, I suspect, from the pulpit or soap box by those raising money to spread this or that word. Most Europeans and Americans don’t know it, but many people who live in the Congo are quite convinced that the bazunga … the white foreigners … are cannibals. I’ve listened closely these assertions, made by many individuals, and I’ve lived in both places for considerable time and I can say something about these claims.
They have a case.
Continue reading Among Cannibals
I will be the first to welcome our new Ape Overlords
We dropped the atomic bomb on japan today (in 1945) and that caused a lot of changes in the world. The idea of a bomb like this was so outrageous that it was actually possible to keep the project secret even though thousands of people worked for months on it, at many different locations. In one plant where nuclear material was being enriched people were told to make up whatever they wanted when asked what they were doing, as long as they avoided saying what they were doing. This was a bit risky because they didn’t actually know, as mere cogs in a larger and incomprehensible machine, what they were in fact doing. I understand that the answer “we are putting the holes in the donuts” became the standard answer.
Continue reading I will be the first to welcome our new Ape Overlords
Hahahaha
But I Can Swim!?
Not wearing a life vest when you are on a recreational boat is about the same as not wearing your seat belt when driving on the highway: Perhaps 8 out of 10 water-recreation related deaths in the US in recent years would not have happened were the person wearing a life vest (as in wearing, not just having one near by). In 2008, about 700 people died in boating accidents in the US. Over 500 of those deaths were by drowning. Of those, abut 50 were wearing their life vest.
Mars may have flowing water
Observations from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars.
“NASA’s Mars Exploration Program keeps bringing us closer to determining whether the Red Planet could harbor life in some form,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, “and it reaffirms Mars as an important future destination for human exploration.”
Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars’ southern hemisphere.
“The best explanation for these observations so far is the flow of briny water,” said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson. McEwen is the principal investigator for the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and lead author of a report about the recurring flows published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science.
Kalahari Green and Red
I have a childhood memory of a troop of baboons, waiting among nearby rocks on a sun baked kopje, taking notice of nearby humans and watching and waiting until they saw a weakness and finally moving in for the kill, barking, grabbing, ripping livid flesh with long sharp canines, howling like wolves. And for the longest time I thought that memory was a scene from a movie called Flight of the Phoenix. But it turns out it was a scene from a movie that showed up on my doorstep this morning. And some time between that childhood memory forming and the DVD’s delivery I actually went to the southwestern desert of Africa, straddling the border of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, and the baboons did indeed have their way with me. But it wasn’t as bad as it was in the movie; In fact it was a rather fun adventure.
Continue reading Kalahari Green and Red
Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity
What is dark matter?
I’ll bet you can’t explain dark matter in less than one minute.
Continue reading What is dark matter?
New Blogs
In case you’ve been living in a well insulated cave, you need to know about Freethought Blogs Dot Com at http://freethoughtblogs.com/, which is where PZ Myers, Ed Brayton Digital Cuttlefish and some others are blogging.
Also, Sheril Kirshenbaum has departed from Wired and has started her own blog, A Culture of Science.
Check them out!
Oxygen Molecules in Space
The Herschel Space Observatory’s large telescope and state-of-the-art infrared detectors have provided the first confirmed finding of oxygen molecules in space. The molecules were discovered in the Orion star-forming complex.
Individual atoms of oxygen are common in space, particularly around massive stars. But molecular oxygen, which makes up about 20 percent of the air we breathe, has eluded astronomers until now.
“Oxygen gas was discovered in the 1770s, but it’s taken us more than 230 years to finally say with certainty that this very simple molecule exists in space,” said Paul Goldsmith, NASA’s Herschel project scientist at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Goldsmith is lead author of a recent paper describing the findings in the Astrophysical Journal. Herschel is a European Space Agency-led mission with important NASA contributions.
Astronomers searched for the elusive molecules in space for decades using balloons, as well as ground- and space-based telescopes. The Swedish Odin telescope spotted the molecule in 2007, but the sighting could not be confirmed.
Goldsmith and his colleagues propose that oxygen is locked up in water ice that coats tiny dust grains. They think the oxygen detected by Herschel in the Orion nebula was formed after starlight warmed the icy grains, releasing water, which was converted into oxygen molecules.
“This explains where some of the oxygen might be hiding,” said Goldsmith. “But we didn’t find large amounts of it, and still don’t understand what is so special about the spots where we find it. The universe still holds many secrets.”
The researchers plan to continue their hunt for oxygen molecules in other star-forming regions.
Google needs to allow pseudonyms on services like Google+ for anonymity
I have thought about writing a post on this topic, and I may well still do that, but so many have covered it so well already that I probably needn’t bother. And needn’t is not a word I use lightly. Anyway, this is an urgent issue and you can help resolve it but adding to some of the pressure to make Google do the right thing and follow their own motto of “not being evil.” Because right now, they are.