Paul Davies makes an interesting case for a realistic mission to Mars: Make it a one-way trip (NYT registration required).

It wouldn't be the first time explorers have gone on to new lands without expectation of coming back, and the potential gain is significant. Unlike the Moon, Mars can provide a sustainable habitat, with minimal supplies sent from Earth each time the 2.2-year window opens up.

Further, if we start with a crew of four, and add more people as the colony proves its viability, then this concept starts to look less and less like a suicide mission, and more like colonization.

Sure, there are tons of problems, not the least of which is that so far 20 of the 36 craft sent to Mars have failed en-route, which makes gambling on the bi-annual resupply from Earth a harrowing and possibly deadly game, but improving the reliability of the one-way trips is infinitely easier than trying to engineer a round-trip with current technologies.

Comments?

Gotta love today's Google logo:

Who knew Martians were more cyan than green?

Comments?

Well, maybe it's not quite as strangely dangerous as a pocket full of degenerate matter, but a 3" neodymium super magnet gives you almost science-fictive powers. As one of the strongest consumer magnets on the planet by weight, two of these coming together can break your fingers and require 700lbs of force to detach from each other.

Gaussboys sells a wide range of magnets, from tiny pieces the size of penciltips to monsters you can use to pull the dents out of cars. I wouldn't suggest using them to tack pictures to your computer, though.

Comments?

Today I went to the cardiologist. After several months of occasional premature beats, I decided it was time to get checked out. Rachel was a godsend and did the legwork of finding a good cardiologist and so it was off to Stanford Medical Center I went this morning.

Driving, parking, finding the office, filling out forms, getting weighed and measured and it was off to the examination room I went. A thorough examination later and now I'm wired to seven electrodes plugged in to a meter smaller than a VHS tape. I'm wearing the box in a shoulder-bag. My cardio-manpurse.

Anyhow, now the machine's watching my every beat and I'm sitting here at my desk, waiting for my heart to flip-flop. It's like the opposite of hiccups: The more attention I pay to it, the less it wants to happen.

Anyhow, now I'm wired (and partially shorn, but maybe I'll talk about that later), and still getting over the cold that kept me from work yesterday. Ugh. Too much stimulus.

Comments?

I've been thinking about adding a 'new thing learned today' sidebar to Fury. I think I literally do learn something interesting new every day. I haven't built it yet, but I really wanted to use it last night, so now I have to write it in a post instead.

Last night I learned that in no circumstance is it optimal to determine whether a soldering iron is cool enough to leave unattended by means of touching the tip of the soldering iron with your finger.

The most irritating part is that for a few days I have to try using another fingertip for putting in my contact lenses. It's harder than I thought.

Ow.

Comments?

The average cash transaction results in 4.7 coins being returned in change. It's all about the denominations. A research scientist took this to heart and work out solutions. The most obvious is to ditch the penny, but since that might never happen (the penny has some big backers) adding an 18-cent piece might be the next best thing.

Comments?

Probably my hottest passion in HCI is the concept of ambient displays. Ambient displays abound in nature. The way the spectrum of light changes a few minutes before rain starts falling, the way birds waking up at 4am let you know you've been studying too late again, your sense of balance. These are all examples of ambient displays.

In the HCI realm, the hot geek project de l'annee has been to create novel man-made ambient displays. Classic examples are the network activity dangling string and a thicket of waterfall and windchime-oriented projects. In the past few years most of these projects have been filed under the concept of 'ubiquitous computing' though I think this is a bit of a misnomer, since if an ambient display is truly ubiquitou, the 'computing' portion of it should be invisible to the user and therefore should no more have the label 'computing' than a car or DVD player should. The advancement of the field comes in the expression, not the computing.

At any rate, I've been wanting to create ambient displays at home for quite a while, but time, money, or other factors always got in the way. Now that I'm settling in to a new home, the desire to create an ambient informatic environment has risen anew, and I've spent the last several days thinking about two things: What form could these displays take, and what information do I want to display?

Though I don't have a shortage of answers for either of these two questions, I often find a disconnect between the two lists. Without any 'in the world' relationship between, say, traffic to fury.com and the sound of flowing water, that relationship has to exist in my head. Therein lies the problem, because there is a deliberate cognitive step that has to happen in my head when I hear the water surge briefly to understand what that display maps to in the real world. Further, someone who hasn't explicitly been told about the relationship between flowing water and my web site traffic (or in the linked example, the dangling string and the office's overall network activity), would never make that connection. This brought me to my first realization:

All ambient displays are learned.

Whether it's the flat sunlight before an imminent downpour, or the birds chirping at 4am, these displays only become effective as the user makes the connection (causal or otherwise) between the two phenomena. In the most effective ambient displays, this connection happens unconsciously, so that not only does the subject not know how they know it's about to rain, but they don't even notice that the light outside has changed.

In the network-string example, it's likely that the information needed to correlate the string to network traffic isn't available to the user, unless they start to realize that their web-browsing gets slower at the same time as the string gets more energetic. In the website traffic and water example, there is even less data to correlate because my website traffic is a metric completely hidden from someone sitting in my living room. The data that the subconscious brain needs to create this binding simply isn't available, and so explicit knowledge is required, negating the very nature of ubiquity.

To take it a step further, I believe that the linkage between the display and the underlying data should not only be available to the subject, but it must be available in a way where it is internalized inexplicitly. In other words, just having a sign saying "this string's activity indicates network traffic" won't do, because the knowledge of the linkage, while in the world, still has to be internalized consciously, and after the first handful of interactions with the display, the user will carry the knowledge in their head, but in their conscious attention.

This creates a direct obstacle to ubiquitous assimilation of the display's information, because a short-circuit to the conscious level has been created. When the subject encounters the ambient display, they think about the display and their explicit learned linkage, eliminating the opportunity for the display to affect them of its own accord.

It's like stopping hiccups: The most successful and difficult method to succeed is to think about something else entirely, only you can't, because you keep polling yourself to see if it worked, at which point you hiccup. By trying to use an ambient display ambiently, people will often try to see 'if it's working' which means it can't. When a linkage between display and data happens in the subconscious, there isn't that conscious recurrent check to see if it's working, because the conscious mind was never given a role in the experience.

So what makes an effective ambient display? What is effectiveness? Is ambience and/or ubiquity the most important facet? Or is it the fidelity to which the changing data is realized in the subject? It must be a middle ground, where explicit data is sacrificed for the sake of 'calm'. A cellphone ring is not an ambient display, while a static painting falls on the 'overly calm' side of the spectrum: a display that might have a deep meaning, but no change over time.

I'm still doing a lot of thinking on the subject, but rather than running headstrong into waterfalls and colored balls, I'm taking a step back and approaching from a research perspective. I'm going to start keeping a log of the ambient displays I sense every day, how I interact with them, and how I learned the relationship between the display and the information behind it.

My next step will be stretching a few of these displays a bit farther from their data, and see if they still work. For example, right now it's very quiet in my apartment because it's 1am. The ambient noise level is a display telling me very roughly what time it is. If I tied this kind of relationship to my radio, so that it grew softer as the evening wore on, and grew louder in the morning, mirroring the average change in ambient background noise, it might give me a better indication of the time of day, both when I'm staying up too late blogging, and when I should be getting up to start the day. In this respect it might serve as both an ambient alarm clock and 'time to sleep' notification, without any of the abruptness of a clock-radio. The most important difference here is that this radio doesn't attempt to tell you what to do or when, it simply gives you a better sense of the world around you.

Approaching the problem from the other end, I should take a look at the pieces of data I want that aren't adequately addressed by ambient displays. Then I need to find the right way to extend that data into the real world, as opposed to creating a display and an arbitrary linkage.

These are slow steps, but hopefully the results will have a greater utility to wow-factor ratio than most of the ambient work I've done so far.

Comments?

So I'm wearing my "Mars Attacks!" T-shirt today, in honor of Mars's closest approach in 60,000 years.

So far nobody at work has noticed, or at least they haven't said anything if they did... Drat!

Comments?

Douglas Adams Explains It All For You. Don't miss the animation explaining why it's imperitive to put the milk in the teacup before putting in the tea.

Comments?

A new fast moving sidewalk is undergoing field trials in Paris. It transports walkers at 9kph (5.5mph), about twice as fast as existing moving sidewalks.

Larry Niven wrote a lot about what he called 'slidewalks.' He envisioned as many as 10 sliding floor tracks edge to edge next to each other, with each one to the left moving a few mph faster than its neighbor. That way someone could step from a stop onto the first 3mph moving sidewalk, then make one more 3mph faster transition, stepping to the next one, until they were going 30mph (or faster) in the 'fast lane', emulating how multi-lane freeways work. People could get on and off wherever they chose, and there would never be a situation where someone would accidentally accelerate or decelerate drastically.

The Paris system is much more like a traditional moving sidewalk, but uses a 'ramp up' section to accelerate passengers to the fast speed, and a ramp-down at the end to bring them to a halt. the animation provided in the article does a great job of showing how this works. It's more sophisticated than just a shorter sidewalk of intermediate speed.

It'll be interesting to see where this goes. Personally, I still see the biggest problem being the point-to-point nature of these sidewalks, making them useful for simple high-traffic routes, but not so useful for, say, getting from one gate to another in an airport, or navigating a city, because with the current design you'd have to get on and off the system at every possible stop.

Comments?

I've been pretty free about spreading my email address around, deciding that since my email address is already on spammers lists, hiding it now would be like trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle. When I see people list email addresses as 'hello at fury dot com' and such, I wonder how well that kind of obfuscation thwarts email harvesting spiders.

The Center for Democracy & Technology knows where spam comes from. This article is the most insightful look into how the online world works that I've seen this year. It's truly fascinating reading.

Comments?

Today's 'International Pi Day,' (being 3/14) and is also Albert Einstein's birthday! What are the chances? <grin>

Actually, do they have Pi day in Europe? Isn't today 14/3 there?

Comments?

Wow. CNN PDF'ed and published a packet of the emails (2.2meg PDF) that went around NASA in the days days before the Columbia disaster. Reading the exchanges is truly fascinating. I'm only on page 9 of 27 now, but it's really clear that a lot of relevant people were aware of the risks, and did what they could to work out disaster scenarios if the wheel well was breeched.

The undercurrent to most of the correspondence was that if it was a problem it could easily become a catastrophic problem, but if the Shuttle made it through the early stages of re-entry, they needed to have decisions regarding bailout or landings sans-gear already decided.

It's horrible that this happened, and worse that more data wasn't available, especially now that detailed investigation found what was probably several tiles in orbit near the orbiter after an orbiter translation (not sure if it was an OMS burn or just an RCS adjustment).

Anyhow, if you're curious, or just morbid, it makes for very interesting reading, both from a historical and an organizational perspective. All in all, I feel this is a different NASA than the one that decided to launch Challenger, but accidents can still happen.

If you decide not to read it, don't worry, I'm sure the movie-of-the-week special will probably be out by September.

Comments?

This is interesting... Flexplay has developed a DVD that will 'expire' 8 hours after it comes into contact with air. [sorry for the nyt link. registration required]

At first I thought this was stupid, but then at first I thought it related to music CDs. Stupid because you would have all the more reason to mp3 encode it immediately upon purchase. But for DVDs, well, when a product enters the market, the public decides whether it will succeed, and where DivX failed (buy a disc with the rights to watch for 48 hours, then buy more rights to 'license' it permanently on a single DVD player), these 'self-destruct' discs might just work.

You see, I have problems with DVDs. I'll buy ones I like, and then rarely watch them. Sometimes I'll rent DVDs at Blockbuster, but that requires me to drive to Blockbuster, rent it, after giving Blockbuster all kinds of personal data they can use to bill me or track me, watch it within a day or two, and then go back there to return it, or face messy late fees.

Netflix is a little better, but then I'm paying a flat monthly fee, when some months I'll watch 8 movies, and other months I'll watch none.

What this new tech would probably do to the market is that DVDs would just be a commodity like groceries. If these single-use DVDs were comparable in price to a Blockbuster rental, I could pick up a couple copies of Lord of the Rings for later viewing at $2 or $3 each, and then buy the full Special Edition DVD when it comes out.

More importantly, I could go shopping for DVDs at the video store once every few months, and pick up all those films I know I want to see, without having to pay hundreds of dollars for permenant versions, or keep going back every week (and hope that the movie's in stock) to rent the one I want to watch that night.

Also, if I really like a film and I want all my friends to see it, I can buy a handful of copies and give them as gifts. At a sixth the price of a DVD, it's not such a grand gesture, or dent in the wallet.

Since the discs are cheap to make, this could also be a great viral marketing mechanism. When you buy a 'full' DVD, you might also get one or two 'single use' copies in there. This way, when I buy Amelie, because I love it so, I can get a few discs that I can give to friends, making me an instant Amelie evangelist. Those friends, if they love it as I do, might turn around and buy the full DVD, or at least a couple more single-use DVDs of their own, or for friends.

DVD-of-the-month-club also becomes a much more financially reasonable proposition.

Christmas would be much more fun if I didn't have to hope that my friend would like the DVD I chose for her, or pretend to like the one I got. When you can give someone a library of single-viewing experiences, you're more likely to make them happy, and it's easier to trade an inexpensive item with your friends for one you'd rather have.

Basically, you're buying, selling, giving, and trading movie tickets that you can redeem in your own home, the instant you open the airtight seal.

Especially when you consider how many portable devices use DVDs (computers, protable players, card, etc.), the idea of being able to 'rent' a DVD that you never have to return or pay late fees on, and can wait as long as you want before using, looks like exactly what's needed.

Despite the instant reaction to any sort of digital rights management technology, I actually think this is way cool, and could completely change people's spending habits on DVDs.

Comments?

Have that difficult-to-shop-for person on your Christmas list? Sure, they might have everything, but now you can give them a little bit of everything all in an easy-toting case!

Note that while radioactive elements are included, they don't go into the transuranic manmade elements.

Comments?

So Manchester, UK was "rocked" by a 3.2 temblor this morning, and later was hit by two larger earthquakes which, at this time, don't have Richters attached to them yet.

The funny bit is that everyone seems so surprised that there could be a larger quake after the first. The term 'foreshock' apparently hasn't crossed the pond, and even experts at the British Geological Survey seemed a bit surprised:

Julian Bukits, of the BGS, told BBC News 24 that it was unusual to have further quakes that were stronger than the first.

He said it was usual to have a strong tremor followed by further smaller aftershocks, but sometimes there could be up to three quakes leading up to a "bigger earthquake".

In truth, foreshocks are really common, and in the event of a 4.0 or higher, the USGS will usually put out a warning that there's a 20% chance of a quake larger than the first within the next 48 hours.

Okay, okay, so maybe I'm just being picky. I just get a kick out of how the BBC put "bigger earthquake" in quotes.

Comments?

Last June, astronomers discovered a new planet, one tenth thie diameter (and one hundredth the volume) of the Earth, but is bigger than all the asteroids put together.

Hopefully this won't turn into another 'it's a planet, it's a comet, it's an asteroit, it's a moonlet' astro-pissfight. True, it's smaller than Pluto, but it doesn't have Pluto's ambiguous orbit, and a rock 800 miles in diameter in a regular circular orbit in the planetary plane isn't a trivial mass.

The discoverers dubbed the planet 'Quaoar,' after the 'great force of nature that summoned the world into being' worshiped by the Tongva people who inhabited the Los Angeles area before Western infiltration.

On another note, I found one paragraph in BBC article amusing:

However, Quaoar is not an official name - at least not yet. In a few months, the International Astronomical Union, astronomy's governing body, will vote on it.

I like the wording they used. It just reminds me of Enterprise last season, when T'pol says that the Vulcan Science Directorate has established that time trave doesn't exist. Astronomy isn't like football, the stock market, or Paraguay. A science can't have a governing body. Sure they can vote on what to call a planet, or whether to even classify it as a planet, but I'd like to see them try to vote on Kepler's laws of planetary motion, the gravitational constant, or Chandrasekhar's limit.

So: Another planet. First new one in 76 years. Nifty, but I wouldn't want to build a summer home there.

Comments?

Just an interesting story I read today, on the ongoing story of Provigil [Tampa Tribune], talking more about current presecription habits and recreational uses or lack thereof. Here also is a reporter's first-person account.

It's interesting that they term using provigil to stay awake overnight as a 'recreational use.' They also use the term 'lifestyle drug' when grouping it with propecia, prozac, and viagra... That's probably a better fit.

Anyhow, I know we've talked about it before, but I'm gonna keep up on this issue as it evolves. I'm curious about the progression of cultural acceptance (or lack thereof) of medicine that changes the paradigm of life. Kinda reminds me of cloning. It was all interewsting, until it unexpectedly became a reality, and now there's the polarized (unequally, but nevertheless most people aren't indifferent) public and political attitdes about it.

But I'm not even going to get in to cloning. I just want to be able to steal time now and then.

Comments?

So today I'm planning on skipping my Communication Design Fundamentals course to go see a lecture from Stephen Wolfram regarding his new book, A New Kind of Science which I've touched on before.

The book is a tome, and it's hard to wade through it while trying to keep its pomposity from sticking to your boots, but maybe seeing him in person will provide a nice precis of the text, and either encourage me to actually work through the tome, or know enough to put it into storage the next time I have to render judgement on my books' fates.

Comments?

Astral Projection, Out of Body Experiences, whatever you want to call it, CNN says researchers think they may know what causes it.

Sorry for another 'mainstream media' link, but as Joss said when he tearfully killed off Tara, it would be just as wrong to not do it because of the fear of backlash.

Personally, I think the conclusions are a little dubious, based on the paucity of the data and the sample size (one person). It reminds me of how people in the Middle Ages thought tomatoes were poisonous, because people who cooked with them occasionally went insane. In that particular case, there was a causal relation, but the conclusion was invalid. The real story? People had just started using lead cookware, which the acids in the tomato would break down, putting lead (a known psychotic) into the food and the body.

The same thing happened in Rome when they used lead pipes for plumbing.

Comments?

Written around midnight, Thursday August 29th

When I flew to Pittsburgh last June to find an apartment, it was the first time I'd been on a plane since jumping out of one. The ascent to cruising altitude was different than every other ascent I'd made, because up until this Summer what happened outside the cabin window was just an unfolding story, geographic in nature, being told on a continental canvas, at a crawling 550mph.

That particular climb into the wild blue hither was different, because I could no longer suspend my belief at the sight outside my window. Having thrown myself (err, been thrown, that is) out of a plane at 14,000 feet, I knew what that distance really means, and what the fall fees like. Not that I was panicked, but it created a conduit of reality, piped into the otherwise insulated torpedo of calm within the rushing mayhem of wind and thrust just inches away from the injection-molded membrane and embedded windows.

Like that four-hour voyage to O'Hare, this straight shot from Pittsburgh to San Francisco brings to light a new dimension of the incredible nature of air travel. Just three weeks ago Ammy and I spent eight days driving 3200 miles between the same dots that I'm currently connecting at over 20 times the aggregate speed.

When you're a kid (or an avid Slashdot reader) one of those questions that comes up from time to time is 'what would your superpower be?' My answer was always the same: teleportation. The power to free myself from the confines of geography always seemed more enticing than freedom from gravity or other powers (and yet in my dreams I can fly when nobody's looking).

After spending days driving cross-country, I have a better feel for what it must have been like a century or two ago. The magnitude difference between flying from coast to coast and driving that distance is roughly the same as the difference between driving it and taking a wagon train across the western frontier. Surprising to me though is that the main difference isn't one of duration, though that's the easiest metric to measure: It's intentionality.

An 18th century family bent on homesteading in the West had to give up everything. The journey was all-consuming, a tremendous commitment, not only for the journey out there, but because of the difficulty of returning. You don't up and move to Nevada, and come back to Boston for holidays.

When cars and the highway system started to tie our country together with asphalt ribbons and interchange bows, lifestyles progressed on with it. At the end of manifest destiny, when Americans had it all, we moved to the next step: having it all at once. Exploring the country was a personal adventure; not a dangerous expedition into the unknown, but a voyage of self-discovery as much as one of first-hand experiences of secondhand stories and pictures.

Now that air travel is ubiquitous, the hour-hand is the one that matters. Intentionality takes a seat next to convenience when for most intents travel is instantaneous.

[side note: I'm looking at the window at the most fantastic lightning storm just outside Denver. It's a wild experience to watch it from the top of the thunderheads, illuminating the clouds more than the back(under)lighting of the city below. You can really see the paths the strikes take inside the clouds; arc-sparks joining together in a snaking pattern that stretches across miles, yet compressed to a few arc-minutes in my own view above it all.]

Of course price is a factor, but factoring in the opportunity costs of lost work when driving (or wagonnering), air travel is far more efficient.

But I digress. Economic arguments are too easy. What I mean to say is that air travel is already on par with so many levels of teleportation. Sure, 20-cent transport booths would be another leap beyond what we have today, but when it takes between 3 and 9 hours to get anywhere in the country from anywhere else in the country more than 180 miles away, distance starts to lose its meaning. How is Denver different than Anchorage or New York when two hours of air travel represents just a faction of the time spent packing, getting to and from the airport, waiting for flights or camping out at baggage claim? Mental maps start to deviate from mercator projections as temporal distances rely more on hubs, connections, and distances from airports than they do on any measure of linear distance. New York City will always be closer than Elko, Nevada. It's hardly the first time. Seas and mountain ranges were more powerful distancers than miles of grassland a century ago. Now they cease to matter, as long as there's enough population to justify conquering nature, carving tunnels and spanning bridges.

It was only 500 years ago that the average European wouldn't travel more than 20 miles from their birthplace. Now consider that for those people in that time, a 20-mile journey would be taken on foot, carrying supplies on their back. Navigating on rough terrain (as seen through our soft-soled eyes), they would be lucky to travel such a distance in a day. Certainly it seems primitive to have a life-long horizon of less than 20 miles, but when a third of Americans haven't even seen an ocean, and most haven't ever been farther from home than they could get in a day, who are we to declare ourselves cosmopolitan through anything other than convenience?

Anyhow, this is the shortest 5-hour plane trip I've ever taken. Recalling so many recent 5-hour stints behind the wheel, ploughing through the night and crosswind for 400 miles before finding a hotel to make up for a morning and afternoon of sightseeing, being in the air now feels so much like cheating. A part of me misses the road, and the unexpected sights that bind the cross-country travellers together in ways that being trapped in a middle seat vieing for elbow room never could. On the road all you share with your fellow travellers is the thrill of the journey. Your journeys are all different, and you're coming from and going to different places, both physically and emotionally. On the plane, everyone is either from point A or point B, and the trait you share is wanting to get to the other one as quickly as possible.

That, and I keep expecting to see Bobbi, excitedly urging me along.

Comments?

"Ooh, honey, is this diamond engagement ring your Grandmother's?"

"No, it's my Grandmother."

Eew.

Comments?

Err, um, yeah. Anyhow:

There's a solar eclipse on Monday! The western half of the US will be treated to a partial eclipse in the evening hours, with Los Angeles seeing 80% of totality and San Francisco seeing a 68% occlusion maxing out around 6:20 PM.

For more details on viewing conditions and times in your neck of the woods (including the total (well, annular) eclipse for those in the south tip of Baja or the Mexican mainland), check out NASA's full eclipse info page.

Comments?

God damn IE. Before it crashed in mid-composition, I wrote 500 words about Stephen Wolfram's new book, "A New Kind of Science" before linking to a great Wired story written by Steven Levy on Wolfram, his book, and the decade-long journey to create it and publish it, and a Slashdot review from a reader who's skimmed the surface of the dense 1200-page tome.

My copy's arriving from Amazon in just a few hours. The first self-funded publication run of 50,000 copies has already sold out, so who knows how long it'll be before Amazon, Ingram, and bookstores nationwide will be able to fill orders for the book which yesterday was Amazon's #1 bestselling item.

More to come as I dive into the work that's already made a big splash (good and bad) in the scientific community.

Comments?

I think I wrote about it before, but a cursory google search didn't turn anything up, and now there's another article...

I'm talking about Provigil, the FDA-approved pill that lets people stay awake for 40 hours straight, with no side effects (except mild nausea in a small percentage). As the LA Times reports, Provigil has been tested on swing-shift workers, military helecoptor pilots, and others extensively and is extraordinarily effective at obviating the need for sleep.

It's not a stimulant, it doesn't give you a rush, or make you hyper, or have a corresponding 'low'. It just maintains a normal wakeful state without lethargy or decrease in attention span.

There are days when I'm feeling creative, getting into the creative swing at 2am, and wow I wish I could just take one of these and be fine all night and the next day at work. Not every day, not every week, but once in a while it can make all the difference when time seems in such short supply.

Comments?

I love SFGate. Hard-hitting news reporting interspersed with fluffly poignant editorialism. Today's gem: Asteroid to obliterate life on Earth in 878 years. Kill it for the Children.

It brings a tear to my eye.

Comments?

So I don't talk about my family too often 'round here, but I'd like to say a little about my sister, Susie.

Susie's a teacher in Los Angeles, teaching Biology to 8th graders, and in addition she teaches on the Homework channel, where 70,000 kids see her for about an hour each week. I've seen tapes of her shows and I'm proud and amazed at what she can do, on live TV no less.

Last week she did a 20-minute presentation on using crickets to tell the temperature, or to be more specific, she did a presentation on how the real world differs from the ideal scientific method. I think this is her best episode, and though I don't expect anyone to watch the whole 20 minutes, there are some really funny bits for those of you who do. Enjoy!

Comments?

It's funny to look at history and see how often, and severely, ideology got in the way of scientific discovery.

Theories of gravity, evolution, planetary motion, the spherical earth, even flight, all had to overcome ridicule and disdain, blockades not always limited to theistic beliefs.

It's so nice that now we look at science empirically. Sure, religion and morality often dictates what we should or shouldn't do (cloning, for example), but it doesn't stop new ideas from being pursued; ideas that might fly in the face of conventional scientific beliefs. Right?

Wrong.

It seems that after the Pons and Fleishman Cold Fusion debacle of 1989, researchers exploring tabletop fusion are cast into a corner smaller and darker than the one where SETI researchers cower.

Researchers exploring a new method of tabletop fusion, putting their paper through standard peer-review channels, have nevertheless been badgered at every stage, ridiculed, dismissed, and blocked wherever possible from presenting their findings.

Their paper, finally published in the peer-reviewed Science journal, almost never saw the light of day, blocked by those who believe that the concept is folly (or is already being utilized in government labs). It's a very interesting look into the 'once burned, twice shy' atmosphere of the scientific community.

Comments?

So wrong cute!

Comments?

I'm loaning a friend my Vision Science book for her class in Visual Perception. I envy her this semester, taking Visual Perception with Stephen Palmer, and Mind & Language with George Lakoff. I remember when I was in those classes, and how clear it was that you were learning from two of the leaders in the field (and I mean that in the good way). She may also get the chance to study in a small neurology seminar with Rich Ivry. Ivry's great, not only because of his extreme knowledge (and ongoing research) in the field, but because he's easygoing.

Back when I took his Cognitive Neuroscience course (CogSci 127), I remember (and wouldn't you know, I've got the photos too) when he talked about Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. Basically, a TMS is a solenoid that generates a very powerful, but highly focused magnetic field that disrupts the delicate electrical potentials within its reach.

The thing is shaped like a ping-pong paddle, with a wire going from the handle to a computer that controls the pulse duration and frequency. The flat paddle projects a disruptive field a few cenitmeters beyond its surface. Scientists use it to create temporary harmless brain lesions. Basically, this will stop a select few square cenitmeters of a person's cerebral cortex from functioning for under a second per pulse.

As we in the class are all amazed by this, he rolls out a cart with a laptop and a TMS paddle on it and asks his head TA if he could come to the front of the room. It sucks to be the GSI. But no, the TA was going to man the computer, while Ivry took the paddle in his own hand, placed it carefully on the right part of his skull (right forward parietal lobe, the motor cortex, a little off from the top, the part controlling the left arm and fingers), holds out his left arm, and signals to the TA.

Professor Ivry takes his role as an educator very seriously.

The class goes very quiet. Shuffling stops, pens stop writing, the 360 students in the room completely fixated on what's about to happen. A flashbulb goes off and 361 heads turn toward me as I sheepishly lower the camera and everyone starts laughing. Once everyone looks back to the spectacle-in-the-making, Ivry gives the sign and the head TA presses a few keys. Pulses accented by quick beeps pulse though the paddle, and every four seconds the professor's arm and fingers twitch. "Okay, now I'm going to concentrate on keeping my fingers absolutely still" he says, and there's absolutely no difference.

I snap another picture without a flash, just in case it looks better (it did).

It starts to dawn on some of the students that he could move the paddle a little along the motor cortex and affect other parts of the body, the face, the legs, the toes, and right next to toes on the cortex, the genitals. Scattered pockets of giggling ensue. Made bold by the professor's daring, a few students call out requests: "Can you put it at the back of your head?" (occipital lobe: temporary lack of vision for part of the visual field (not darkness, but a completel lack of awareness that it exists)), "Can you put it at the front?" (prefrontal cortex: temporary lack of personality), "Broca's! Broca's!" (Broca's Area: inability to formulate coherent words).

But no, even when a few students volunteered to be guinea pigs (err, monkeys. I think this thing could probably disrupt a whole guinea-brain at once, and that wouldn't be good) trying, no doubt, to remember where the pleasure center of the brain was. Besides, it wouldn't activate it, as an electrode would. It would just disrupt it anyhow.

I wonder if the grad students ever mess with the paddle after office hours.

Ahh, I miss Berkeley...

Comments?

...but never thought to ask.

the Sea Monkey Worship Page has an excellent FAQ, answering such stumpers as "Are there any countries that would prosecute me for owning Sea Monkeys?" "How do Sea Monkeys mate?" and "What are Sea Monkeys made of?"

For the more inquisitive Monkey-lover, there is also the Ask the Sea Monkey Lady Answer Page, which delves into such advanced topics as "How can I encourage my Sea Monkey to reveal his true orientation?", "How will my Sea Monkey change if I neuter him?", "Why are my Sea Monkeys floating at the top of the tank?", "Do Sea Monkeys feel pain?" and "Is it okay to kiss my Sea Monkey?"

Some of the answers are even funnier than the questions. Wow. I haven't wanted to recapture my youth (err, the young, young youth) so badly since that time I went online and bought a large supply of Shrinky Dinks! (Let me tell you, oven... toaster oven... completely different animals when it comes to Shrinky Dinks. Trust me.)

Comments?

One of my favorite things to do in the UC Berkeley library was to go to the archives of Scientific American and read issues that were sixty or even a hundred years old, seeing the fantastic tales of future technology like single-passenger helicopters that everyone will use for personal transport by 1950, or 'personal telegraphs' in everyone's home in our lifetime.

Along that vein, I present a thoroughly awful article on CNN today: "Antimatter could fuel rockets, heal patients."

It's not that the ideas presented are completely farfetched, it's that they don't give any premise for how it could happen. Sure, we can make a little antimatter, and now pundits are writing about how interstellar travel is 50 years away, while omitting the small problem of how an antimatter interstellar engine would work. It's as if the author suddenly stumbled on to antimatter and said "eureka!"

It reminds me of the South Park episode featuring the Underpants Gnomes, and their plan for world domination:

1. Steal Underpants
2. ???
3. Profit!

I'm sure the people working on the problem are a little more serious, but I'm just thinking about the kid digging through internet archives 100 years from now who sees this article and just giggles and turns the e-page.

Comments?

Australian magazine The Age tackles this question, summarizing a year-long study where several volunteers shaved their bellies in the name of science, to test the 'hair conveyor-belt theory.'

More incredible to me than the study itself, (which is insanely great research in the name of abstract knowledge) is the quote:

"Most people have belly-button lint and they want to know why it collects in the navel, what it is composed of and why it is almost always blue,"
-Dr Kruszelnicki

Wow. And I thought the blue-lint thing was just me. I've actually talked to friends about this. Nice to see I'm not alone!

Comments?

Also, the current buzz is that "Ginger" will be unveiled on this morning's Good Morning America. Could be the world's next innovation, could be parp. I'll be on the train, so TiVo will have to watch for me and I'm sure all the pundits will be spinning stories by the time I arrive at work.

Comments?

Kudos to How Stuff Works for a timely, useful, and informative article about Digital Satellite Radio (aka XM-band radio).

Just like the net is starting to move from the ever-weakening advertising model into subscription services (Salon, Yahoo! and Slashdot are prime examples), mainstream media is following suit. HBO is a purveyor of fine serial content instead of just movies, people pay monthly fees to ditch commercials via TiVo, and streaming ad-free audio in your car is available now, and will probably be everywhere in the next 18 months, with low hardware costs, designed to lure you into the $9.95 monthly fees.

Anyhow, an interesting article. Hope you enjoy it, and that your Thanksgivings are going well!

Comments?

The FDA today approved a contraceptive patch. A patch a week for three weeks, then one week off.

Sounds like life is imitating tech. I wonder if they'll release patches to stop recently discovered viruses or worms. Still, a patch that prevents the spawning of child processes is really pretty cool.

Okay, so I really just wrote this post to help the story make it to the top of blogdex.

Comments?

I've never been in a big meteor shower before. I may not be able to say the same thing next week.

The Leonid Shower is coming to town, and by all accounts it should be huge. It's going to reach its peak shortly after midnight on Saturday night (Sunday morning) the 17th/18th.

Sadly, I'll be spending Saturday afternoon leaving one of the best places to see the event, Lake Tahoe. At that altitude, there should be roughly 2700 visible streaks per hour (or one every 1.3 seconds) at its peak at 2am. The good news is that I'll be at Crystal's birthday in Vallejo, so we won't be in the thick of light pollution, and if we're feeling motivated we can still take a short drive and get away from most of the background light and still get around 2200 streaks per hour (compared to about 350/hr in urban areas (which is still nothing to sneeze at)).

Want to find out when and where is the best time to watch? Grab your latitude and longitude (or pick the biggest city close to you) and take it to NASA's Leonid Flux Estimator. It'll tell you the best time to watch, and give you a rough idea of what you can expect.

This should be quite incredible. Just the thing for a birthday party.

Comments?

More than you ever thought you'd know about making artificial snow, Disneyland-style.

(props to Jessajune)

Comments?

It's strange to articulate, but I've lost my web center. How to explain? Let me try this way:

Fall of 1990, I was 200 lbs, a brand new high-school senior. Somewhere in my head I decided I didn't want to be so big, and somewhere in my body, something changed. Everything got unsettled, and when the chaos subsided, I had a metabolism with a resting balance of 170 lbs. No monumental effort, just a natural change. That and I grew my hair long, but that's probably coincidental.

Around 1993 one day I suddenly was paranoid of public toilets. It's as if I was dropped into an alien culture and had no experience with them before, as I had no memory of how I felt about using public toilets, and therefore was timid about using them (sit-down only. No problem with urinals). I knew it was something I needed to get over, but I couldn't remember how I thought about them before.

In short, it was as if I had become so accustomed to feeling a certain way, that when I experienced the subject in question, I completely stopped reinforcing the behavior or feeling, and suddenly that engrained feeling vanished from non-reinforcement, and I was left using episodic memory instead of procedural memory to figure out (and remember) how I felt about things.

No, it's not just toilet trauma either. In 4th grade I suddenly became paranoid about sharing straws with my best friend Ali. When taking classes at UCLA my senior year in high school I had to remember how to walk casually. Suffice it to say that now and then skills, no, habits, completely disappear and I have to relearn them from scratch.

Okay, so taking the long way around: I've lost my web center. I used to have a routine, a litany of sites to churn through, blogs, news sites, humor, a regular garden path I would walk each morning to reacquaint myself with the world around me, yet somewhere along the past few weeks the garden's become overgrown and all the paths are obscured.

To take a different metaphorical angle, it's as if my site memory is like a standing wave on a string, keeping it's own form, changing only amplitude. Then a dissonance comes along and throws the oscillations just out of whack enough that they lose any sense of harmony; not just a beat pattern when the two tones happen to match up, but a chaotic loss of any frequency at all (or random mix of all frequencies, depending on how you look at it).

Coincidentally enough, this may be an apt metaphor, as this is one theory on how the hippocampus both writes and eventually (approximately two weeks after the first encounter) erases medium-term episodic memory. It fires the pyramidal hippocampal cells in time with the Alpha wave during the early stages of sleep, reinforcing procedural learning of the previous cycle. This is the effect of feeling like you're on a roller coaster when falling asleep after a day at the amusement park, or perhaps more recognizably, the feeling of seeing geometric forms falling from the sky after playing too much Tetris. This is the feeling of your brain learning new abilities.

You don't notice weeks later when the selfsame cells fire in the inverse of the Alpha waves (having gradually moved out of phase since day one until they are exactly a half-cycle behind), erasing the mid-term memory. You don't notice because this is when the procedural memory has either become established in long-term storage, or has fallen into disuse and is being 'recycled.' This is the stage when playing Tetris (or Dance Dance Revolution) goes from the stage of easily reading and dealing with the oncoming symbols, to the stage of doing so without liminal thought. This is when you can carry on a conversation without losing much skill.

Okay, floating off topic, but maybe you've caught my point. I don't have a bookmarks list. I don't have a page with all my favorite links on them. I have a brain with a notoriously short attention span, that knows what sites to look at from procedural, and to a lesser extent, mnemonic devices. Now that that procedure has gone without reenforcement, and has fallen victim to chaos, I have to try and remember sites I've been to, and judge whether I want to go again. It's like I'm starting from scratch, with my only roadsigns being episodic memory of having been to this site or that one, and the fledgling procedural memories that have been reinforced for the last month, namely CNN, SFGate, ABCNews, Yahoo News, etc.

It's enough to mess with a guy's head.

It's really enough.

Comments?

The more I read today, the more I think this is just a huge media buzz stunt by Lucasfilm. How else could they have pulled this off?

My favorite part is bioethicist Art Caplan, quoted on the front page saying, "Human cloning is scary."

Frankly, I just hope it's scarier than Episode One.

Comments?

Anyone else find it amusing that Lucasfilm waits until the day scientists announce they will attempt to create 200 cloned humans to unveil the name of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones?

Coincidence? The 200 women 'host volunteers' will be impregnated in November, just in time for a July gala premiere with 200 identical babies to drive the point home.

It's funny how times change. 20 years ago, Star Wars was the inspiration for entirely new realms of military funding, and now it's a harbinger of things best banned (according to the gov't).

Comments?

Working on Weakest Link story and photos. I'll have 'em up soon. Doing loads of laundry for the upcoming trip.

Meanwhile, check this out: A company called Transgenic Pets, LLC is planning to offer genetically modified non-allergenic kittens somewhere around 2003. They remove the protein that produces cat allergens. It's a cool idea, but it gives me the willies after seeing A.I.

The thing that weirds me out is the cat's sense of history: Will this cat have parents? Can you submit a sample for them to make a non-allergenic cat? Will there be two or three 'models' to choose from?

I like Kisa just fine thankyouverymuch, besides, she's about as non-allergenic as they come naturally.

Comments?

So as I was discussing in an earlier post about Christa McAuliffe's inadvertant role in the Challenger Disaster, it's becoming clear how 'space tourist' Dennis Tito's trip to the International Space Station could result in a disaster having nothing to do with his experience, training, or lack thereof.

I hadn't expected the departure from standard operating procedure to be so similar to Challenger, but there it is. Tito's Soyuz craft took off this morning for the space station, over NASA's objections, as the Endeavour is still docked to the station, pending repair of its computers.

Endeavour is expected to leave on Sunday, but this is by no means a certainty. The Soyuz ship plans to dock with the Station on Monday. Because of the high profile of this mission, and the Russians' need to demonstrate that they have some measure of control, instead of simply taking directives from NASA, they refused to delay the launch by a day or two, to ensure Endeavour's departure.

If Endeavour is still there on Monday, the Russian Space Agency has implied that they'll dock anyhow (the station has more than one docking port). This hasn't been adequately prepared or trained for, and there's a possibility of shearing problems, as you have three very heavy bodies all connected by two relatively small sealed joints (the docking connectors and airlocks).

If I could tell you what could go wrong, it probably wouldn't be a problem, but there are just too many unknowns. In addition, astronauts spent the last few days 'tourist-proofing' the station, an unplanned act that all by itself could initiate a critical unexpected problem.

And of course, the irony is again that if so much pressure hadn't been centered around Tito's 'mission' then there would be a far less likely chance of disaster than there is with all the minor and major changes taking place at the same time in order to accomodate the mission.

Comments?

I figured out why I don't get enough sleep. I get caught up writing posts like this one.

(Note: Slashdot has archived the story, so you'll have to follow the link and search for 'check this shit out' in the resulting page.)

Comments?

An interesting observation from Slashdot: With the launch of one astronaut and two cosmonauts to be the first crew on the new Space Station, it's entirely possible that yesterday was the last time that every member of the human race will be on Planet Earth.

Current schedules plan for continuous occupation of the space station for the next 10 years, and by that time, it's entirely possible, even probable, that the space station will continue to be used, or something will take its place. Eventually there will be manned missions to Mars and other destinations (Moon base in 50 years?).

Anyhow, though space exploration has slowed dramatically since the 60's, today it is steady, with regular, small steps forward (think the turtle, not the hare). In short, there may never again be another day without someone in space.

Centuries from now, when colonies exist on other planets, in space, or even other systems, mankind may mark yesterday, October 31st, 2000, as the day mankind truly left the cradle for good.

Spooky, but cool.

Comments?