ideonexus.com

• The Pacific Rim Nations, including the United States and China, agree that we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions! HOORAY!!! But they didn’t set any targets! BOOOOO!!!
• There’s a call out for Google Earthers to study satellite photos to Help Find Steve Fosset, the adventurer who’s plane went down while scoping out places to go adventuring. To quote Buck Murdock from Airplane II, “Sometimes irony can be so… ironic.”
• A cool artwork concept is Comparitive Morphologies of computers, peripherals, and wires, in the tradition of stunning Ehrenberg Plates.
• Found this one on a few feeds, but the BBC has cute diagrams of the discovery that Our Eyes Focus On Different Letters While Reading, each eye on a different letter about two letters apart, sometimes cross-eyed even, and our brain puts it together into a coherent image.
• The researchers say this isn’t evidence that we are better than conservatives cognitively, but Liberals have twice as much activity in the brain’s deep region, which helps recognize situations where we must refrain from action, such as… gee… I dunno. Iraq?
• Heavy, but enlightening, reading warning: the Internet as the Library of Babel
• File this one in the “No #&$%ing Way!” folder: Is Randall Munroe, author of the brilliant xkcd comic really a former NASA Roboticist? I thought he was like a high school prodigy or something.
• Ohhhh… Ahhhh… Check out the Watercube, National Swimming Center for the 2008 Olympics. Construction began this week.
• Also in the eye-candy department, check out a video of Time-Lapse North American Flight Patterns.
• Pink and White Katydids were found in Osaka. Surely these are the end times.
• Not to be a future Internet sensation, but I thoroughly enjoyed Geeks in Love

Today marks the 150th anniversary of a dark and tragic even in American history, when a group of religious fanatics brutally slaughtered unarmed men, women, and children. On Sept. 11, 1857, at the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Mormon fanatics murdered more than 120 settlers who were passing through Utah on their way to California. The Mormons had assured the pioneers safe passage if they disarmed and surrendered after a force of Paiute Indians and Mormon soldiers had laid siege to the Francher-Baker wagon train for five days.

A person’s faith or lack thereof has absolutely no bearing on the morality of their behavior. Hitler and Stalin were Atheists, the 9/11 hijackers and Taliban were Muslims, the genocidal Crusaders and Spanish Inquisitors were Christians, the Old Testament chronicles the many horrendous atrocities committed by followers of the Jewish faith, Hindus in India have slaughtered entire villages of Muslims in recent years, and Zen Buddhists were complacent in Japanese war atrocities in WWII.

So what is the common thread that ties the Hindu Ghandi, Catholic Mother Theresa, Buddhist Dali Lama, Jewish Albert Einstein, Deist Thomas Jefferson, Muslim Saladin, and Atheist Isaac Asimov together? What motivates and inspires all these famous humanists to their great works?

Perhaps it’s as simple as Thomas Paine, the Atheist who inspired the American Revolution, put it, “My country is the world and my religion is to do good.”

---

The critically-panned film September Dawn is reported to dramatically reenact the events at Mountain Meadows; however, the independent documentary film Burying the Past, which purports to explore the eye-witness accounts, forensic evidence, and cover-up by the Mormon Church, has received much better reviews. I have not seen either film.

Bora Zivkovic on Facebook

This is like collecting sports cards, only scientists!!! Ha! Ha! Time to sell the comic book collection, I’ve found a new hobby.

Bora Zivkovic runs A Blog Around the Clock, works as the “Online Community Manager” at Public Library of Science (PLoS-ONE), one of the two main organizers for the annual NC Science Blogging Conference, one of the organizers for the Open Laboratory annual best-of science blogging book, and his “scientific specialty is chronobiology (circadian rhythms and photoperiodism)”–what I consider a very obscure specialty, but one he covers in an entertaining manner without being pedantic.

While there aren’t specific posts of Zivkovic’s that stand out in my mind, I am perpetually blown away by the incredible stream of clock quotes, blog rolls, events, and news articles that he references on his blog. As one of the most prolific writers on ScienceBlogs, he is one of the many reasons I had to switch my RSS feed there from all blogs to just the “Select” feed to keep from getting overwhelmed.

Zivkovic is also an activist blogger, helping to expose the attacks on open-source science and blogger lashback, recent developments in political interference in science, and promotes using Blogs as Weapons in the war against the proprietary establishment.

And did I mention he’s now on my facebook friends? BOO-YAA!!!

There’s gotta be a Science Scouts badge for this one. If not, there needs to be one. The “I have X Scientists on my MySpace/Facebook Profile” badge.

I’ve already got the “I may look like a scientist but I’m actually also a ninja” badge:

Ninja Scientist	I blog about science	I can be a prick when it comes to science
Some of my Science Scouts Badges

Heard last week on NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” on what Leona Helmsley’s dog, Trouble, is going to do with the $12 million she’s inherited:

“She’s going to buy a bunch of professional football players and angry them up.”

---

After reading the letter to the editor “Anger at Vick disproportionate” in my local paper concerning Michael Vick’s dog-torturing, I was compelled to respond. Today the Daily Advance published my letter, “Vick shouldn’t play in NFL again.” Since this link will go dead in a few weeks, and I’m not too fond of the way the editor modified it (usually they greatly improve on my submissions), I’m posting my original here:

Michael Vick was the sportsman who got me following college football. So crucial were his talents to the Virginia Tech football team, that I remember when Vick couldn’t play due to an injury, Coach Beamer went ahead and put him on the field anyway, his leg in a cast in an attempt to keep from losing a game. Vick’s professional football career had so much hope that the Falcons were rearranging their entire team around taking advantage of Vick’s talents. I even owned a #7 Vick football jersey.

Not anymore. The millions of dollars Vick would have earned from his football career have vanished, and his luxuriant lifestyle will soon be replaced with months or years of prison time.

And for what? A dog-fighting operation. He threw it all away to indulge in strangling, electrocuting, hanging, drowning, and forcing dogs to tear each other apart in a ring for his amusement. The more than 50 dogs still living at Vick’s home are so irreparably brutalized that they must be euthanized, because they have been raised to be killers.

Public outrage over Vick’s crime has everything to do maintaining a healthy society. The serial killer, Jeffery Dahmer, abused and killed dogs as a youth, as do many psychopaths. By safeguarding the welfare of “man’s best friend” we are safeguarding the human race as well.

Football players are public figures. They are idols and heroes in addition to being superstars. We and the NFL have a responsibility not to put someone who butchers dogs for their own decadent amusement back in the game for our children to admire and look up to. Michael Vick must never play professional football again.

There was a lot more I wanted to vent, but you can only say so much with a 300-word limit.

• Sad news from the field of non-human cognitive studies as Alex the Grey Parrot is Dead at 31.

The Mighty Stephen Hawking

• Stephen Hawking fans rejoice! Our oh-so-brilliant Simpsons character, who has also done some stuff with space or physics or something, has written a Kid’s Cosmology Book. No release date yet, but I’ve got it tagged onto my Amazon wish list. (See also: Lego Stephen Hawking)
• D’oh! “A 20-year government effort to restore the population of an endangered native trout in Colorado has made little progress because biologists have been stocking some of the waterways with the wrong fish“
• Is it really actually veritably honest-to-goodnessly indeedily going to in fact happen? The image of the New Mexico Spaceport Design gives me hope for the space-tourism industry.
• Can one person changing their behaviors really make a difference? Not really. Mike Tidwell explains How Florescent Lights and Hybrids are Hurting the Environment
• A Woman visits her own heart at the Welcome Collection in London.
• Half of Americans are of below average intelligence, which explains why two-thirds say they would believe their faith over empirical evidence when the two conflict. Well, that’s my explanation for it anyway.
• The deep seas are getting wired with cameras, fiber optics, and other instruments as part of a NASA-scale Mission to Explore the Oceans.
• NASA’s all-time most rewarding mission continues it’s slow, agonizing death as Hubble telescope loses another gyroscope.
• I’m still partial to remote-desktopping into work, but apparently IvanAnywhere Robot gives a programmer 1,350 kilometers away from work a more interactive presence with his distant coworkers.

I couldn’t take it anymore. Yes, I know white text on black background really cheeses off some people, but I find it easier on the eyes once the pupils open up and adjust to the diminished brightness. I tend to agree with the reasoning that black text on a white background works on paper because paper reflects light; therefore, white text on a black background is preferable on a computer monitor because the light is coming through the monitor, where bright colors bleed over dark ones.

There might also be a bit of an environmental reason for the white text on black background format, and that is energy efficiency. EcoIron estimates a black Google would save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year. The Wall Street Journal had Energy Star’s power-management program ask consulting firm Cadmus Group run a quick test of this claim. They found dark colors conferred a 5% to 20% energy savings on old CRT monitors, but found negligible savings on LCDs.

Then there’s Blackle, a black version of google search, which claims to save energy (Hat Tip to Flying Sirkus for the link.). Techlogg researched 27 monitors, comparing their energy consumption on Google and Blackle, also finding significant energy-savings for CRT’s using Blackle; however, they also found Blackle consumed slightly more energy on smaller LCD screens, with most monitors larger than 22-inches consuming slightly less energy on Blackle.

Techlogg’s recommendation for eco-conscious geeks? Reduce your monitor’s refresh rate for the most savings.

Blackle The Energy Star Version of Google?

Now I’m eager to get ahold of a point-of-use electrical meter and run some tests on this myself. If my blog saves me a little energy, then screw all you envious dwarf-monitor users.

In the meantime, I’ll continue rationalizing this style as a legibility issue, and not a belligerent refusal to change styles from my former life at what I now refer to as ideonexus beta. Besides a page hosted on NASA’s domain seems to indicate that this format is at least acceptably legible.

Not to mention the folks at LaughingSquid use the same format, and they’re a bunch of artists, and, even better, is the design at Pink Tentacle, which I find very easy on the eyes and also benefit from the Cephalopod aesthetic.

Hmmm… I think this site needs a “cephalopod” tag.

Whoops! I’m a week behind on this one, but apparently September is Eat Local Month, an effort to get people to think about where their food comes from by eating food produced within 100 miles of where you live.

Why eat local? See 10 Reasons to Eat Local Food. “Local” is better than “Organic.”

Waitaminute! No, I’m wrong. The Eat Local Challenge is scheduled for October 3rd. That’s a relief, and it’s only a single day, and this one gives us a 150 mile radius. That’s nowhere near as daunting as foraging in my backyard for grubs for a month.

Hold on… No, the Eat Local Challenge is in May, the Whole Month of May. So that’s two months and a day every year I’ve got to try and eat food produced within 100-150 miles of Elizabeth City, North Carolina??? Sure we’ve got a good deal of farm produce, but eating local seafood here means adding to our problem of collapsing fish stocks. Ever feel damned if you do, damned if you don’t?

I’m not trying to be obtuse here. I think this is an awesome idea, but it has two really big problems:

1. It’s disorganized. Pick a date, stick with it, and get corporate sponsorship. Get all the treehugger sites on board.
2. It’s too long, which violates the “people are lazy” truism. I’m lazy and I’m intimidated by a month of eating locally. This should be a one-week challenge so it doesn’t scare away those of us who are ecologically mindful, but not devotees to the cause.
3. The goal here is to promote a meme. Get people planting gardens in their back yards, fruit trees, stopping in at the farmer’s market, etc. Push Eat Local resources and “how to” guides more than anything.

“I”m a lazy lazy man,” to quote Krusty the Clown from The Simpsons, like most people, and I don’t have time for 24/7 environmentalism. My fellow dirt-worshiping treehuggers are trying to say that we should be mindful of where our food comes from all the time, and that’s great, but package this message consistently, make it inclusive to the point that people who aren’t taking part in the challenge will want to follow it and maybe take an electronic brochure, and dumb it down enough to make everyone care.

Earthday everyday. : )

---

Right before posting this, I found the Eat Really Local Challenge, 100 yards. Not commenting on that with a 1024-foot pole.

My Felis catus
Has Ctenocephalides
he itchy kitty

---

For those of you who enjoy science and enjoy haiku, like I do (Rhymes! Ha!). The Science Creative Quarterly is seeking a few hundred phylogeny haikus.I submitted about two-dozen a month ago, and I recieved an e-mail this week thanking me for the contribution and assuring me they were in the process of building the database as you read this.

Okay, so I can’t seem to get the whole life is a simulation meme out of my head. It’s simultaneously liberating, because life is all B.S., and fascinating, because of all the potential implications.

Thinking about life as just a really advanced video game begs the obvious: Who are the Non-Player Characters? The bots? The game’s A.I.s?

I’ve got my suspicions:

Atrios: Despite the existence of pictures of this blogger who runs Eschaton, I firmly believe this human is merely an actor. The reality is that Atrios is just a clever algorithm, a liberal-pundit flavor of A.L.I.C.E. Bot, perpetually web-crawling the news and spitting out short, liberal-rants to perpetuate the hyper-active commenters on his–or rather–its blog.

Young Republicans: With a name like “dittohead,” and so many pre-programmed knee-jerk responses to political keywords, you just know these plastic-looking pod-people are just game AI’s like the characters in Ultima.

Fraggles:

Fraggles are not Real

Fraggles are not real, no matter how sexually attractive I may have found Mokey in my confused youth.

Ryan Somma (aka. “me”): I’m a bot. I’ll do everything in my power to convince you I’m not a bot, that’s because the Cartesian Duality phenomena in my brain has me convinced that my mind is separate and distinct from my body. It’s not my fault I think I’m a real person, I’m just programmed that way.

So are you. : P

George Bush’s “One-Fingered Victory Salute”

George “W” Bush Jr.: This one’s a no-brainer. I mean, come on. A bumbling, uninquisitive, academically-challenged doofus of a man who’s failed his way up all his life, even into the Presidency, is given Ceasar-like authority over America’s democracy because a handful of criminals pulled off some Michael Bay-esque terrorist stunt given the catchy title “9/11???”

Obviously the programmer has a fantastic nose for satire; however, the absurdity of this dramatic situation seriously strains one’s suspension of disbelief. I want my money back.

In honor of the new, radical to the max web-comic-blog howtoons, I thought I’d post resources to the other DIY (Do It Yourself) Movement resources.

We live in a society where producers tell us what we want, and too many of us surrender our individuality and get drawn right into their bullying tactics. The D.I.Y. movement seeks to transform America from a consumer-dominated society back to a producer-dominated society. It’s about empowering individuals, democratizing innovation, and freeing us from the materialist pushers that convince so many to spend their weekends at Wall Mart.

• Howtoons is the brand-spanking new D.I.Y. site for kids that suggests both it’s own projects and simple projects from other sources that are on a level that children, and myself, can master. Great comic art too.
• Instructables is “the brainchild of half a dozen or so MIT PhDs (Worldchanging, 95),” a community of DIY-minded folks who share their family secrets, personal discoveries, and inventions. The projects here run from the ridiculously simple to the advanced, but there are a lot of memes here beneficial to modern living. From Refrigerator Pickles, Geodesic Dome Greenhouse, How to Harvest Squid Ink, CD packaging into a flower pot, or the Headless Suzy Flashdrive doll. Also check out the 12 Volt Battery Hack that will save you $40 on button batteries for laser pointers and such.
• Makezine is indisputably the coolest of all DIY resources online, and their projects are the most advanced. With projects like DIY make a rubik’s cube out of dice, hand crank USB chargers, open source self balancing scooter, silver rings out of 50-cent coins, Solar Bags, Space Balloons, and Braille Graffiti. As you can tell from this last item, Makezine, like most DIY organizations, are also about making a statement with their work in addition to fun and independence.

I really wanted a picture of a fist with D.I.Y. tattooed on it for this post, but was unable to find any such thing online. So I wrote the acronym on my knuckles and snapped a photo of it with my cell phone real quick. I’m trying to rationalize this as being delightfully cheesy, rather than pathetically tacky… like most of my own DIY projects.

---

World Changing, A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, Abrams, Worldchanging 2006, New York, NY.

Sacred Geometry Deciphering the Code

Enchantments

Reading this book took some time. Every two-page spread explores a single concept, and I found myself meditating on the subject matter with every turn of the page, trying to master its concepts. In a few places, I was forced to move on, but, for the most part, Skinner gives the introductory reader everything they should need to grasp the material.

I’m a collector of Phi trivia, and this book did a great job of pointing me to many unfamiliar facts about this golden number and clarifying facts I knew, but didn’t understand.

For instance, did you know the pentagram’s five points are golden triangles? I didn’t. It’s also possible to construct golden triangles inside a pentagon. Using repeating golden triangles, it’s possible to create a sort of pentagram-fractal.

ZomeTool’s connector balls are small rhombicosidodecahedrons

I found in the book’s section on the 13 Archimedean solids (which I had never heard of before (to my delight)), that the connector-balls in the zome construction sets are actually small rhombicosidodecahedrons.

Euclid’s Elements (with cool interactive illustrations, however questionably appropriate),

In other places, Skinner’s observations are interesting, but it feels as though he is stretching to make the connection. Like when he points out that there are 81 stable elements on Earth, and the letters in the Gnostic name for god, IAO, add up to 81, and 81 is an important number on the greek lambda, which is based on the Pythagorean tetractys, which is related to the musical scale.

Greek Lambda, Musical Scales, and Tetractys (It all fits together somehow!)

Reading this actually makes me a little embarrassed about my interest in phi, because it shows that, if you look hard enough, you’ll find connections and synchronicities in everything.

I think this grasping for meaning in every little thing is what makes the book’s final chapters, which explore the mathematical basis of ancient architectures and works of art, the least interesting. So Leonardo Da Vinci, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Parthenon all use “sacred” proportions in their works (note the scare-quotes). All this means is that the humans building them put what they considered sacred into their art and architecture. This is not as fascinating as these numbers occurring the DNA’s double helix, jellyfish colonies, astronomy, snowflakes, and water turbulence, which the book covers in earlier chapters.

Overall, this is a very pretty book. Only time will tell if it survives on my very selective bookshelf over the years, but for right now, I really enjoy flipping through its pages and immersing myself in mathematical ideas as they are expressed in human constructs, nature, geometric figures, and abstract concepts.

“Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?”
- Buckminster Fuller

American Pavilion’s Geodesic Dome Image Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada

The Buckminster Fuller Institute begins accepting submissions for its Buckminster Fuller Challenge today through October 30th, 2007.

…seeks submissions of design science solutions within a broad range of human endeavor that exemplify the trimtab principle. Trimtabs demonstrate how small amounts of energy and resources precisely applied at the right time and place can produce maximum advantageous change.

The institute is founded on the inspiring works of the great humanist Buckminster Fuller, who designed the geodesic dome and devoted his life to sustainable solutions for the human race’s continued existence.

Sacred Geometry Deciphering the Code

Pursuant to my interest in the beauty of mathematical ideas, I decided to pick up a copy of Stephen Skinner’s book, Sacred Geometry, which surveys the beauty and synchronicities of whole numbers and geometric concepts. This is a beautify, however somewhat flawed book, and I’ve decided to break my review of it up into two posts highlighting its negative and positive aspects. I like to get the negatives out of the way up front, and leave off with positives. So…

Two Glaring Goof Ups

Da Vinci’s Drawings of the Platonic Solids (Tetrahedron, Hexahedron, Octahedron, Icosahedron, Dodecahedron)

In the section on the five platonic solids, Skinner notes that the hexahedron (earth) and octahedron (air) are a pair, meaning it’s possible to create one from the other by connecting the vertices to the centers of the faces. Correct, but then he writes that the icosahedron (water) and tetrahedron (fire) are also a pair in this sense, and the dodecahedron (ether) is a pair unto itself; therefore, poetically, ether comes from ether.

Wrong. It’s the icosahedron and dodecahedron that are a pair, each forming the other. I know this because, for a brief phase in my life, I was spending my leisure time getting schnookered and playing with Zome Tools, and have built this association myself. It is the tetrahedron that makes itself; therefore, not quite so poetically, fire comes from fire.

Skinner, like most skips–or doesn’t know about–what I think is the most fascinating aspect of the icosohedron platonic solid: the fact that it is possible to generate three golden rectangles inside it by connecting the vertices. I am so enchanted by this fact, that I keep a ZomeTool model of an icosahedron with the interlaced golden rectangles on my desk at work. It serves as a warning to my geeky coworkers that this desk is my territory:

Ryan’s Icosahedron With Golden Rectangles Highlighted

Now, as Professor Bender will instruct, ignore the cross lines in the figure, but note the rectangle, which has proportions according to the golden rectangle. Now imagine Dr. Bender rotating the object 180-degrees along the horizontal axis, and the horizontal line will reveal another golden rectangle. A 180-degree twist on the vertical axis, and the vertical line will reveal a golden rectangle. Doesn’t that just make your eyes glaze over with indifference???

Me too. Here’s some good pictures of what I’m talking about. Let’s move on.

When discussing prime numbers, Skinner cites Peter Plichta’s Prime Number Circle, which is titled “Prime Number Cross” in the reference I found, but this is an obscure mathematical construction. I suspect his reasoning for using it is Plichta’s focus on figuring out “God’s Secret Formula” from primes, which he didn’t… or maybe he did, and god killed him to keep it a secret. : )

A much more well-known and, to my mind, interesting construct is the Ulam Spiral and the variant Sacks Spiral. Both of these illustrate in much more dramatic detail the concept of primes “regular irregularity,” as Skinner is attempting to illustrate them.

These last two are not errors, but the omissions do make me wonder what else I was missing out on that the author didn’t know about, or didn’t fit in with the theme of his book?

Tomorrow I’ll talk about what I liked in this book.

And he added me as friend! w00t!!! I’m totally pwning these InterWebs and stuff!

The Carl Zimmer, author of many excellent books that I need to read, and author of The Loom science blog, which has covered such fascinating topics as parasitic wasps that mind-control cockroaches and kick-ass Science Tattoos.

Aaaaaand, for the moment, I’m in his top friends!!! And I got the f1rst p0st on his profile! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

Sure, Tom is in the #1 spot, but he’s everybody’s friend on myspace, not discriminating at all. That guy is a slut.

MySpace is pwned!

I had to take a snap shot of this for posterity. You know, before people he actually knows start adding him and I get dropped out of the top friends list and eventually lost under the avalanche of people who will inevitably add him, but, for now, I rule.

This is so going on my resume.