Science Etecetera Marsday, 20080108

January 8th, 2008

Geodesic Gingerbread House
by Slave to the Light

A tasty selection of entries are in for the Bake for Change, sustainable ginger bread house contest. The entries are so sweet they make my teeth hurt.

Two bits of sweetness for the Astronomy geeks, a Mandella Made with Galaxy M74 and the Rings of Jupiter.

Negroponte’s observation that Intel’s dirty tactics against the OLPC is “a little bit like McDonald’s competing with the World Food Program,” seems pretty on the mark. Especially in light of the first-hand account from Peru’s Minster of Education of an Intel Sales-Person trying to convince him to ditch the project (while Intel was part of it) for their more expensive Classmate PC. Luckily, the “Give One, Get One” charitable promotion has generated $35 million and sold a total of 167,000 computers, half to be distributed in the developing world.

A hardware hacker takes apart the OLPC-XO1 and gives it a qualified thumbs-up.

Politicians local to the region are rushing to Protect the Water In the Great Lakes Basin, which contains 18% of the world’s freshwater, before the Federal Government steps in to redistribute it to states who failed to manage their water supplies.

Curious assertion from a member of the field: Biology is Built on an Oral Tradition, because the science doesn’t lend itself well to mathematical explanations.

Christian Science Textbook

This is what science textbooks will look like, if the Creationists have their way.

Breeding two different species of cavefish partially restores vision in 40% of their offspring. The phenomenon has to do with the different species being blind due to errors in different genes, crossbreeding gives the children a good chance of having all good genes for sight. Neat!

To-ga! To-ga! To-ga!

For a lesson in chaos theory and self-organizing systems check out video from an India Traffic Cam.