Science Etcetera Mercuryday, 20080423

April 23rd, 2008

A series of hand-knitted wrappers for electronic devices by Sternlab illustrate our connection to our PEDs.

Knitted Enclosure for a Laptop
Photo by Sternlab

Diderot sought to create an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, Britannica multiplied his effort by dozens of volumes, Wikipedia multiplied Britannica’s effort, and now Distributed Digital Libraries may eclipse them all. It’s like grid computing, but for stored knowledge.

Hypothetically, I Love Lucy broadcasts have traveled 200 trillion miles. Realistically, the signal would be too weak to detect outside our solar system. Food for thought for SETI advocates like myself.

Perhaps books aren’t completely useless, bookshelves of them do serve to insulate homes.

I was glad to see Foundation listed among some life-changing books recommendations from leading scientists.

A Yale student who claims to have impregnated and induced miscarriages in herself over the last nine months has sparked a debate over the terms “pregnancy” and “abortion” and what they mean.

Being distracted makes us more susceptible to advertising.

<SATIRE>Ben Stein’s next movie: Sexpelled</SATIRE>:

Is it proper for NPR, the History and Science channels to accept advertising revenue from the Expelled movie?

Expelled’s technique of sowing doubt without evidence is nothing new, the Tobacco Industry, Global Warming Skeptics, and Environmentalists have all used the same tactic.

Gizmodo poo-poos the idea, but new technological terms and geek-speak are the same in all languages, which, while not a “language” in and of itself, does provoke food for thought.

Quantum Mechanics may explain how birds view the Earth’s Magnetic field. Interesting idea, but someone needs to explain it in plain English.

Carl Zimmer points out the truism that “The More We Know About Genes, the Less We Understand.”

Google is investing in personal DNA indexing services.

Video of BF Skinner Teaching Pigeons to Play Pong:

3 comments to “Science Etcetera Mercuryday, 20080423”

That’s too bad that the signals wouldn’t be detected.

I read that the signals from the Voyager probe were no stronger than a “refrigerator light bulb”, and by the time they got back to earth, they were “one billionth the power of a wristwatch”.

(You gotta love the units of measure science journalism uses… to make the old slashdot joke, “How many Library Of Congresses per second is that?”)

I would think any civilization able to travel to us would also be sufficiently technologically advanced to perhaps have more efficient ways of listening to radio signals than we have, but it’s quite easy to make such a statement as conjecture. :)
by ClintJCL April 23rd, 2008 at 11:48 am
I have a comment (surprise) about the home insulation too. I would like to know the R-value added by a bookshelf.

Typically, if you have just one or two cracks to let heat escape out, you lose a disproportionate of heat. I.E. a 1% gap in coverage will cause you to lose way more than 1% of the heat in the room. I just don’t see how a bookshelf would add more than 1 or 2 R-values.

BUT, I have been wondering: Old clothes. Carolyn gets most her clothes as hand-me-downs from more regular clothes buyers like my sister and our friend Angel. It would just go to waste, so she takes some.

But then we still end up donating huge bags to the Lupus Foundation (we didn’t really choose them — but they’ll take your junk too, so they walked a bunch of heavy junk off our property for us too.)

I definitely have gaps in my insulation upstairs … Raccoons have taken some for nesting, and my house was not built very consistently (there are multiple shingled roofs inside the attic due to the 4 separate builds (1941, 194x, 1955, 2004) for my house.

Could I take my old clothes and shove them between non-insulated floorboards? Of course buying real insulation would be better, but first off — that stuff isn’t free, and trash-clothes are. I’m sure it has some sort of carbon footprint. And it’s unwieldy — you don’t want to rip it up like cotton candy to plug up small gaps, or you’ll have insulation on your skin. Carolyn breaks out right away.

I moved my old carpets up there too, just to give the fiberglass something to nestle into, and insulated it slightly more.

I’m just wondering — is moving our “garbage” (of the non-rotting variety) into our attic perhaps something that could reduce heating bills, carbon footprints, energy use, etc, while also keeping our landfills empty?
by ClintJCL April 23rd, 2008 at 11:55 am
)))))))))))))))))))))))))))
crap i hate it when I do that!
by ClintJCL April 24th, 2008 at 12:40 pm