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Yesterday began Turn Off the TV Week.

Happy Earth Day!!! Take a moment to call your Representative or Senator at 202-224-3121 and ask them to take action on Climate Change.

Earth Day 2008 Logo

Bush’s proposals to combat greenhouse gas emissions are pretty much just the same old same old. Luckily, according to Governor Schwarzeneggar and 18 states all that will change when Dubya leaves office.

This cartoon I think captures the Bush Administration’s plan to tackle climate change. (HT Oranchak).

Eating local reduces your carbon footprint about the same as giving up beef once a week.

Starvation is setting in around the globe in Haiti, India, Cairo, Africa, and elsewhere, as escalating food prices, a direct result of biofuels, are causing riots and pushing people to other extreme acts, like eating mud, to fight off hunger.

Another way to sequester carbon and help meet industrial demand, plant bamboo.

The North American jet stream is moving North and getting weaker.

Some veterans are angry with this week’s Time magazine cover, which compares the fight against Global Warming with the fight against fascism.

Time’s War on Global Warming Cover

Gallup finds no progress in people making green lifestyle choices. But personal choices matter less than group choices.

PETA is offering it’s own X-Prize, $1 million to the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

Cocaine addiction destroys National Parks, as drug traffickers move into protected areas and burn down the forests for their own purposes..

Decades worth of seismic noise recorded from storm surf show heat energy from Global Warming translating to increased wave energy as predicted.

Ed Begley walks the environmental walk.

Mercury contamination has climbed up the food chain in the ocean and into land animals.

GE reports a $12 billion wind turbine backlog.

Climate Change is Bringing Humbolt Squid to California:

Last weekend I got to meet one of my favorite SF authors, David Brin, at a virtual talk in Second Life’s Extropia Community.

David Brin in SL

It was a packed house, avatars kept crashing, lag was evident, but surprisingly mild. Twice my SL interface got a memory error and crashed, meaning when I logged back into the room, I was standing where I was sitting and looking like a putz to everyone else while the room loaded back in. Just like other members of the audience got booted and then reappeared standing and looking around dazed while their avatar reloaded. It’s not like you can yell, “Down in front!”

David Brin in SL

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the talk focused on David Brin’s insecurities about the chat format, and whether or not it was progress. “How on Earth could anybody call this “discourse” subtle or detailed or serious?” Brin asked, obviously frustrated at the fact that keeping up with a chat log involving 80-plus people is an exercise in futility.

Audience Member

I could understand Brin’s frustrations; however, I had to completely disagree with him on the inadequacy of the medium. Many people are perfectly happy with chat rooms, some with blogs, other television, and others books. Brin unnecessarily put down RSS because he has “so little life span,” and seemed to indicate that he believes the “cocktail party” format is superior for communicating information to the Internet.

Audience Member

Yet, I personally absolutely despise real-life parties for the same reason Brin dislikes virtual ones, there’s too many voices going off at once and I end up losing track of all of them. I get dizzy and disoriented at parties, and often feel as though I should wear a button to them that reads, “I’m smiling because I have no idea what’s going on.”

Ozymandias Spark (Me)

At least I can save and review a chat log, usually finding many wonderful meme morsels in them. I sift 400-plus science articles a day, because I’m looking for only the most interesting stories. I blog, because that’s the only way I can keep from being talked over, which is what happens in every other real-life medium I’ve encountered. Instead of criticizing our online formats, David Brin should have been celebrating the fact that people like us have found a way to express ourselves and exchange ideas.

David Brin Talks in SL

Not enough of the discussion was about the Western Enlightenment, but there was enough to make me think about coffee shops, and how they got their start during the Enlightenment. Intellectuals would gather, get caffinated, and engage in late-night discussions about science and philosophy. This was before the Renaissance came along and squash rationality with its oppressive foo-foo idealism.

David Brin Talks in SL User Interface Displayed

Today, coffee shops have been abandoned to the artists, and the scholars of the Enlightenment have moved to the online world, like hanging out on blogs, RSS Feeds, and in the anything-goes realm of Second Life. I think that is progress.

I’ve been struggling to find something profound and insightful about bugs and insects, but I just keep coming back to “Insects are cool.” One drawback to the NCMoNS is their lack of labels for some displays. So I have a lot of insect pictures here that I don’t have titles for. I’m hoping the Netizens of this 2.0 interwingularity will help me figure them out.

Giant Walking Stick

View the complete flickr set here.

Today kicks off the Year of Evolution in honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. It will run until May 2009.

When an glacier lake suddenly emptied in July 2006, it had three times the volume of Niagara.

One of the reasons rice prices have doubled in the last three months is the collapse of Australia’s rice production from drought.

The Borneo pygmy elephant is not actually from Borneo, but is actually the previously thought extinct Javan elephant, preserved by the Sultan of Sulu centuries ago.

Pygmy elephant with radio collar Photo by Cede Prudente

Republicans think it was unfair that Google used its monetary influence to trigger open-access rules at the recent spectrum auction.

Single-celled phytoplankton, Emiliania huxleyi, thrives in elevated CO₂ levels.

Recent observations by scientists are leading them to conclude that road kill may be a leading factor in species population declines.

A high school team has won Shell’s Eco-Marathon with a car that gets 2,843 MPG.

A three-hour project costing $18.39 in parts and sounds pretty sweet, build your own pocket theremin.

It’s not a fish or reptile, what is this mysterious skeleton found by Russian soldiers?

Unidentified Monster Skeleton

An amusing critical analysis of the bad science behind the recent claim that vitamins will kill you.

A 9,550 year old spruce is the oldest living tree on the planet.

Plants thriving on a diet of moon rocks brings us closer to setting up gardens for our Moon Base.

It sounds suspiciously like spam-blogging to me, but there are now automated “living” websites that evolve and adapt to user preferences.

Two girl scouts are refusing to sell cookies, because the palm oil used to make them is driving orangutans into extinction.

Something to think about next time you eat at McDonald’s, their french fries don’t biodegrade:

“Some kids get their ears pierced… others it’s a unique haircut… Charles likes people to see his brain.”
- Supervillain Brain Child’s Mother, from The Tick Cartoon

My friend Carolyn and her husband Clint made this really cool animated video from her CT Scan, which I highly recommend. A few months back, I had a series of MRI’s done, but was disappointed to find the quality wasn’t good enough to make my own animated video from the images.

What I have been able to do is turn a few of the image series into animated gifs. The result are what you see below. Click on any image to see a larger version.

Ryan’s MRI Top View of the Head Click Image for 2.1 MB Size Gif

Ryan’s MRI Front View of the Head Click Image for 2.2 MB Size Gif

Ryan’s MRI Side View of the Head Click Image for 1.5 MB Size Gif

Ryan’s MRI Top View of Neck and Chest Click Image for 2.2 MB Size Gif

Correction: NASA says the 13-year-old boy did not prove them wrong, contrary to all the interweb hype earlier this week.

Dubya is really really really gonna do something about Climate Change for sure this time right? Don’t be a moron.

This is what night skies are supposed to look like. Flagstaff, AZ gets to enjoy them because they are an International Dark-Sky City.

Interational Dark-Sky City, Flagstaff, AZ Photo by Dan & Cindy Duriscoe

Not only might the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) find the fabled Higgs-Boson particle, but it might also find unparticles too.

A moment of silence for Edward Lorenz, father of chaos theory. Can you hear the butterfly’s wings flapping?

Coming soon to a blue sky near you giant foam floating ads.

In America, our government pays farmers to not grow crops, in Canada, the government pays farmers to slaughter and dispose of 150,000 pigs to keep the price of pork up.

Make calls it a “Desktop Biosphere,” but really this is just a cool tutorial for making a terrarium, a self-contained ecosystem in a jar.

Silverbackers is a free game you can download for your mobile phone to learn about preserving the Mountain Gorilla.

Silverbackers Mobile Phone Game

Selectively quoting Darwin to make him sound like a Nazi (Goodwin’s Law), staged speeches, false testimonials, and more in Six Things in Expelled that Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know…

20,000 items and 90,000 images from Darwin’s work have been made available online.

Using fuzzy logic to analyze pollutants could lead to water quality improvement.

It’s not in your head eldest-born, parents really are stricter on us to set an example to our younger siblings.

Explaining the multiple worlds hypothesis with the Super Mario Multiverse:

Considering the list of embarrassingly stupid questions ABC asked Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton last night (see also here, here, here, here, and here), one has to wonder why the candidates prefer such unproductive distractions to engaging the positive and enlightening Science Debate 2008.

It was infuriating watching Barack Obama be questioned about his relationship to Reverend Wright for the bazillionth time, an issue that is old news, when he could have been explaining his policies to ensure American competitiveness online, to tackle Climate Change, and to improve our Educational system..

It was an outrage to watch Hillary Clinton confronted with the same old silly questions about her Bosnia story gaff, when she could have spent those precious moments talking about her plans to switch America to alternative energy, to mend our Educational system, and keep America a high-tech leader in the world.

In taking their discussion to ABC, the candidates simply fed the already-obese media gossip machine. No one was enlightened. With a science debate, they could have demonstrated the very job skills we are interviewing them for with this whole political process, the purpose of which is finding the right person to lead America into the future.

Heading to NY for the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the MoMa. Blog will be running on autopilot until Monday. : )

“There was a time when reading wasn’t just for fags. And neither was writing. People wrote books and movies. Movies with stories that made you care about whose ass it was and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again!” - Joe Bowers, Idiocracy

Channel-surfing with my siblings during a family visit, I happened to come across Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy right at the opening, a film I would not even know existed if it weren’t for HBO playing it perpetually for several months now. We LOLed through most of it, and when the credits rolled and the laughter subsided. Someone stated what we were all thinking:

“That movie hit a little too close to the mark.”

Quick Synopsis: Joe Bauers is a completely average person, average in every way. He gets put to sleep and wakes up 500 years in the future, where centuries of increasingly inane entertainment, Fox News, and commercialism have brought average IQs down to what we consider mentally challenged today.

The opening clip is totally awesome (language advisory):

Although Fox had a contractual obligation to release this film, they did nothing to promote it. Probably because the film’s critical satire of Costco, Starbucks, Carl’s Jr., Fudruckers, and Fox News wasn’t good for advertising.

Mike Judge has a Bachelors in Physics and his film Office Space was very funny and insightful. While his shows King of the Hill and Beavis and Butthead had mass appeal. This blend of intelligence and accessibility make Judge perfect for making a movie like this.

Judge’s depiction of the culture of stupidity is actually frighteningly realistic. Watching the dittohead assault on academia or spending an hour browsing MySpace profiles confirms that, when a doctor in Idiocracy diagnoses Joe, “Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit’s all retarded,” Judge is taking a page from a segment of today’s society.

Friday night’s at the comic shop, we gamers are subject to endless verbal abuse from drunk people hanging out at the neighboring nightclub. They laugh at us, call us fags, and deride our preference for intellectual stimulation to chemical intoxication.

We laugh at them with films like Idiocracy.

Improved images tracking all the junk in orbit around Earth.

Trackable objects in orbit around Earth

Ha! Ha! Ha! Dittoheads’ new hero in the fight against Global Warming Science? A 16-year-old girl!!! She may be more articulate and mature than me, to which I reply: Nya! Nya! Nya!

By salvaging the raw binary data from the magnetic disks carrying Pioneer’s telemetric data, scientists have been able to model the mystery of why the space craft fell behind course during its 35-year journey.

The placenta is an incredible adaptation, and now Stanford scientists are finding clues about its evolutionary origin, beginning with modified bird and reptile genes, and then specializing into species-specific development.

We were just thinking about the possibility of our galaxy’s black hole waking up to fry us all, well, it appears to have had a flare-up just 300 years ago.

Charel’s Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, a 3-ton mechanical calculator designed in the 1840s, has been constructed at the Computer History Museum in California.

Difference Engine No. 2 Photo by Paul Downey

All the science sites are talking this week about scientists simulating Neanderthal speech with models of their larynx, but none of these sites have sound clips of the simulation.

SICK: The mass diversion of North American grain to make ethanol is starving people across the globe.

Maybe I shouldn’t be ridiculing the 16-year-old climate skeptic, when a 13-year-old boy corrected NASA’s estimates of an asteroid hitting the Earth.

Thunderf00t totally opens a can of intellectual whup-ass on Ben Stein’s ignorant, flunky description of Evolution (or “Darwinism” as he so moronically calls it):

When I had to learn SQABasic for automated testing, I downloaded and printed out the 902 page reference guide, three-hole punched it, and put it into a three-ring binder. The only nice thing about this otherwise idiotic and wasteful act of mine was that I printed it two-up and double-sided to conserve paper.

Now I’m in the process of migrating into Database Development. Having to learn the intricacies of our relational database, I downloaded the Ingres 2006 SQL Reference Guide. It’s a PDF file, and it’s taking every ounce of my willpower now not to print it out.

In the comments section of his July, 2007 article, A Defense of the Book, Alan Wall argues:

I value computer technology, and could not function without it (here I am, after all) but I am yet to meet anyone who would rather read Paradise Lost on a computer screen, or read Dickens on a train from a laptop.

He’s correct that there is a strong resistance to people reading entire books electronically, but this is not proof that print-books are intrinsically superior to e-books. The resistance has much more to do with what’s familiar to us. Print books are incredibly inefficient and devoid of features when compared to the same literature placed in an electronic medium.

There’s no “Find” function in a book. I can’t cut-and-paste my favorite quotes and blockquotes into other files, I have to transcribe them by hand or scan them with text-reading software. I can’t store a book online and reference it from any computer in the world, including my cell-phone.

If I cite a book in one of my posts, anyone who wants to check my sources has to call the library or check the book’s availability online. Then, if the library doesn’t have the book, they call another library and have it sent over. At some point, the scholar has to physically visit the library to pick up the book, and then physically visit the library again to return it.

In a utopian future, libraries will offer nothing but free Internet access and experts to guide people to books online. Romanticists get cold-chills at such a future, as if we are somehow losing something classical rather than gaining something magical. It’s the same nostalgia that keeps us from adopting the Metric System and Dvorak Keyboard layouts.

We didn’t have E-books when I was a kid, so now I must unlearn my habits and port my mind to this Information Age paradigm. Don’t let your personal resistance to E-books prompt you to saddle your children with the obsolescence of printed texts. Get them reading books online today, and put the world’s library on their bookshelf.

Project Gutenberg is a great place to start, with a collection of over 25,000 classic text available for free online.

Ancient Kauri is 45,000 year old wood dug up from swamps in New Zealand, with trunks so large you can make a staircase out of it. (HT TGAW)

Te Matua Ngahere Kauri Tree, Second Largest Tree in New Zealand

As a blogger, is everything in my life a tax write-off?

Despite being nuked, the coral reefs at the Bikini Atoll are in good health. The coconuts are radioactive though.

John A. Wheeler, physicist who coined the term “Black Hole,” has passed away.

Earth Hour may have used less electricity, but warm weather produced more CO₂.

Elephants have a semi-aquatic ancestry.

Moeritherium Illustration by Heinrich Harder

The leading arm of the Large Megellanic Cloud, pokes through the Milky Way.

Scanners predict people’s decisions seven seconds before they make them.

Toe-Shortening, Body Piercing, Grills, and Botox are just some of LiveScience’s Top 10 Crimes against Nature.

Pure is a new play about Alan Turing.

It keeps going and going and going, Boston Dynamics Big Dog:

Dare County has made English its official language, and I say it’s about time somebody finally took a stand!

They show up in our country in droves, usurping our traditional values, and turning our culture on its head. Studies show they are bringing down our children’s grammar skills. They don’t pay taxes, and their influx of cheap labor is forcing countless honest, hardworking Americans into the unemployment lines.

Some people say we can’t do without them, that our economy depends on their labors. That if we exile them from our borders, our modern way of life will collapse, but our lifestyles are increasingly consumed with catering to their needs, all because they are apparently incapable of learning our common tongue.

This is America, and we speak English in this great union. Perl, COBOL, VBScript, PHP, C++, SQL, Java, cold Fusion, Lojban, Python, and other programming languages are un-American, and the schools that teach them and programmers who speak them are bordering on treason.

I say computers either need to learn English or get the heck out of our country!

I have a new Mecca! The Corpus Human Body Museum in the Netherlands.

Corpus Human Body Museum

A lack of cloud-coverage played a larger role than CO₂ emissions in producing ancient Super-Greenhouse Effects.

Microscopic operating table for conducting nanosurgery on a 1 mm worm.

Is the “unstable nonlinearity” observed in fruit flies mean they have freewill.

While human troop levels will stay the same in Iraq, robots are being pulled out for pointing their guns at friendlies.

Climate Models show that Global Warming may decrease the severity and occurrence of hurricanes in some areas.

Textour is an interesting application for statistical analysis of text into visual patterns.

Textour

Scientists firing high-power pulses of laser light into a thunderstorm triggered electrical activity.

Disposal experts detonated 1,500lb WWII mine, awesome pic accompanies article.

Video: Kitty Plays Theramin

A study showed that “children can identify 1,000 logos, but only 10 plants or animals.” Support the No Child Left Inside Campaign.