Archive for June 14th, 2008

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Science Etcetera, Saturnday 20080614

Saturday, June 14th, 2008
  • National Get Outdoors Day is today!!! (HT TGAW).
  • One-fifth of the oxygen we breath comes from the Prochlorococcus bacteria, living in the Ocean (Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of its discovery).

    • oceanic cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus

    oceanic cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus
    Credit: William K. Li and Frédéric Partensky
  • Lizards running on two legs are, in fact, pulling wheelies.
  • Is the solution to poor people selling their organs to the rich to legalize the practice, making it safer and eliminating the blackmarket?
  • Toothpaste is too expensive for the poor.
  • The psychology behind what turns otherwise well-behaved soccer moms and dads into ultra-competitive such-and-suches.
  • The UFO seen floating off the space shuttle Discovery as it heads back to Earth is just a clip from the rudder, and serves no purpose on re-entry.
  • Code Swarm visualizes the history of commits in a software project.

    • Code Swarm

    Code Swarm
    Credit: Michael Ogawa
  • Three smart facts about music.
  • Visualizing cause of death data.
  • Satellite images of war’s destruction.
  • The hole in the Ozone layer is expected to heal by the end of the century, which may worsen Global Warming.
  • Visualizing Iraq War data.
  • Wearing flip-flops is linked to an increased risk of a serious form of skin cancer.
  • Science supports environmentalism, and that’s why Republicans work so strongly against it.
  • Preview of the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions
  • DROD Puzzlegame:



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    International Weblogger’s Day 2008: Change

    Saturday, June 14th, 2008

    It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. - Charels Darwin

    International Weblogger's Day 2008

    Homo sapiens experience change throughout our lives, but when it comes to changes on the scale of our civilization or environment, we have the perspective of walking along the Earth’s surface, unaware of its curvature. Because our memories are recreations of events, rather than a recording, we experience landscape amnesia, recalling events from the past in the environment surrounding us today rather than the way it looked then.

    They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. - Andy Warhol

    Science tracks the long-term changes our short lifetimes cannot comprehend. Although Global Warming occurs at pace of such tiny increments, we cannot perceive the increase in temperature from year to year, science catalogues and documents such change. When the snows of Kilimanjaro vanish, science overcomes our brains’ tendency to forget this feature was ever there.


    Snow Coverage on Mt. Kilimanjaro

    Snow Coverage on Mt. Kilimanjaro
    Credit: NASA

    If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less. - U.S. General Eric Shinseki

    Our brains have evolved to perceive the world one way. Science equips our minds to perceive it a more accurate way. We must embrace these cognitive advances that have rendered our innate biological state obsolete, lest we become irrelevant along with them.

    And evolution’s method for dealing with irrelevance is extinction.

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