ideonexus

Month: October 2008

  • Flash SF: The Illusian

    Jwandry was just about to take a break from digging her husband’s grave when she caught the movement out of the corner of her eye. Two hours of chiseling away at the rock-solid soil had produced only a shallow indent. At this rate, it would take days to complete it. There were no schools here…

  • Halloween Urban Legends Abound

    Tomorrow is Halloween, and that means it’s time to trot out BS stories about razorblades in snickers bars and more BS stories about poisoned candy perpetrated by silly people who must want to believe this stuff because it fits in with their preconceived notions that the world is a dark and disturbing place. So I…

  • Antibacterial Soaps are Bad for You

    Antibiotic Resistance This message brought to you by the American Medical Association, Food and Drug Administration, and Centers for Disease Control: There is no scientific evidence that antibacterial soaps and other products have any health benefits, and there is reason to suspect they could contribute to a problem much more dangerous than a bellyache from…

  • American Natural History Museum: Reptiles and Amphibians

    I was going to post a little blurb about how one result of the fact that reptiles and amphibians have been around much longer than mammals on planet Earth is how advanced many of their adaptations are. While armadillos have armor, no mammal has anything to compare to the turtle shell, a home the animal…

  • Flash SF: The Meme Virus

    “Status…” “Status…” “Status! Now!” Chiandrii practically jumped out of her spacesuit, “I-I’m sorry. I’m here. I’m here. I just wasn’t expecting a status update for another ten minutes.” “I’ve lost three Information Scientists on this expedition all ready,” Director Kawlah’s displeasure was clear. “So when I request status, I don’t care how early it is,…

  • Asimov Quote Reflects Learning as an Adventure

    Been reading a lot of Isaac Asimov short stories as the only reading I can fit into my schedule, and found this passage in the book Earth is Room Enough from the short story The Dead Past: When science was young and the intricacies of all or most of the known was within the grasp…

  • Intelligence is Dynamic

    Thomas Jefferson asserted that African-Americans were mentally inferior to whites, a sentiment that still pervades in white supremist circles. Former Harvard University President, Lawrence H. Summers, suggested that one of the reasons there are fewer women in science and engineering fields might be because of innate differences between women and men. News articles covering studies…

  • American Natural History Museum: Hall of Human Origins

    I overheard a woman at the museum remark to her kids upon seeing this exhibit, “Look at that. It’s a cast of a skeleton, not the real thing. And that’s a recreation. They don’t know people really looked like that. This is all just made up and these people don’t even care!” I lurked around…

  • A Deterministic Finite State Machine in HTML

    Thomas Jansen of the Shift Happens blog has a post up titled A Game in plain HTML (no JavaScript, no Flash, no PHP), which sparks an interesting conundrum concerning what and what isn’t a computer program with an interesting example. The goal is to set all squares to white and the center square black: Click…

  • “The whole point of the armed forces is to hurt the environment”

    It’s looking very likely that the Supreme Court will rule against whales in the Navy sonar case. With the justices arguing that only the Navy knows what constitutes a national crisis in their justification for conducting sonar exercises, and suggesting environmental concerns are over hyped. Most disturbing is this statement from Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed…

  • The Evolutionary Battle of the Sexes

    Once upon a time in Earth’s history, all life reproduced through cloning. Be it binary fission, budding, spores, fragmentation, or parthenogenesis, every parent produced exact replicas of itself by itself. Everything was very stable, and evolution moved at a glacial pace, restricted to chance mutations with extremely rare beneficial effects. Then, atleast 565 million years…

  • American Natural History Museum: Hall of Biodiversity

    This is my all-time favorite museum exhibit, and it’s only occupies one wall. This takes us from bacteria all the way up to mammals along a chain of increasing complexity. This is the most impressive display of diversity in life on planet Earth there is, and maybe my complete innability to do it justice in…