ideonexus.com

How to Turn Your PC into a Science TV

ideonexus — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:00:30 +0000

Step the First

Download Miro Player, the free and open-source RSS aggregator for video podcasts. I’m sure there are others, but Miro is, to my experience, the sleekest and most user friendly.

Miro (Formerly “Democracy Player”)

Step the Second

Subscribe to the following shows:

Nova’s Science Now presents engaging science from a longtime standard in documentary-making.
PBS has a HUGE collection of classic clips from their documentaries. Awe inspiring, wonderful stuff!
National Geographic’s Wild Chronicles are great, short clips to enchant you.
dh love life is Daryl Hannah’s regular video blog exploring sustainable living. Fun and thoughtful (although a bit too new age at times).
EcoGeeks’ Wild Classroom has it’s misses, but overall it’s a worthy subscription.
Wired Science often introduces me to the more “out-there” science news.
Dr. Kiki’s Food Science is fun, entertaining, and involves the chemistry in your kitchen. Highly highly recommended.
Science Sensei is my favorite of ScienCentral’s videos. His kung-fu is superior.
TED Talks takes the world’s most intriguing intellectuals and gives them 18 minutes on the soapbox.
Every episode of Seed Salon takes two great minds and allows us to be a fly on the wall for their dinner conversation.
Evolution Entertainment is a recent addition to my playlist, also of remarkable quality.
Life on Terra is my absolute FAV. It’s hard to believe there are documentaries of this caliber for free online.

There are many many more shows out there. You can do a search on “Science” from your Miro Player to find them. There’s more content than I can keep up with. Enjoy!

Science Etcetera, Venusday 20080704

ideonexus — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:00:14 +0000

Have a moment of Zen with some stunning aerial photos of Dutch Tulip farms, copyrighted, so below is a photo of a Portland, Oregon farm to entice you.

A tulip farm near Portland, OR and Mount Hood.
Credit: Jas&Suz

Language is an inherent faculty of the brain, and various languages express it differently.

The world happiness index has risen substantially since 1981.

Science is harder than English (PDF), according to a new study, and making a C in Biology is the same as a B in Sociology.

Over the next two years, the German Research Centre for Geosciences will store 60,000 tons of carbon dioxide 600 metres below the Earth.

Carbon Sequestration

Fitness for Thought: Study of Weight Watchers VS Fitness Centers found Weight Watchers people lost about 9 pounds, but it was mostly lean tissue, not fat, while Fitness Center people lost very little weight, but lost a lot of abdominal fat. Unfortunately, this makes Fitness people give up because they don’t see results, despite getting them.

Hypermiling is cool, but some practices are downright dangerous.

The Berkeley Pit in Montana is an acidic environmental disaster left over from the Anaconda Mining Company, one of the deadliest places on Earth. Now researchers have found an extremophile algae living on its surface, producing oxygen that neutralizes the acid.

Liquid Magnet Sculptures:

Envirowacko Harry Reid Says “Coal Makes Us Sick”

ideonexus — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:00:47 +0000

Is there anything more amusing than watching dittheads work themselves up into a frothing, impotent rage when confronted with Reality’s liberal bias? Most recently they’ve started rolling around, slobbering all over themselves over this video of Harry Reid pointing out that “Coal makes us sick:”

How dare he say that Oil and Coal makes us sick?!?! the dittohead blogs responded in their predictably uneducated fashion (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here. (Oh yeah, and , here)), calling him names, arguing that the oil industry provides for us like a benevolent loving guardian, and basically ignoring the real question, Do fossil fuels make us sick?

Let’s Review:

Continuous contact with motor oil causes skin cancer. Diesel Truck drivers are 50% more likely to get lung cancer, while auto mechanics are more likely to die from a wide variety of cancer-related diseases. 12,000 Coal Miners died of black lung disease between 1992 and 2002. According to the UK’s Health and Safety Executive, Vehicle exhaust emissions:

…irritate the eyes and respiratory tract, and are a risk to health by breathing in. Petrol or gas (LPG) fuelled engine fumes contain up to 10% carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas. Prolonged exposure to diesel fumes, especially blue or black smoke, could lead to coughing, chestiness and breathlessness, and there is evidence that long term exposure may increase the risk of lung cancer.

Run a car in a closed space, like a garage, and you will asphixiate very quickly. One gallon of motor oil can ruin a million gallons of freshwater if dumped into the public water system “- a year’s supply of water for 50 people.” At the Coast Guard base where I work, a small amount of jet fuel, which is kerosene-based, leaked into the ground at one site, it will take years of phytoremediation to make the field usable again.

In Ecuador cancer rates were found to be 150 percent higher in an oil-drilling area than in other parts of Ecuador. Lukemia rates in those same areas where three times the norm.

Coal Fired power plants shorten nearly 24,000 lives a year, including 2,800 from lung cancer. Fish populations across the globe are increasingly becoming contaminated with mercury, dumped into the environment by these plants. With levels rising, the American Geological Institute has issued fish advisories warning the public about the health risks posed by eating certain fish.

Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada
Credit: Sierra Club

All of these issues, dittoheads taking a strong stand against any government support of alternative energies, and then there’s this:

The Department of Energy is currently seeking $648 million for “clean coal” projects in its 2009 budget request, “representing the largest budget request for coal RD&D in over 25 years.”

And then there’s that whole Global Warming thing, of which fossil fuels is a major contributor to greenhouse gases, which dittoheads don’t believe despite all of the following organizations and scientific bodies making statements asserting their acceptance of the Theory:

In ditthead land, you can go skinny-dipping in oil-lakes, put high-octane in the cat’s dish, and user Mercury as a seasoning. : P

Science Etcetera, Jupiterday 20080703

ideonexus — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:00:51 +0000

100 AUs away in space lies the Heliopause, where the solar wind from our Sun hits the rest of the Galaxy, where our solar system officially ends, and the two Voyager probes are mapping it.

Hot ions in the heliosheath
Credit: University of California, Berkeley; L. Wang

Congress will (barely) continue funding Fermilab.

A new model that corrects for previous models’ bad math may mean we are underestimating extinction rates by a factor of 100.

Hey Kids! Wanna go explore a Massive Inflatable Colon? (The guy dressed up like an enema is totally awesome!!!)

Sweet animation of the vortex on Venus put together from the Venus Express observations (HT Oranchak).

Still from Venus Vortex Animation
Credit: European Space Agency

Men, to lower your chances of getting erectile dysfunction, have sex more often. Get a prescription and take it to the bar with you, might make a good pickup line.

Reptiles produce males or females based on temperatures, by 2085 the tuatara may go extinct from Global Warming preventing it from producing females.

The article refers to it as a flat atom, but its more of virtual atom that comes into existence when an electrical current is applied… still, it’s very cool and holds great promise for quantum computing.

Enchanting Rocketboom episodes like this are why I sit through all of the show’s artsy fartsy stuff:

OMFSM!!! This is SOFA KING BAD ON SO MANY LEVELS!!! WRONG! NO! BAD! FAIL! FAIL!! FAIL!!!

ideonexus — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:28:29 +0000

AAAAAaaaaaAAAAAiiiiiiIIIIIIIEEEEEEeeeeeeEEEEE!!!
(HT Oranchak)

Science is Free (as in Beer)

ideonexus — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:00:17 +0000

One of the things I loooooooooove about science writing is all the free stuff. Scientists aren’t like those crummy jerks at the Associated Press, scientists want you to talk about what they’re doing. They want us bloggers to quote them, link to them, post their photos. Scientists give away tons and tons of intellectual property every single day, which gives people like me tons and tons of stuff to cover. I never hurt for content or media to fill this blog all because I cover science.

If I covered movies, music, television, or radio, I would be wasting more time than its worth trying to rationalize fair use, translating the word-count of my cited quotes to the pennies in my budget, and shelling out the moolah for photos and video clips to illustrate my content–and even then I’d probably get sued.

You know what? #$%@ it. It’s not worth it covering those media fantasy lands anyways. Science is reality, 99% of modern media is crap.

The following quote from G.M. Trevelyan, although speaking to history, applies to science as well as any other academic pursuit. Just replace the word “historians” with “scientists”:

And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.

If a scientist makes a discovery, and fails to share it with anyone, then is it science? Absolutely not. They are irrelevant. Lucky for Science Bloggers, scientists are all about the pursuit of knowledge for everyone’s benefit, and not about hoarding it to make a little money.

Science Etectera, Mercuryday 20080702

ideonexus — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:00:46 +0000

Below is one of the spooky proposed landing sites for Mars Science Lander.

Mars Science Lander Landing Site
Credit: NASA

Har! Har! Har! Those silly dittoheads are at it again, this time demanding a researcher publish his data for a paper that demonstrated the evolution of bacteria. If they had only bothered to read the paper, they would have found the data published in it!!! Silly Dittoheads! No science for you! Thpppt!!!

Good morning America, there are 450,000 acres of wildfires burning across the country right now.

John’s Hopkins Researchers report that most volunteers given psilocybin mushrooms in a controlled experiment say, 14 months later, that the experience “increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.”

Creepy sounds of the solar wind colliding with Earth’s magnetic field. Somebody remix this with an NIN song.

Eigenfactor let’s you map scientific notations in journals. Nifty!

Eigenfactor

Science Rockstar: David Pritchard has an hypothesis that hookworms suppress the immune system, causing those infected with them to have fewer allergies. To test this he’s infected himself.

An awesome spectacular incredibly good-looking judge in Georgia, who probably has an enormous phallus, has denied a Coal Plant Permit because it did not set limits on Carbon Dioxide emissions.

ROUNDEST OBJECT EVER could be used to redefine the kilogram.

For just $10, you can adopt a star for the Kepler satellite to investigate, and get personal notification if a planet is discovered in orbit around it. I’m signed up and will get to select a star in August with all the other cool kids. Don’t you want to be part of the club?

Discovery Channel’s The World is Just Awesome Commercial:

Published at the SCQ: Explaining Our World: Science VS Creationism

ideonexus — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 23:34:44 +0000

My latest article is up at the Science Creative Quarterly:

Explaining Our World: Science VS Creationism.

My previous articles are still available there as well:

Tragedy of the Commons Explained With Smurfs

Science Fiction VS Fantasy: An Opinionated Guide

How To Fly

Enjoy!

Putting Microbes to Work for Us

ideonexus — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:00:54 +0000

“civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.”
- H.G. Welles

It took life on Earth millions years to figure out how to digest cellulose, the hard wall that makes up the cells of plants, efficiently to get at the energy inside it. In fact, complex lifeforms, such as Cows and Termites, have to take the indirect route of enlisting bacteria in their guts to digest the cellulose for them.

In one of the many many many asides he takes in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson talks about plastics being made of hydrocarbons found in oil and natural gas. Although plastics are non-biodegradable, there is a great deal of energy still stored in those hydrocarbons, just waiting for the right lifeform to evolve along and start consuming them.

There is now a continent-sized vortex of the Pacific Ocean swimming with plastic junk. Sea turtles and birds are mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish, ingesting them and dieing. Plastic particles are accumulating in the food chain, appearing, undigested, in the feces of seals and other animals.

Plastic Bag Tree
Credit: spike55151

In his book, The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton fictionalizes a microbe that mutates to eat rubber. Today, numerous scientists and companies are engineering microbes to eat plastic, or more precisely, microbes with the ability to break down plastics to get at the bounty of hydrocarbons locked up within them.

Companies, like Verde Environmental and WonderChem, produce solutions of microbial cultures that eat oil, slowly. Recently, 16-year-old Daniel Burd, of Waterloo, recently isolated the microbes that eat plastic bags as a Science Fair project, earning him a $10,000 prize and $20,000 scholarship. His discovery may reduce the time it take to degrade plastic bags to just three months. A shovel-full of soil from anywhere on Earth contains millions of the oil-eating Pseudomonas bacteria. It’s just a matter of encouraging these microbes to be fruitful and multiply

The Law of Unintended Consequences comes into play at this point. Algae-like bacteria live in both diesel and biodiesel fuel, clogging up the engines they contaminate. Organisms like these have all ready ruined a large amount of Earth’s underground petroleum, leaving sulfer and methane as byproducts. A quick look at all the modern conveniences requiring plastics that we rely on give us a hint as to the pandora’s box we might be dabbling with here, meaning we might end up needing microbes to clean up the microbes.

“There was an old lady who swallowed a fly…”

Science Etcetera, Marsday 20080701

ideonexus — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:00:12 +0000

I want a gun that shoots these. Using laser beams and electric fields, Rice physicists pushed an electron to orbit far from the nucleus of a potassium atom, creating a millimeter-sized “Bohr Atom.”

Millimeter-Sized Atom
Credit: Jeff Mestayer/Rice University

Perspective please. Fear of flying after 9/11 killed 1600 people who chose to make the much more dangerous choice of driving.

MIT Students have built a 12X12 foot parabolic mirror that can focus sunlight well enough to melt steel… theoretically.

The International Whaling Commission got nowhere, and Japan is considering quitting it so they can eat all the whales they want like a fat little piggy nation.

Stunning collection of photos of Earth from Space (HT Oranchak).

A cloud wake appears on the downwind side of Isla Socorro, Mexico
Credit: NASA Johnson Space Center

Wal-Mart and Costco are adopting redesigned milk jugs that are cheaper to ship and better for the environment. People hate them, but they’re gonna have to suck it up because it’s here to stay.

Using embryo selection, a couple will have a baby free of the breast cancer gene, removing the disease from their lineage. Now consider the truth in Clint’s prediction concerning humans evolving themselves.

Somebody please find me an audio sample of the Aztec Death Whistle, played by those about to be sacrificed.

Rock Dissolving Acid on Bare Human Skin:

Prescience, Futurism, Hard SF… Go See WALL-E

ideonexus — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:00:59 +0000

WALL-E’s Curiosity Gives it Purpose
Credit: Pixar Studios

Great Science Fiction films come out so rarely that I am overjoyed when a movie like Pixar’s WALL-E hits the screens. This is one of those rare SF stories that ventures into the distant future, a place so alien most SF writers don’t want to touch it.

WALL-E leaps more that 700 years into the future to a dystopian time where the human race has evacuated the Earth after burying it in trash. Waste Allocation Load Lifters Earth-Class (WALL-E) robots are left with the task of cleaning up the planet so humans may one day return. Only one such robot remains, WALL-E, with a cockroach as a companion, where all the other bots have long-since broken down.

WALL-E is Solar Powered
Credit: Pixar Studios

WALL-E has survived these 700 years because it has learned to recycle from the skyscraper-tall mountains of garbage it has assembled. WALL-E is inquisitive, experimenting with the world around it, playing with all the toys left behind from our shopaholic binge on Earth. Its curiosity has obviously also had a crucial role in its survival all these centuries.

WALL-E meets EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a vastly more advanced robot sent from the humans in space, in a “boy meets girl” storyline that makes WALL-E a stowaway back to the human ship, where we find a society of humans all turned into obese blobs floating on mobile beds which perpetually feed them commercialized media and “meals in cup.” Such a dystopian future is not difficult to imagine in our present society, where we are encouraged to buy things we do not need and consume nutritionless calories far in excess of what our bodies can burn.

WALL-E and EVE
Credit: Pixar Studios

Can WALL-E and EVE save the human race? See for yourself. I left the theater to find myself confronted with a world of brandnames, and a fascinating new perspective on them and what they are doing to our human evolution. Impacting our worldview is what good science fiction is all about.

I also had lots of fun playing with Disney’s WALL-E Website

Science Etcetera, Moonday 20080630

ideonexus — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:00:08 +0000

Happy Meteor Day!!! It is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska Event, when a meteor exploded over Russia with a force 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, leveling 80 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers. GrrlScientist has a great write-up of the incident and what we know about it.

Fallen Trees from the Tunguska Event
Credit: Leonid Kulik expedition in 1927

Louisiana has enacted legislation allowing teachers to question evolution and other scientific theories in the interest of promoting “critical thinking skills.”

A middle school creationist science teacher, who teaches his students that “science is wrong” for disagreeing with the bible, has burned a cross into a student’s arm (HT Carolyn).

The status quo is the biggest hindrance to technological innovation.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has come up with a plug-in hybrid that gets 100 MPG.

Gas is more dense at cooler temperatures and measured by volume at the pump, so purchasing at night is most economic and 20 other facts about Oil.

Check out NASA’s Climate Time Machine to learn about sea levels, CO₂ emissions, and global average temperatures. Then go tell an AGW Skeptic to suck it.

NASA’s Climate Time Machine

The Supreme Court ruled last week that Exxon can put a price tag on a clean environment, and that price tag equals 24 hours’ worth of their profits.

Eating almonds promotes good bacteria in the gut.

Blind children cover their eyes when they hear something disturbing, and what your body language betrays about you.

Is Senator Inhofe laying low on his Climate Change skepticism so as not to hurt John McCain’s election chances? Inquiring minds want to know.

Visible Magnetic Fields:

Adventuring: NY Hall of Science Center Room

ideonexus — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 08:00:15 +0000

Most of my photos from this large, science playground of a room came out as just blurs of motion, so dynamic are the displays. Giant molecules, genetically engineered potato plants, microbes, microscopes, and sculptures of the atomic fill the area, begging to be played with.

Thermal Ryan

View the complete flickr set here.

Flash SF Story: Scriptures

ideonexus — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:00:34 +0000

“Father,” Demetrius’ voice trembled, his youthful blue eyes were swollen and watery, “I cannot absolve myself of these doubts.”

Lord Balthasar placed two firm and reassuring hands on Demetrius’ shoulders, welcoming this distraction from the unrelenting hunger pains that plagued them all, “It is uncommon for one to question their faith in such desperate times, when we need it most.”

Demetrius avoided the Lord’s eyes, replying, “I fear my faith is what has brought me into this crisis.”

Lord Balthasar squeezed the lad’s shoulders and gently shook him so that Demetrius looked up into his eyes, coming into the here and now, “It is not our faith that has imperiled us, but that of the heretics who persecute us.”

“But who’s to say whose faith is true?” Demetrius searched the old man’s eyes, pleading, but looked to the far dirt wall as the muffled sounds of explosions found their way into the bunker.

“Ours is the one true word. Theirs is an heretical text,” Lord Balthasar assured him. “Our texts are ancient, written by the hand of God himself. They cannot make the same claim.”

“But don’t they?” Demtrius snapped back at the Lord, his trembling increasing in intensity. The boy was practically in shock with his fear. “I have no proof these words were not written by man! If God wanted to adhere to the scripture, why didn’t he write it on the Moon, mountainsides, and tree leaves?”

Another explosion, closer now, shook the room so that streams of dust poured through the ceiling. The rest of Lord Balthasar’s flock whimpered and cried in fear. Demetrius’ doubting could not come at a worse time.

Lord Balthasar pushed the youth down onto his knees, “You must have faith that there are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in philosophy!”

The boy instantly stopped trembling, and merely gazed up at the Lord in stunned silence.

Then the heretical battle chant roared just outside, sending chills through everyone in the room, “Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war!!!”

There were only moments of life left to them now. Lord Balthasar dropped to one knee and the congregation followed suit, “Let us pray!”

Together, they recited from the holy passages:

“What a piece of work is a man,
how noble in reason,
how infinite in faculties,
in form and moving how express and admirable,
in action how like an angel,
in apprehension how like a god!
the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals—and yet,
what is this quintessence of dust?”

This is a short short SF story, less than 600 words, in the spirit of 365Tomorrows.