ideonexus

Month: March 2008

  • “Theoretically” is a Meaningless Word to Scientists

    It’s time we stopped using the word “theoretically,” the word is an oxymoron unto itself, at least in the way we use it: “Is it theoretically possible for science to someday create a real lightsaber? (source)” “Antimatter galaxies theoretically possible, but unlikely (source)” “Critics say the White House’s theoretical arguments may fly in the face…

  • [citation needed] for the Mind

    “What is truth?” – Pontius Pilate Wikipedian Protester Courtesy of xkcd.com Al Gore never said he invented the Internet. You can’t see the Great Wall of China from space. There is no ghost of a little boy in the background of Three Men and a Baby. Goldfish do not have memory-spans only 10-second’s long. Nobody’s…

  • Copyright Infringement on Ideonexus

    I think I’ve gotten really good at this since I started running with ideonexus full speed, keeping the daily posts stocked with photos I get from NASA, wikimedia commons, and other legitimate sources, like flickr creative commons photos. However, I think it’s important to acknowledge that I did violate a photographer’s copyright in my 20071126…

  • Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”

    The Blank Slate I love books that shake up my preconceptions, and reading Pinker’s book was like experiencing one big personal iconoclasm. The thoroughness with which he engaged gender, violence, intelligence, and other aspects of our social understandings unsettled my positions on much of the whole “Nature VS Nurture” debate. While it did not convince…

  • The Scientific Virtue of Being Wrong

    Every year Green Sea Turtles travel 1,300 miles across the Atlantic Ocean from their nesting grounds in the middle of the South Atlantic to their feeding grounds on the Brazilian Coast. Why do the turtles undertake this incredibly taxing journey each year? 135 million years ago, South America and Africa were a single super-continent called…

  • North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences: Nature’s Explorers

    Fish Specimens in Jars I have a morbid fascination with animals preserved in jars, and that’s what drew me into the Natures Explorers exhibit; however, it was not the Cabinet of Curiosities I expected to find. Instead, I met with an exhibit about the lives of those who assemble such cabinets and the history behind…

  • Beowulf: Not Out of the Uncanny Valley Yet

    Saw Beowulf Friday night, not a classic tale I’m particularly fond of, but I was curious about this being the first attempt to make a film with as-real-as-possible human characters since Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within belly-flopped in 2001 (not counting mixture CGI/live action films like The Matrix, which also failed). The film still failed…

  • Just When I Thought I Had Enough Distractions in My Life…

    I’ve started twittering. I’m not ready to have this thing start texting my phone just yet, despite the fact that I can set it up so that my houseplants can text me when they need water. I’m sure my cats would love this service too, “Ryan! Come home and let us (in/out) of the house!…

  • Response to a PLoS One Article

    My father, former head of the Microbiology Department at ODU, responded to an e-mail my hippie brother sent out about the recent Prozac debunking: I seriously doubt that the PLOS Journal of Medicine, which I’ve never heard of in all my 35 years in the field, has any merit. If it even does exist, then…

  • MySpace is Forever

    Whenever I type “Ryan Somma” into google. There’s the bit of JavaScript code I wrote to strip characters from a string variable. There’s my Waterway 5k stats. There are court dockets from my divorce and the time I was sued for a million dollars. There’s also the “Rare Ryan Somma Sighting!” picture of me on…

  • Extinction Infringes on my Civil Rights

    You heard me. When some selfish numbnuts corporation or collusion of businesses and politics or just plain-old short-sighted human beings drive some species to extinction, that infringes on my rights. Namely, my right to eat that species. I’ve eaten bear, deer, oysters, ostrich, frogs, turtles, rabbit, pheasant, squid, alligator, octopus, fish, snails, clams, snakes, a…

  • Spitzer’s Hypocrisy

    “The lady doth protest too much.” – Queen Gertrude, Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, 222–230 Eliot Spitzer was an outspoken prosecutor of prostitution, and now we know this hypocrite dirtbag is guilty of indulging in what he believes should be a crime. As I have argued before that prostitution should be legal. Sex is legal,…