ideonexus

interweaving ideas

  • 42 More Years of Star Trek

    “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before.” – Introduction to each episode of the original Star Trek series USS Enterprise model used in theoriginal Star…

  • Matter-Energy and Information

    “I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed.” – Max Tegmark The ancient Greeks, Hindus, Buddhists, and Medieval Alchemists thought the universe was composed of five classical elements: air/wind, water, Earth, Fire, and Aether/Space. Recently, I came across the most basic way to categorize everything in our universe into two…

  • Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam: Palms and Crown Jewels

    Century Plant According to W.H. Barreveld, without the date palm, the human race would not have been able to migrate out of Africa. Dates provided an energy-dense food for journeying across the desert, are mentioned 30 times in the Bible, and 22 times in the Quran. Every part of the palm, its wood, leaves, fruit,…

  • Flash SF: Cartesian Creation

    Is up at 365tomorrows. It’s about a programmer who writes an application capable of inferring a universe from the laws of reality. Director Almod peered at the computer screen frowning in contemplation, “I don’t get it.” “It’s a star,” Jaed offered helpfully. “I know it’s a star,” Almod gaze never broke from the image. “So…

  • Benjamin Franklin’s Electrical Goof

    The 1700s were a century of phenomenal progress in the subject of electricity. Luigi Galvani discovered that electricity made dead muscles twitch, inspiring Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Alessandro Volta discovered that electricity was dynamic, flowing through conductive materials like water in a stream, which is why we call it an “electric current.” William Nicholson and Anthony…

  • The Digital Naturalist

    “Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.” – Chief Seattle This quote from Chief Seattle, leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish Native American tribes, is paraphrased by modern naturalists as, “Take only photographs, leave only footprints” (and sometimes adding, “Kill only time.”). Beetle in Flight Credit: Matthew Fang In the past, Naturalists like Charles Darwin…

  • Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam

    The Horticultural Gardens in Amsterdam is a suprisingly small garden, however, incredibly rich in biodiversity. Fuchsias And what a fascinating collection of specimens too. There’s the giant rubarb, the southern ash tree grafted onto a northern ash to allow it to survive the colder climate, the semicircle of systematics, the Wollemi pine a living fossil,…

  • We are the Metadata

    I remember a conversation I had with a retired Coast Guard pilot seven years ago who was testing our Flight Record application still in development: “I just recorded a shipboard landing with a C130 in your application,” he complained. “Is that a bad thing?” I blinked. His eyes bulged, “I’d like to see you land…

  • Science Radio Podcasts for Listening in Your Car

    I have these in my RSS reader, where I let them mass up until there are hundreds. Then I go through and download all the ones that sound interesting to a folder and burn them to a CD (as MP3s) or store on a thumb drive. These are listed in order of my personal preference:…

  • CIS517 IT Project Management: APA Style as a Modern and Accurate Writing Style for the Sciences

    A PDF of this Paper is available here. The American Psychological Association’s (APA) Style enhances an author’s accuracy and allows for the incorporation of more modern sources in his or her research. With its focus on research writing, APA citations provide a means of enforcing the ethics of integrity in the sciences by providing a…

  • Adventuring in Amsterdam

    Rainbow Following us Out of the City There are some incredibly progressive cultural values in the Netherlands, as well as demonstrations of enlightenment values. I previously covered the NEMO Science Center, a children’s science center that had sex displays. There were Obama posters everywhere, wind turbines, as well as bicycles, rows and endless rows of…

  • A Very Expensive Programming Mistake

    IBM 360/65 mainframe Credit: John Sloan I worked in a wide variety of development environments as an independent contractor in Washington DC, mostly on small teams or individual assignments, but I’ve found there’s an incredible wealth of learning opportunities that come with working in the large-team environment we have at the Coast Guard. In addition…