ideonexus

interweaving ideas

  • 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…

  • Flash SF: The Philanthropist’s Dilema

    “At this stage, Mr. Haro, we have exhausted all options,” the doctor was explaining softly. “It’s time to settle your affairs.” Haro nodded slightly from his prone position, where numerous tubes and wires bound him to the bed, which he now knew he would never rise from again. He waited for the electrodes to stimulate…

  • Why Does John McCain Hate Planetariums?

    Okay, so I’ve officially gone from admiration to mere respect, and now to plain dislike of John McCain. He made my list for the following point about Barack Obama in Tuesday night’s debate: He voted for nearly $1 billion in pork barrel earmark projects including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at…

  • Coolest Unit of Measurement EVER: The LOC

    To quote the textbook Information Science by David G. Luenberger, on the units of measurement for information: A popular unit is the LOC, representing 20 terabytes, which is roughly the contents of the U.S. Library of Congress when converted to digital form. (Emphasis mine) That’s right, America has a Library so #$%&ing grandios that Information…

  • Elementary Particles at the Quantum Zoo

    When they broke open molecules, they found atoms. When they broke open atoms, they found explosions. The Large Hadron Collider is an experiment of gargantuan proportions, 26.7 kilometers in circumference and costing 6.4 billion euros. It’s quest: to find Elementary Particles, that is, particles that are not made of other particles. It is an adventure…

  • Barack Obama Rally, Victory Landing Park, Newport News, VA 20081003

    This has been a year of firsts for me this presidential election season. My first time voting in a primary, first time donating to a political campaign, and my first time ever being this incredibly addicted to the daily news (Honestly, I can’t wait for this to be over so I can stop refreshing the…