January 2008 Archives

BBC's TIMEWATCH: Bloody Omaha recreated the D-Day scene from Saving Private Ryan using only 3 people, 4 days, and a shoe string budget. The results are amazing:

The whole program is supposed to be airing on the Smithsonian Channel here in the US.

Take note, Hollywood.

This story is apparently being talked about in many of the science blogs out there, and Clarke brought it to my attention, via PZ Myers's blog on Science Blogs:

Narcan is the commercial name for Naloxone, a rapid acting drug used to counteract the effects of opioid overdose by combating the depression of the central nervous and respiratory systems.

It costs only $9.50 per dose and is easily administered via a nasal spray, saving the life of someone who has overdosed on heroin or morphine.

The White House's deputy director of the Office on National Drug Control Policy, Dr. Bertha Madras, opposes the use of the life saving heroin overdose antidote:

"First of all, I don't agree with giving an opioid antidote to non-medical professionals. That's No. 1," she says. "I just don't think that's good public health policy."

Madras says drug users aren't likely to be competent to deal with an overdose emergency. More importantly, she says, Narcan kits may actually encourage drug abusers to keep using heroin because they know overdosing isn't as likely.

Madras says the rescue programs might take away the drug user's motivation to get into detoxification and drug treatment.

"Sometimes having an overdose, being in an emergency room, having that contact with a health care professional is enough to make a person snap into the reality of the situation and snap into having someone give them services," Madras says.

The White House's position is absolutely absurd. These people WILL DIE without the antidote, and you want to deny people in drug treatment and response programs the use of this drug?!

The argument that it will encourage more drug use just because it makes overdose "safer" is absolutely ludicrous coming from a White House that has professed a love for all life, promoting their "Pro-Life" agenda in other issues such as abortion.

The key point is Narcan saves people from dying. A person can't go through drug rehabilitation if they're dead. They can't keep using the drug if they're dead.

Perhaps that the end goal of the White House, to let all those on the bottom rung of the drug war to die in dark, filthy corners basking in their poverty and misfortune. I doubt the White House cares enough about them, and its obvious from many of their policies that they don't.

It's a ridiculous point of view to take when you turn around and profess all life as sacred from the moment a sperm hits an egg.

Hypocrites.

The European Court of Human Rights has overruled a French court and stated that adoption by single, gay individuals is legal in the European Union:

In a 10-7 vote, the Strasbourg-based court ruled Tuesday that a plaintiff identified only as Emmanuelle B. had been the victim of illegal discrimination when successive French authorities denied her request to adopt a child in 1998. The court faulted the French courts for citing "the lack of a paternal referent in the household", and said the woman's homosexuality had been "if not explicit, at least implicit" in France's rejection of her adoption request. The Court judged France had violated the European Convention on Human Rights — to which France and the other 46 Council of Europe members are signatories — by failing to assess adoption by a lesbian the same way it would a single heterosexual.

This decision means that it is no longer legal in the EU to discriminate between gay and straight individuals in regards to adoption applications; however, the decision does not apply to couples, so gay couples can still be denied adoption.

Baby steps.

If you've ever watched a keynote by Steve Jobs, you know he's got charisma, and that his speeches always deliver that bit of "Wow!" and extra special sauce that has led some people to term the effect he has on audiences the "Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field."

Business Week had their communications coach watch the latest keynote by Steve Jobs at Macworld 2008, and came up with 10 tips we can all use when making our own presentations so that we too can have some of that Steve magic:

2. Demonstrate enthusiasm. Jobs shows his passion for computer design. During his presentation he used words like "extraordinary," "amazing," and "cool." When demonstrating a new location feature for the iPhone, Jobs said, "It works pretty doggone well." Most speakers have room to add some flair to their presentations. Remember, your audience wants to be wowed, not put to sleep. Next time you're crafting or delivering a presentation, think about injecting your own personality into it. If you think a particular feature of your product is "awesome," say it. Most speakers get into presentation mode and feel as though they have to strip the talk of any fun. If you are not enthusiastic about your own products or services, how do you expect your audience to be?

Hello folks,

I know ya'll have noticed the dearth of content this month, and I apologise to all of you about that. Those who are still here: I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Some thanks goes out to my guest writer Clarke for his contributions during my vacation.

The excuse? My writing for class ramped up significantly this semester (combined with my writing at Homotron), and so I had to enact a self-imposed hiatus from this blog as it neither A) pays the bills or B) gets me a good grade. I hope you will understand why I had to do it.

However, I've established my rhythm again and so now I'm prepared to make a comeback, and boy do I have a long list of links ready to burst! I may have not been writing here, but my pack rat tendencies still collected interesting things from all over the tubes.

So without further ado: I'm BACK!

Evolution explains why LOLCats control your mind. The basic argument extrapolates on this little bit from a Yale study

Since keeping an eye on predators and prey was important during our evolution, Joshua New and colleagues investigated whether animals, both human and otherwise, are more likely to grab our visual attention. [...] As predicted, subjects were faster and more accurate detecting changes involving animals than inanimate objects. If experience were producing this bias, then people should also be good at detecting changes involving automobiles, which as drivers and pedestrians they have been trained all their lives to monitor for sudden, life-or-death changes in trajectory. Yet subjects were much slower in detecting changes to vehicles than to more rarely experienced animal species, indicating that learning is not the source of this difference. The bias for animals, the authors conclude, is like the appendix: present in modern humans because it was useful for our ancestors, even if useless now.

And the captions are one of these changes that people notice in pictures of cute kitties, which is why they catch our attention. That's the argument, at least.

Why do people think cars will save the world? In the past month, there has been news that the Smart car will be coming out locally, that India is planning to release a small $2.5k car, and that a presidential candidate has promised to revive the domestic automotive industry. Yeah, just what we need: more cars. It's good that the smart car and the new car in India will be more fuel efficient than a lot of the vehicles on the road, but really, how much of an effect will good fuel efficiency have when, in India's case, there are that many more cars on the road? I know that where I live, if people were willing to give up their SUVs and trucks--which at first glance while riding my bike (and avoiding getting hit) seem to make up at least 2/5ths of the vehicles on the road--then there would be a definitive impact on air quality. We're talking about a jump to 40mpg city up from -5--I kid, of course. The number of people who'd drive the Smart car over SUVs won't be that large, though, since they'd only be the people who can actually afford having two vehicles (though I'd be curious to know how many people who own SUVs have another vehicle) unless they trade in their current vehicles towards a Smart Car, and on top of that the cost is prohibitive ($28k was it?).

On the more socially and globally responsible note, Planetizen makes a good point about people like me commenting on developments in "developing" countries:

Of course there is deep hypocrisy in developed countries criticizing the driving habits of the developing world. Developed countries’ environmental critiques and campaigns need to start at home. Politicians, labor unions and environmental activists have a responsibility not to brandish global warming as a stick to bash workers and consumers in India or China. Instead the argument for progressive global warming policy must begin with the acknowledgment of the destructive policies of our home governments and corporations; this includes taking responsibility for developed countries majority contribution to the climate crisis.

*points finger at Texas*

Or you could go the route of AFS Trinity and get 150mpg (and potentially unlimited). According to the Salon article I heard about the company from, it does it with technology that's available to us now (and was available years ago):

Instead of waiting for a battery that can deliver both energy and power cheaply, it uses current lithium-ion batteries for energy, and then adds something called an ultracapacitor for rapid discharge during acceleration.

Ultracaps have 10 to 100 times the power density of typical batteries, but only one-tenth the energy density, so this is a marriage made in heaven, or at least Silicon Valley. The ultracap is the electrical equivalent of the shaken champagne bottle -- although even that analogy is flawed since ultracaps do not just discharge quickly, they also charge quickly. That's another benefit that ultracaps bring to hybrids.

Regular hybrids get much of their efficiency gains from their ability to capture the energy normally lost during braking and convert it to electricity. Current hybrid batteries take up only about half of this electricity, but fast-acting ultracaps can take up much more.

I have written a four part series of articles entitled "The State of the Mac Nation 2008" over on Homotron.net where I reviewed everything Apple related that happened in 2007, complete with my insights and conjectures on how some of the new stuff (like the iPhone) came about. I worked pretty hard on this series of articles and I think they turned out pretty good. A lot of people who've read them have given me kudos for them. Here's the links:

The State of the Mac Nation 2008, Part 1: Desktops, Laptops, & Professional Hardware
The State of the Mac Nation 2008, Part 2: iPod + iPhone
The State of the Mac Nation 2008, Part 3: iTunes + Other Apple Software
The State of the Mac Nation 2008, Part 4: Macworld Keynote Rumours and Predictions

And tomorrow (Tuesday, January 15) I'll be doing a live post with updates and commentary during Steve Jobs's keynote starting at 12PM. Stay tuned at Homotron.net if you want to read my commentary!

I'm so excited!

(Coincidentally, this series of articles is precisely why I've been absent from theInput during the last few days)

Now they've gone and done it: they've messed with linguistics. When they came for the biologists, I fought... so nevermind that train of thought.

Really, the Language Log entry does a good job of describing what's going on with a new wave of the Edenics phenomenon, which I thought was a rather unique or sporadic theological attack on science because of my Southern Baptist upbringing. But there are books, websites, and pages on Creationist Websites. From the book's author's website:

Here you will discover that ALL human words contain forms of the Edenic roots within them. These proto-Semitic or early Biblical Hebrew words were programmed into our common ancestors, Adam and Eve, before the language dispersion, or babble at the Tower of Babel -- which kickstarted multi-national human history. I congratulate you for investigating for yourself if language is an engineered miracle or merely the evolved gesturing of chimps.

Note that this author thinks that Hebrew is the source of English. Hypotheses like Edenics, i.e. the religious versions of the proto-world language theories, are based on two other hypotheses: Young Earth Creationism and the Tower of Babel As Origin of Language Diversity, a.k.a. Wrathful Dispersion. These religious theories of language origin and theories of language based on them are absolute shite for a variety of reasons, one of which is that living, breathing, speaking people have been around for longer than 6,000 years, much longer, and it's poppycock to think that everybody from the origin and spread of H. sapiens to the time of Babylon spoke the same language, especially when you look at extremely old populations like native Australians, who arrived, conservatively, 40,000 years ago, and who were geographically isolated when water covered the land bridge over which they could have traveled about 8,000 years ago. Also, the original, Edenic language would most definitely not be early Biblical Hebrew, which any cursory glance at a good history book's chapters on Mesopotamia and the preceding time would make damn clear (Sumerian, for example, doesn't fit into any language family, really, like Basque).

Just knowing how long Native Australians have lilved there is enough to dismiss Edenics out of hand, so while I want to read the Edenics book, I don't know if I'd have the patience. I should get it so I can address the phonology-type arguments he has, but, like I said, I don't know if I have the patience, and phonetics isn't a subject I get much joy from.

So, like any other politics nut I'm following the results of the New Hampshire primaries, and upon loading CNN's front page to see the current results, I couldn't help but notice one bullet point about the results of an exit poll, pictured at right:

• Exit polls showed issues swayed Democrats but Republicans were moved by personality.

And that, I think, is exactly the difference between Democrats and Republicans right now. Are you serious, Republicans?

I always used to pull a very neat example in Debate Team whenever someone argued that it was better to judge someone by their character and personality in elections. I would describe for them several different personalities, of which I can only remember two of now:

1. One was a womaniser, a drunkard, and adulterer.
2. One was a vegetarian, clean record, etc.

I asked them to choose which they would judge as the better candidate, using their personality guidelines. Invariably, they'd choose the clean cut vegetarian.

It was at that point I told them they had just chosen Adolf Hitler over Winston Churchill. A trap question, to be sure, but it drove the point home.

The Japanese have a traditional wrapping cloth called a 風呂敷 (Furoshiki) that has been used to carry items and clothes for centuries:

Although possibly dating back as far as the Nara period, the name, meaning "bath spread", derives from the Edo period practice of using them to bundle clothes while at the sentō (public baths). Before becoming associated with public baths, furoshiki was known as hiradzutsumi (平包), or flat folded bundle. Eventually, the furoshiki's usage extended to serve as a means for merchants to transport their wares or to protect and decorate a gift.

Usage of furoshiki dropped off after WWII, but has seen renewed interest in place of shopping bags for a greener alternative to carrying goods around. There's many different methods of folding furoshiki to carry different types of objects, and Dr. Vino brings us a video of using a furoshiki to carry wine bottles, which makes for a great presentation:

To see a bunch of different folding techniques for other types of objects, Furoshiki.com has a neat chart of folding techniques.

Via Boing Boing: Bologna flavoured bubble gum. $1 a pack, discovered by Flickr user turncoat tendrils.