http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=calendar-jan-feb-2010

JANUARY

8 Most Holocaust survivors spend their lives trying to forget the horrors of the era, but neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel , who fled Austria in 1939 to escape the Nazis, went on to investigate how we remember. His groundbreaking research led to a new understanding of how memories are formed, eventually winning Kandel the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work. Now German filmmaker Petra Seeger has profiled Kandel’s life in an eloquent film called In Search of Memory . [More]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=powerful-chips

LAS VEGAS--As tech vendors unleashed a barrage of 3D HD TVs, smarter smart phones and home energy management systems on the public this week here at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Intel could not have been happier. All of these high-performance communication and entertainment gadgets generate a lot of data, and someone needs to provide the horsepower to make sure that data flows to where it needs to go. [More]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=monkeys-are-canaries-in-lead-mine-10-01-08

You’ve heard about the canary in the coal mine. And frogs as signals of environmental degradation. The latest animal to serve as a harbinger of toxic exposures to humans may be: monkeys. That’s according to research in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology .

Macaques live in close quarters with people in parts of Nepal. So scientists thought that the monkeys might be “sentinels” for human lead exposure. Lead can have multiple deleterious health effects, from impairing neurological development to kidney, liver, and circulatory and respiratory problems.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-need-for-open-process

When President Barack Obama promised change, he put two kinds on the agenda. The first was substantive change: reforms to key sectors of the economy, such as health care, climate change, financial markets and arms procurement.

The second was process change: improvements to how public policies are shaped and how decisions over public funding are made. Against the odds, the Obama administration is making some progress on the first--but at the sacrifice of the second.

http://www.dailycoyote.net/index.php/?p=1775

photo taken September 2009

one year ago: Stormy Days
two years ago: Very Important Exploration

http://www.dailycoyote.net/index.php/?p=1773

photo taken September 2009

one year ago: Still The Younger Brother
two years ago: He Thinks He’s A Cat

This title promises far more entertainment than the article actually delivers:
Domestic Disturbances: The Rising Polyamorous Culture Is Out to Get Your Children

I was hoping it would get into detail, but the note at the end says it's adapted from a talk -- I guess The Rising Powerpoint Culture Is Out to Get Your Substantive Content. In the article that should have been written, each bullet point would be developed into the fascinating little trainwreck it cries out to become.

Edits follow:

- The lack of details makes me think this is what it's like when you have to argue with creationists -- it's a struggle to figure out what you are arguing against, and you're probably going to wind up making better arguments for their side than they are, just as a side-effect of trying to make sense of what they're saying. Now I want a relationship status on Facebook that says "It's Irreducibly Complicated".


- Well, I suppose we can still salvage some humor out of this -- let's play complete the sentence!

The rising polyamorous culture is ____________



Found via Google news alerts. Tagged "language" for the article's novel and bizarre use of "polyamory".

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=record-232-digit-number-from-crypto-2010-01-08

A team of researchers has successfully factored a 232-digit number into its two composite prime-number factors, but too late to claim a $50,000 prize once attached to the achievement. The number, RSA-768, was part of a cryptography challenge that technically ended in 2007 that had been sponsored by RSA Laboratories, a prominent computer-security firm. RSA-768, so named because its binary representation is 768 bits long, is the largest number from the now-defunct challenge to be cracked. [More]

http://www.instructables.com/id/Water-Bottle-Kayak-with-addition-Outrigger/

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

The city lights of Boston's Longwood Medical Area, as seen through the bare vegetation of the Riverway. In the summer, the foliage acts as a visual and auditory barrier, creating the illusion of wilderness.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheThrillingWonderStory/~3/145ZAd9yCPQ/link-latte-125.html

My Twitter tweets for the day.

Read them or not at your leisure. There may be some new stuff in there, so if interested, check ( behind the LJ cut. )

Tweets copied by twittinesis.com

http://www.instructables.com/id/aluminum-ring/

I found this article today...

The Melting of America
Orville Schell, TomDispatch.com: "Lately, I've been studying the climate-change induced melting of glaciers in the Greater Himalaya. Understanding the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet's most magnificent landforms has, to put it politely, left me dispirited. Spending time considering the deleterious downstream effects on the two billion people (from the North China Plain to Afghanistan) who depend on the river systems -- the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Amu Darya and Tarim -- that arise in these mountains isn't much of an antidote to malaise either."

Ice melting and not coming back isn't an "interpretation."  It's a photographically visible fact.  And it's causing problems.

Current Mood: tired

I have a vanity domain (who doesn't, these days) but it's been sitting around bare for the last year or two, and I really need to do something with it. I wasn't using it as it was, so I scrapped the whole thing and enlisted the help of a friend to set up Wordpress. I want to use it as a place to list my musical performances (something I can point the family and co-workers to, without pointing them here), and somewhere I can list the albums and projects I've worked on.

The problem is, I don't know what to write about myself. It's all well and good to say I studied music performance at the University of Utah or I sing with thus-and-so group and have been on such-and-such albums, but it isn't clever or engaging or very fun. Anyone got any suggestions for me? :)

Current Mood: curious

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

Quick question, need to know fast: Does anything bad happen to chickens in Fantastic Mr. Fox?

We're a little short on book reviews at the moment, so when I found out last night that Julie Powell — author of Julie & Julia — put out a new one a month ago: Cleaving: A Story Of Marriage, Meat, And Obsession. It's largely about her apprenticeship in a butcher shop, and sleeping around on her husband. I thought "Oh, I'll go pick that up this morning before work, read it over the weekend, and write a review for Monday. There's a Borders right next to an el station a couple stops south of the office; I'll just nip down before work and grab it."

Famous last words. I got into Borders and wandered all over the new books section and couldn't find it. Not in new memoirs, not in new non-fiction, not on the "new and notable" tables, not nowhere. Finally I found a computer and tried to look it up. Maybe Amazon had the release date wrong; it's happened before. Then a staffer buttonholed me and asked what I was looking for. I told him. "Oh, I think I've heard of that. It's called Cleaver or something. It'd be in the food section upstairs. I'll call up." And he did, and I waited, and they said they couldn't find it. So he said it was probably in the new non-fiction section, and he looked, and I waited, and he couldn't find it. Finally, he looked it up on the computer again and said "Oh, we don't have it here."

So I wound up trudging through the snow to Michigan Avenue and taking a bus to another Borders a couple of miles away, thinking "Well, if Borders is sold out, it must really be a huge hit, and we really should cover it, so I really should get it today. Except… it's funny how the sales guy got the title wrong, and neither he nor the food-books guy upstairs knew that it was such a big seller that they'd had a lot of demand for it. And it's funny that even though it's only a month old, it was listed as being off in the food corner upstairs instead of in the new books section downstairs, even though they have prominently-placed stuff down there that's a couple of years old at this point."

So I got to the other, even bigger Borders, and checked the new book section. Nothing. I looked it up on the computer; it said I should check "Food Reference." I trekked upstairs to the food section; I found about 50 copies of Julie And Julia (literally: shelf displays in two different sections, two different table displays, and then several massive stacks of them on the floor under the tables), but no copies of the new book. At this point, I was thinking, "Wow, this must REALLY be a hot seller." Except, again, for the part where the computer said it was in Food Reference instead of the new-books section.

And the part where when someone asked me what I was looking for — there were more employees in the bookstore than customers, and they were apparently bored — and she didn't know what it was called either. Given the butchery angle, she suggested it might be in the Chicken & Beef section. (There's a chicken and beef section in the food section?) No luck. She finally called downstairs, and found someone who claimed he knew where it was. And he beelined to the front of the store… where it wasn't. Finally he disappeared for five or 10 minutes and then emerged from the stockroom with a couple copies. I took one and skeedadled. It didn't have a discount tag on it, but it was 50% off, which strikes me as weird all over again — in my experience at Borders, 30% off means a bestseller, 40% off means a Twilight-level mega-bestseller, and 50% off means a clearance book.

So I remain confused as to whether this book is selling so well that they can't keep it on the floor, or so poorly (or it's such a minor release) that they've barely put it out at all. The fact that no one seemed to know about it leans me in the latter direction — I've normally found librarians and bookstore employees to be REALLY familiar with any recent book that's in high demand. And the reviews I've found are sparse, and universally negative. And I started it on the way home today, and hoo boy, the first few chapters are pretty terrible — mostly just very overwritten, with gushy, purple descriptions on top of fairly lame attempts to make her life sound far more exciting than it is. (No, Julie, working at a butcher shop and walking around with blood on your hands and apron does not make you mysterious, compelling, and possibly just a little… frightening, dum dum DUM, no matter how much you wish it did.)

Or maybe it was just The Invisible Book because nobody cares. Either way, I didn't get into the office til past 11, and I felt like I'd either been on a scavenger hunt, or a snipe hunt.

Current Mood: tired