The Miracle of Science

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow

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You always wanted to know, and now here’s your answer.


Posted by Buckethead on 11/19/03 at 07:03 PM
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Sunday, November 16, 2003

Scientists create a virus that reproduces

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I have a bad, bad feeling about this one.  See this USA Today article; Craig Venter and his team have put together a virus based on the recipe, read from the genetic code…

Scary.

Of course, I just watched Terminator 3, with Skynet taking over the world, and all that...so maybe my subconscious is a little overly concerned.

Still.

People are wondering if these things can fix the carbon dioxide problem in the atmosphere?  Dumb.


Posted by Ross on 11/16/03 at 03:17 AM
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Thursday, November 13, 2003

I’ll have to buy the White Album again, damnit!

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In a disturbing development for Johno, CDs may soon be relegated to the ash heap of history. Ananova is reporting that those pesky scientists have discovered a way to make permanent data storage devices from plastic antistatic film.  The new technology layers the polymer PEDOT with thin film silicon circuitry to create a new storage medium that could store in excess of a gigabyte of data in less than a cubic centimeter.  This is passing dense, information wise.  In addition, the new storage technology has the advantage of having no moving parts, requiring no batteries, and being fairly durable compared to traditional CDs.

So, in less than five years if the researchers are correct in their estimates, Johno will have to figure out what to do with thirty linear feet of beer coasters.


Posted by Buckethead on 11/13/03 at 07:05 PM
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Medical Research Has Spoken…

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Guinness IS good for you!


Posted by Johno on 11/13/03 at 01:56 PM
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Saturday, November 08, 2003

Fixing Patents

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Great reading here...the FTC is releasing findings about the patent system.  Reading this, it’s just common sense to do so, and everything in here squares with what I’ve experienced. 


Posted by Ross on 11/08/03 at 11:27 PM
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Monday, November 03, 2003

Attack of the Clones

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The AP is reporting that sales of cloned cattle are increasing in anticipation of an FDA ruling that cloned beef is safe to eat.  Personally, I don’t see how the FDA could rule otherwise, given that a clone is by definition an exact copy of another animal.  If the original ambulatory steak was edible, so will its identical twin.  Of course, we must get ready for the deluge of dirty hippies screaming, “Frankenfood.”

Meanwhile, I eagerly await my first cloned steak.  It has such 50s retro science of the future feel to it.  I arrive home from work in my jet car, park in the garage of my circular, all-glass home of the future, tell the robot butler to hold all calls on the videophone, and sit down to a meal of cloned beef and genetically engineered potatoes.  What could be better?


Posted by Buckethead on 11/03/03 at 09:31 PM
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Science is Fun!

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You can’t resist reading something entitled “Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass”, can you?


Posted by Ross on 11/03/03 at 04:56 PM
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Sunday, November 02, 2003

Powers Of Ten

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Very cool Java applet demonstrating the wonders of the universe, from the very large, to the very small...hopefully you have installed Java!  If so…

Powers Of Ten


Posted by Ross on 11/02/03 at 03:00 PM
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Saturday, November 01, 2003

Don’t Cry For DarkProfits

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I just read that there’s another mass email worm on the loose.  Yeah, denial of service is bad and all that, but this one apparently targets DarkProfits.com.  They’re the friendly folks who sent me (and my mother) a few dozen emails that loudly proclaim, in the subject line, “your credit card has been charged $247.35 for child porn”, and provide a convenient HTML form where you can enter in your credit card details if you disagree with that charge.

It’s an anti-spammer worm, which is an interesting development.  It’s sort of a stupid one, though...it makes no sense whatsoever to create a worm that only does one thing.  You really want the bot army if you can get it, and it’s a lot simpler to build something that morphs itself from one form to another, that is very general, that has little for scanners to get a hold of.

The bottom line is that Windows-based computation is in some pretty severe danger right now.  Microsoft has absolutely insisted that the default state of the OS be that processes can do whatever they want, wherever they want.  Unix takes the opposite view, that much of the system is protected from processes unless they can get rooted.  Guess which one makes for a more secure system?

Of course all of that can be subverted, instantly, by one crappy program running setuid root.  C may be a good language for writing bits and pieces of an OS, but it’s lousy at security. 


Posted by Ross on 11/01/03 at 06:02 AM
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Monday, October 27, 2003

How many bowls of Total is that?

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Check this out! A study from the University of Utah estimates that, for every gallon of gasoline you put in your car, 98 tons of prehistoric plant matter had to die.

I’m not throwing that out there to be an environmentalist doomsayer, though numbers that big do induce a little save-the-world spasm. I just think that’s 98 tons is awesomely huge number. The Slashdot story which linked to the study notes that this equates to roughly 4 tons of plants per car per mile. Daaaamn. Thirty-odd tons of plant matter! In my Pontiac! Just to go to the store!

I don’t know which is more mind-boggling: the sheer amount of dead plants it takes to move our society, or the sheer amount of dead plants that must have existed.


Posted by Johno on 10/27/03 at 07:24 PM
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Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Coming soon: cloned beef?

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This Wired article looks at the debate over cloning of food animals. Predictibly, consumers express reluctance to consider buying cloned meat, even though scientists are reasonably certain that it would be safe to eat.

Interestingly, this debate may well be moot: the economics of cloning cattle mean that we won’t be eating Clone Steak any time soon. Cloning is not economically effective for raising cattle for slaughter ($72K a pop these days...), but it works when employed instead of breeding to perpetuate a particularly strong genetic line-- making ten copies of your best Hereford. Man! Stud fees galore!

--Editorial handwaving--
People flip out over genetically modified food way too much. Some advances, like the much-touted Vitamin-A enriched Golden Rice, are 100% double plus goods. Others are of more dubious good, like Monsanto seed that goes bad after a year. At this point, the general public is so paranoid about Frankenfood (and note the fear factor in that very slang) that a reasoned debate isn’t even possible, even though plenty of food has already been tampered with at the genetic level by pointy-heads with clipboards. This paranoia is no way to feed the world.

On that note, the Wired article does note that the biggest concern of scientists working on cloning cattle is that a clone might escape and try to breed. Although it’s hard to imagine a doomsday scenario arising from that event, if the scientists are worried, I’ll let them find a solution.

Personally, I would LOVE the economics and technology of cloning to advance to the point that cheap beef could be vatgrown. That would be great! Cheesesteak without the cruelty! Seriously, one reason I don’t eat a lot of meat is that I want to do my tiny, symbolic part to help humankind, and a cow takes up a lot of perfectly good grain that could otherwise feed people on the cheap. Vatgrown beef would mitigate this concern, and have the added benefit that a cow didn’t have to die. Of course, the Black Angus top-line stuff could/should still be the real thang, but who the hell’s going to notice the difference in cafeteria food?

I love the future!


Posted by Johno on 10/15/03 at 05:03 PM
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Monday, October 06, 2003

One shot, one kill

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Nature is telling us that those wacky scientists have developed a laser that can zap individual mitochondria inside a cell, leaving the rest of the cell unharmed.  Using laser bursts .000000000000001 of a second long, they are able to destroy very small things indeed.  Femtolasers!  Sadly, they are little use in fighting off Martians.


Posted by Buckethead on 10/06/03 at 05:17 PM
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Environmentalist Wackos and Doommongers

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In response to Johno’s recent post:

I worked for several years for Citizen Action, an enviromental lobby group.  Concern for the environment has always been something important for me, going back to the days when I was in the Boy Scouts and spent a considerable amount of time in actual nature as opposed to volvo station wagons with “Think globally act locally” bumperstickers.

CA and similar groups are the “sane” side of the environmental movement.  While they eschew the violent or property damaging methods of Earth First and other wackos, their politics and beliefs are scarcely different.

My time at CA was a constant struggle - while I wanted to do something positive for the environment, do my part so to speak, the ideological fanaticism of the leadership and most of the other people working there was hard to deal with.  At the time, I was significantly less conservative than I am today - and that experience was a major part of why I moved rightward.

At base, I cannot agree with people who think that technology is inherently evil, and that the world would be a better place if all but maybe a million environmentally conscious people were to depart it.  Taken to its logical conclusions, the “sustainable development” ideology is a recipe for the death by starvation of billions.

Most environmentalists would of course stop short of advocating this path.  But they are strangely tolerant of those who don’t.  The prejudices of the environmentalist and the antiglobalization crowd amount to a kind of condescension, where primitive peoples and nature are to be kept pristine, so that they may be properly appreciated by enlightened, blue-goretex-wearing ecotourists.  Those primitive people are rarely consulted as to what their wishes actually are.  (Usually, TV and a new wardrobe from a lot of the documentaries I’ve seen.  Most people do not like poverty, even if it is a traditional lifestyle - that’s why so many move to the cities.)

Technology could make things much better for the rest of the world, as could the economic liberty that makes advanced technology possible.  A classic example is the golden rice, enriched with vitamin A that could prevent blindness in millions of children a year (it’s all about the children, of course) even though it is an eevilll frankenfood.  Kneejerk opposition to technological solutions, mystical environmental marxism, and constant doommongering are not a recipe for saving the whales, or anything else.

If we are going to preserve our natural wonders, and not go careening into self created disaster (at various times one or more of the following: new ice age, malthusian population collapse, utter depletion of natural resources, global warming, systemic collapse of the ecosystem, or just choking to death on pollution) we don’t need more of the “woolly-headed crypto-Marxist claptrap that totally ignores reality in favor of impossible solutions.”

Real solutions rely on an enlightened regard for self interest.  If we refrain from screaming that the sky is falling, and point out that it is in everyone’s best interest to avoid drowning in PCBs, we begin to make progress.  (And using market based mechanisms for pollution control is a good start.) We are ever so much cleaner than we were even thirty years ago, and most new factories and what not are designed with environmental protection in mind.  (The Cuyahoga River hasn’t caught fire since before I was born! Go Cleveland!) In time, we’ll have hydrogen cars, and maybe even clean fusion power (Cold Fusion Now!) or solar power satellites.  The world will be cleaner, at least where sensible democratic people live.

But the worst polluters and environment rapers are totalitarian governments and poor nations.  There is a clear connection between wealth and environmental awareness.  People who have the luxury to think about a clean environment (rather than the next meal or whether they will be tortured by the local gestapo) will take steps to clean things up.

The trend is clear in the industrialized world - ever stricter standards and an increasingly park-like world outside the cities.  We don’t really need to worry much there.  I don’t think we are approaching ecological holocaust.  We just need to calm down and stop firebombing apartment complexes and shouting “Free the Mink!”


Posted by Buckethead on 10/06/03 at 02:38 PM
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Thursday, October 02, 2003

Scottish Researchers Discover Perfect Sandwich

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... or at least the perfect sandwich for Scottish people. Disgusting.


Posted by Johno on 10/02/03 at 07:43 PM
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Monday, September 22, 2003

Vaccine for Cancer

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This is London is reporting that a US research team has made some serious progress in developing a Vaccine for Cancer .  The vaccines have produced dramatic results against the most virulent of cancers, such as pancreatic and kidney cancer.  Typically, there is a 95% mortality rate over two years for those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, over a third of those receiving the treatment were alive after three years, and one was disease free after five.

The new treatments are tailor made for each patient, using materials from the patient’s own body to create the vaccine.  Researchers also have reason to believe that the technique might also make possible vaccines against other infectious diseases as well.

Given cancer’s place on the list of leading causes of death, this is promising news indeed.


Posted by Buckethead on 09/22/03 at 07:28 PM
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