September 2012
1 post
August 2012
18 posts
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Losing Yourself in Fiction Makes YOU the Character →
Ever make a decision based on how you felt from reading a book? Not that weak-willed, you say? Well you probably are! Think about it, like that time you read Harry Potter and rode a broom around? Or when you read Lord of the Rings and were a giant nerd. You’re such a nerd, nerd.
Move Over, Yerba Mate, Cahokia Black Drink is... →
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Squid Detaches Arms to Distract Predator →
When attacked, this squid leaves its arms in the predator. There are some barbs on its arms that can detach and distract the predator long enough for the squid to get away. If I were a squid, I think I would just be the ink kind, as that seems painful.
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Science Shows Climate Change Real for... →
Climate change and global warming is a real thing. All the science proves it, aside from the scientists at the Shell and BP labs. But seriously, people need to stop with this “It’s not real” bs, as it’s clearly a thing and if you think otherwise you’re either a neanderthal or have an agenda that involves getting super rich. So go to hell.
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Confirmed: Homo Sapiens Weren't the Only Humans →
At least two other kinds of cavemen existed, homo rudolfensis and homo erectus. And they all lived at the same time, proving that humans evolved the same way animals did, with derivative factions
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Sharks Do Their Own Dental Work →
Or rather have fluoride in their teeth. Nature just puts it there because nature prefers sharks to humans because sharks are cool and don’t need gross teeth. Humans need gross teeth so that they look weird and then nature doesn’t feel bad when they’re killed by awesome sharks.
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Amazing Unknown: The Heliosphere →
The first instalment, possibly the last because I’ll forget, in a series called Amazing Unknown - crazy stuff that exists that I’ve never heard of before. Today: The Heliosphere! A bubble of charged particles that surround our solar system. FACT: Voyager 1 just reached the Heliopause and will soon head into interstellar space. It was launched in 1977. Just read the wiki article.
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Fraking May Cause Earthquakes →
The worst thing just got worse. Fraking has been correlated with earth quakes. Can we get some alien overlords to preserve earth as a natural park already? I mean seriously, how crazy is this?
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Total War USA 2020 →
Cyclodynamics is history as science, and a new breed of data-centric rogue historians is advocating data use to predict cycles. Are we just a bunch of numbers, or does humanity have free will? I ask that like you won’t say free will, you predictable bag of chemicals, you.
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Epic Mars Mission Fails →
Curiosity made it to Mars, despite the improbability of making it, but these missions didn’t. You know why? It’s INSANELY DIFFICULT.
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Level Up! The Richter Scale of Puzzle Difficulty. →
Some elderly (I’m assuming) scientists have done a bunch of math to create a scale to determine how hard puzzles are. So far the hardest sudoku is like 3.5 out of 4. Big whoop.
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The Math Behind Sandcastles →
This is some no-shit serious math right here! I understood none of it!
Qualitatively, the liquid leads to the formation of capillary bridges between the sand grains, and the curvature of the liquid interface leads to a capillary pressure causing a force of attraction between the grains. This then creates a network of grains connected by pendular bridges, and allows, for example, creating complex...
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How Your Brain Hears a Voice in a Loud Room →
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New Prize for Theoretical Physics is Seriously... →
Internet billionaire Yuri Milner has started a 27 million dollar prize for theoretical physics. He pretty much just called up 9 physicists and said “Hey, I’m giving you 3 million for being smart.” Of course non-winners are complaining because they are babies, but it’s his money and he can do what he wants. So stuff it, “Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia...
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Get the Clubs Ready! Bird Flu Spreads to Baby... →
Watch out for that seal-lover Morrissey, too. He’s probably got H3N8 - the new iteration - all over his clothes. God, look at these little murderers.
July 2012
57 posts
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Dinosaurs Were Not As Big As We Thought →
Total bummer. They apparently only weighed about half as much as we thought, which conjures for me images of tying a brachiosaurus to a string and flying it like a kite. But that’s not true either, so what’s the point of dinosaurs any more?
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Spider Hunts by Casting a Net (Video) →
This is a spider capturing a grasshopper by catching it in a net. Bugs are nuts, almost as crazy as stuff in the ocean. Perhaps even crazier. If they were larger, they would be a complete horror. I mean, think about black flies. When they bit you, they slash your skin and lap up the blood. So gross!
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Blame it on the Brain. →
Are morals a choice, or is our brain wired to cause grief? Perhaps both? I think we can probably rewire our brains, if we want to, but people are made up of chemicals a little more than we care to admit. Still, self-awareness is some crazy batch of special chemical.
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Drawing with Your Eyes →
If looks could kill. The pen is mightier than the sword. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call this the most destructive weapon of all time.
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Pop Music: All the Same. →
Scientists at the Institute for Curmudgeonly Fun Wrecking have compared data sets to find that pop music is too loud and all sounds the same.
“We found evidence of a progressive homogenization of the musical discourse,” Serra told Reuters. “In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations - roughly speaking chords plus...
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Turns Out Everyone's Birth Was an Accident →
An accidental doubling of genes led to cancer, disease, and humanity. Whoops! We could have been trees or something if it weren’t for a mistake in evolution. C’est la vie!
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The Prisoner's Dilemma →
Amazing, all of my commentary disappeared. There are some new theories about how to play the Prisoner’s Dilemma. There’s something so creepy but interesting about these simple mind-games. It’s like practical application of philosophy on behavioural psychology; villain school type stuff.
The troubling aspect of this game, the reason it is infamous, is that it seems clear that...
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US Drought Could Cause Civil Unrest Around the... →
Good news, the drought in the US, the one that is destroying crops, is going to last until October. Experts are calling for farmers to use crops grown for biofuel to be used for food, and asking speculators not to drive the price of food up in order to make money. That will definitely happen and everything will be okay.
Also GLOBAL WARMING.
Anonymous asked: You are an arrogant buffoon, bumbling through life with your mouth open and your eyes shut tight.
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Whooping Cough is Back! →
In a related story, fewer toddlers are getting all of their immunizations. There is blood on Jenny McCarthy’s hands. It is that of infants. There are no links between vaccines and autism. Here is a study. Use Google to find more of your own. Get you some vaccines so the plague doesn’t come back.
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“The thing that I’ll remember most about the flight is that it was fun. In...”
– Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, died yesterday at the age of 61 of pancreatic cancer. Read her obit in the L.A. times.
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Sleep Paralysis! →
We can’t move while we sleep due to two chemicals, GABA and glycine, flooding our brains. When someone has sleep paralysis (which I have experienced, it’s terrifying) or sleep walks, it’s due to the chemical balance being off. Soon there will be pills for everything.
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WatchThe Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis as seen from space. There’s a whole collection (I recommend Borealis over Europe) on Wired.
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Wait, What's "String Theory?" →
It’s a theory that tries to reconcile relativity with quantum physics. Duh, everyone knows that. Just kidding, no one knows that except for math nerds and writers of Science Fiction. Steig Larsson strikes me as someone who would know that, but he’s dead. Luckily there is a cheat sheet for string theory.
There are other theories, but string theory is extra neat as it contains the idea...
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How Does Higgs Boson Effect String Theory? →
My confused, precarious grasp of physics theories left me with a niggling question after the Higgs boson was discovered. Does this mean sting theory is completely invalid?
Turns out it doesn’t. In fact, stupid, string theory is an underlying theory for the standard model of physics. So the Higgs boson is even predicted by string theory.
Lies and the Lying Scientists Who Lie Them. →
I’d like to be good at something, or perceived as such, but I don’t want to do any actual work; and so I read some science articles off of Reddit and post them as if I found them or something. But if you have too much integrity (any) to be a “content aggregator” or a “community manager” or a “social media expert,” you can fake data and become a...
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Caveman Sex! Now That I Have Your Attention... →
Mapping the human genome results in swaths of junk DNA. Previously thought to be useless, Junk DNA is sort of useless, except that it can trace back important evolutionary histories of man. Or could do that, if evolution was real. In fact man was created 10,000 years ago and that junk DNA is angel DNA that is activated when we die and go to heaven.
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Interstellar antimatter Laser Jets →
This conceptual engine uses - you guessed it - lasers to gather antimatter to create matter/antimatter collisions that are capable of interstellar propulsion. That’s crazy! It sounds like John Scalzi made it up or something.
This is totally great and all, but I can’t help but feel if we concentrated hard enough, we could figure out a way for me to never ever die. Can we work on that...
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Coral Reefs Completely Fubar →
They’re not beyond hope, but get this, instead of creating some super-robot to destroy factories and other ocean polluters, scientists are ASKING POLITICIANS TO DO SOMETHING! Ha ha ha ha lol! My god, smart people sure can be dumb sometimes!
The international coral reef science community is in 100 percent agreement on the urgent need for action to protect reefs and more than 2,500 marine...
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500 Terrawatt Laser! →
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred terrawatts! How do you measure the energy of fusion? Or whatever. It doesn’t matter how much it is, they could have said 10 megawatts and I would have been all “OOOOHHHH MEGAWATTSSSS!”
That’s kind of true for all science, it sounds great, but I have no practical way of knowing, say, how big the Carcharocles megalodon is, except...
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Bionic Laser Eye Gives Sight to Blind →
A bionic eye that gives 576px grayscale images to the completely blind. It’s pretty exciting stuff, and as scientists work towards discovering more about how the brain processes images, pretty soon we might just be giving eye transplants to everyone! Wheee!
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Aquanauts to the Rescue! →
Not rescuing so much as living underwater. The last undersea habitat is and undersea habitat, and while this article contains almost no real science, it does describe what is possibly the best place to live ever. I assume hilarious antics are a given. Also they’re called Aquanauts, so solving fish crimes are also a given.
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