links for 2008-12-28

"We broadly lump solids into two groups, those that conduct electricity and those that don't. Materials in the latter category are known as insulators, and it turns out that there are at least three different kinds."

"I started to investigate Faraday's writings while working on a post about Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Coming Race, which quotes Faraday to justify B-L's fictional source of energy, vril. This led me back through Faraday's monumental collection of researches on electricity, a collection of over 25 articles published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society under the blanket title, "Experimental researches in electricity.""

"I've always had a soft spot for Michael Faraday, for any number of reasons, but one of those reasons is that he was a brilliant experimentalist with world-class instincts for investigating the behavior of this strange new phenomenon, and yet he possessed only rudimentary mathematical skills -- something that hampered the broad acceptance of his concept of how electromagnetism worked. "

It happens to everyone.

"The case that made contraception safe for America was a nail-biter. Thirty-three years later, a man who watched the game while clerking for Hugo Black was still bitter as he recalled the improbable 30 foot shot William Douglas made at the buzzer. "Two defenders hanging all over him, absolutely no arch, and it goes in - I mean, he should have apologized to everyone. But instead of acknowledging that he was lucky, he goes and writes that crap about the 'penumbra of privacy' to rub our noses in it. What a prick.""

"Where the hell is my Wii?"

"Sure, the music industry has been staggering around like a wounded animal for close to a decade now, but that hasn't stopped the yearly tide of staggeringly inessential albums. The A.V. Club's annual Least Essential roundup surveys the music that didn't have to happen. What follows isn't necessarily the year's worst music--though some of it is undeniably bad--it's but the year's most unnecessary."

"In the 300 B.C., years before the birth of black Jesus, Aristole postulated that all good things were made of "win." That was a pretty good guess, but he was drunk and probably also having an orgy. Modern day awesominers know there are actually 118 fundamental "awesoments" that compose all good things. The Periodic table of Awesoments can be a very useful tool. It's designed to show the relationships between awesoments, and often one can even predict how awesoments interact simply by their positions on the table."

But if we're going to do some social engineering with mortgage loans, why not go whole hog? An outfit called Architecture 2030, founded by Edward Mazria, suggests that we offer homeowners not just low-interest loans, but a sliding scale of low-interest loans that's conditioned on renovating their homes to increase energy efficiency.