Links Dump
drorzel | January 24, 2011
Scientists discover snowflake identical to one which fell in 1963 | NewsBiscuit
"'It's one of the last remaining challenges known to science and we've cracked it at last,' said lead researcher, Professor Kenneth Libbrecht. 'The team will soon disband to pursue other major scientific challenges, such as the unresolved toast-butter conundrum, and whether or not my baldness makes me a better lover.'"
(tags: science physics silly)
Coding Horror: The Bad Apple: Group Poison
"Groups of four college students were organized into teams and given a task to complete some basic management decisions…
drorzel | January 23, 2011
Food for Thinkers: The Rise of White People Food - Food - GOOD
"White People Food has nothing to do with the relative melanin level of the person eating it. There are plenty of black and Hispanic foodies happily gorging themselves. They, too, in this case, are White People. And it has nothing to do with cuisine or the chef. In fact, Momofuku, the very quintessence of a White People restaurant, serves Asian-themed food and is run by David Chang, who is Korean. White People Food does, however, have a lot to do with money. Are you wealthy enough to afford cuts of [insert farm name] [insert…
drorzel | January 22, 2011
$1,000 to do something Awesome. « The Awesome Foundation - Toronto
"Further details below, but the basic idea is that 10 Torontonians have committed to showing up each month, stuffing $100 each into a paper bag, and giving that bag to the person we think has the best chance at achieving something awesome.
No reporting, no strings, no oversight. Just $1,000 to do whatever it is you think is worth doing.
Deadline for submission is February 15th."
(tags: awards culture society internet world)
Oliver Twist's Workhouse Discovered - Telegraph
"[A] buzz surrounds the new claim by Ruth…
drorzel | January 21, 2011
Surviving the World - Lesson 862 - Middle Aged
"I like the idea that you are greeted by a yeti either as you leave this world or when you first arrive in the afterlife. If you're creating a new religion or lifestyle, may I suggest you implement this concept into your theology?"
(tags: comics internet silly surviving-world)
Community gun ownership and Tulsa at Tobias Buckell Online
"I understand the momentum of gun ownership in the US, and find most people I know who own weapons do actually either hunt (and eat their hunt) or keep it for home protection (there are the nuts who fetishize…
drorzel | January 20, 2011
Andrew Lownie Literary Agency | What Editors Want
A big list of editors talking about what they're looking for at their publishing houses, including this, from Oneworld i the UK: "We also love quirky non-fiction for our Autumn list, when shoppers are looking for something a bit different. We had great success last year with How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel and Mary Roach's hilarious Packing for Mars (popular science) as well as Peter Cave's Do Llamas Fall in Love (philosophy). Books like these that offer intelligent but highly readable introductions to interesting…
drorzel | January 19, 2011
The slow-photography movement asks what is the point of taking pictures? - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine
"[T]he real victim of fast photography is not the quality of the photos themselves. The victim is us. We lose something else: the experiential side, the joy of photography as an activity. And trying to fight this loss, to treat photography as an experience, not a means to an end, is the very definition of slow photography.
Defined more carefully, slow photography is the effort to flip the usual relationship between process and results. Usually, you use a camera because you want the results…
drorzel | January 18, 2011
xkcd: 3D
"You should've gone to the screening at CERN."
(tags: comics xkcd silly physics particles science theory)
Smarter Than the Average Bear? « Easily Distracted
"If I have seen a pattern, among my students and my parental peers alike, it's that parents who try to be someone that they're not, pursuing a parenting style that doesn't come from their own life experience, are the ones who will create the most psychic havoc for their children and for themselves. That's the really pernicious thing about figures like Chua, or indeed most folks who try to sell a complete parenting philosophy…
drorzel | January 17, 2011
Drug experiment - The Boston Globe
"[N]early a decade later, there's evidence that Portugal's great drug experiment not only didn't blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon's troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and,…
drorzel | January 15, 2011
YouTube - Fox in Socks-Like NEVER before
Just a tiny bit faster than I can manage...
(tags: youtube books kid-stuff video)
Veiled Criticism - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - 01/13/11 - Video Clip | Comedy Central
"It's not a show!!!"
(tags: politics us television comedy video)
drorzel | January 14, 2011
The Virtuosi: Darts
A scientific analysis of where to aim to get the most points, and how that point shifts depending on your skill level.
(tags: science games statistics math blogs virtusoi physics)
Real Genius | Film | The New Cult Canon | The A.V. Club
"Here's a movie that has all the elements of a standard nerd comedy: Pranks? Yes. Shenanigans? You betcha. A crusty-dean type? The best ever. It also features mild semi-nudity, montage sequences set to forgotten (though winning) songs by obscure '80s pop outfits [...], and comeuppances galore. But while Real Genius more or less follows…
drorzel | January 13, 2011
Pimp My Novel: Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity
"The sample sizes aren't quite identical yet, folks (232 votes this round compared to 342 last round), but currently 54% of those of you who responded own an e-reader, as opposed to only 42% in June 2010. Granted, this is an entirely unscientific survey, but it seems to me that e-reading is on the rise. Not that we couldn't have guessed this already.
Speaking of e-books, I thought I'd take a moment to rehash the two primary ways they're sold: via either the agency model or the wholesale model. How does this affect you?"
(tags: publishing…
drorzel | January 11, 2011
Cocktail Party Physics: i think that i shall never see / a carbon offset as lovely as a tree
"I heard a NASCAR broadcaster make the following claim: "NASCAR offsets 100% of the carbon emissions from this race via their tree-planting program." Anytime someone says "100%" or "always" or "without exception", my ears perk up.
[...]
But tree planting... beautiful PR idea. Get your biggest stars out to dig the holes, put the trees at a local school or park. Bingo. So how many trees do we have to plant?
Some brilliant NASCAR PR person did major damage to the cause of logic and educating the…
drorzel | January 10, 2011
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion Of Your Thesis Defense.
"Q: What does it mean if I get a small snake that is also very strong?
A: Snake-picking is not an exact science. The size of the snake is the main factor. The snake may be very strong, or it may be very weak. It may be of Asian, African, or South American origin. It may constrict its victims and then swallow them whole, or it may use venom to blind and/or paralyze its prey. You shouldn't read too much into these other characteristics. Although if you get a poisonous snake, it often means that there was a…
drorzel | January 9, 2011
Graphic Stories for your Hugo 2011 Nomination Consideration | Tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts
"As I noted the last time around, there seems to be a trend for Hugo nominators to stay comfortably inside their reading boxes--comics by folks already famous in other corners of SFF, like Neil Gaiman or Paul Cornell, or easily accessible webcomics that deal with comfortable tropes. (Which is not to say that Girl Genius wasn't a deserving winner; just that it's been two years in a row, now.) Compare the Eisner Awards with the Hugo for Graphic Story and there are startling…
drorzel | January 8, 2011
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)
"A medium has a niche. A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper.
When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the…
drorzel | January 6, 2011
The decline of the serial killer. - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine
Serial killers just aren't the sensation they used to be. They haven't disappeared, of course. Last month, Suffolk County, N.Y., police found the bodies of four women dumped near a beach in Long Island. Philadelphia police have attributed the murders of three women in the city's Kensington neighborhood to one "Kensington Strangler." On Tuesday, an accused serial stabber in Flint, Mich., filed an insanity plea.
But the number of serial murders seems to be dwindling, as does the public's fascination with them. "It does…
drorzel | January 5, 2011
To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor - NYTimes.com
"Today, however, Brazil's level of economic inequality is dropping at a faster rate than that of almost any other country. Between 2003 and 2009, the income of poor Brazilians has grown seven times as much as the income of rich Brazilians. Poverty has fallen during that time from 22 percent of the population to 7 percent.
Contrast this with the United States, where from 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the increase in Americans' income went to the top 1 percent of earners. (see this great series in Slate by Timothy Noah on American…
drorzel | January 4, 2011
nsf.gov - SRS The End of Mandatory Retirement for Doctoral Scientists and Engineers in Postsecondary Institutions: Retirement Patterns 10 Years Later - US National Science Foundation (NSF)
"Mandatory retirement in postsecondary educational institutions ended in 1994. In this paper, examination of retirements in 1993 (just before the end of this practice) and again 10 years later shows that by 2003, the age distribution of doctoral scientists and engineers working in postsecondary institutions had shifted, with a larger proportion being older than 56 years of age, compared with 1993. However…
drorzel | January 3, 2011
Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems
"I know what you're thinking : crystallographic and thermodynamic data of ternary alloy systems is a such a hackneyed plot device. But Landolt-Börnstein work their magic in such a subtle and layered way that at 3am when you are reading just one more page, you suddenly realise how they have completely turned everything on its head and produced the most breathtakingly original work. Not to mention the most spellbinding. "
(tags: amazon books technology engineering nuclear silly)
ScienceLeaks
"This blog exists…
drorzel | January 2, 2011
What's stats got to do with it? - Expression Patterns Blog | Nature Publishing Group
"I recently learned that I have an above average number of legs. This is no cause for concern: most of you do, too. It was something I first learned when watching Hans Rosling's The Joy of Stats BBC documentary. He pointed out that, since there are a few people with only one leg or none at all, the average number of legs is about 1.99 - just short of most people's two.
It shows that sometimes statistics are meaningless. There is no practical application to knowing the exact average number of legs per person…