Prime Stream
thescian | June 6, 2007Cicadas. They hide underground doing pretty much nothing for a number of years. Not any number of years but number of years that are prime. 3,5, 13, 17.. Aha. Smart. They use prime years to beat predators (that's the theory and I'll go with it). Any other occurence of primes in the natural world that you know about?
I've been smitten by prime numbers lately. If you would like to smite yourself, I recommend Melvyn Bragg's excellent BBC series 'In Our Time' on Primes.
thescian | June 5, 2007Fascinating news I read at ScienceDaily.
An important new study from the Journal of Consumer Research demonstrates how this "cognitive lock-in" can cause us to remain loyal to a product, even if objectively better alternatives exist.
"We find that consumers typically are not aware that this mechanism is a powerful determinant of the choices they make," write Kyle B. Murray (University of Western Ontario) and Gerald Häubl (University of Alberta).
Murray and Häubl examine a theory of cognitive lock-in centered around the notion of skill-based habits of use, that is, how using or purchasing a…
thescian | June 4, 2007Welcome to the ward of post-operative aftertaste where you can taste you appendix or spleen for a fee.
Transgastric surgery, or natural orifice translumenal endosurgery (NOTES), as it is officially known, involves passing flexible surgical tools and a camera in through the patient's mouth to reach the abdominal cavity via an incision made in the stomach lining. Once the operation is over, the surgeon draws any removed tissue back out through the patient's mouth and stitches up the hole in the stomach.
To some it may sound disgusting, to others the prospect of scar-free surgery may sound too…
thescian | June 4, 2007There was a long discussion about religion and god at home yesterday night. I ought to write it for public consumption some time. For now, I'll just post some thoughts about Hell and Hinduism. For those bought up by religious christian parents, the conception hell is probably as intimate and as vivid as their poop. This is in no small measure due to the emphasis of Christian faith on sin and confessions.
Just like christian religion, hindu religion has also exploited the notion of hell to scare the shit out of its masses but unlike christian religion it has not taken hell to its logical…
thescian | May 31, 2007iBioSeminars, a free online library of seminars aimed to spur students in India. They are soliciting feedback on the service before wider deployment. Bangalore's National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) will provide the servers.
"Many bright students in science institutes and colleges in India do not always have access to the latest breakthroughs in research in the areas that they are interested in. An exposure to this information at an earlier stage, say at the B.Sc. level, will help students get a better grasp of their subject and make decisions about future study and work," says Prof…
thescian | May 31, 2007God says no to abortion. God says no to condoms. God says no to reason and toleration. Since god has a very fragile ego and does not say all this in public, it falls upon a bishop of the catholic church in Scotland to relay god's delusions to us mortals. A friend of mine in Colorado - a woman, an atheist - used to say that most gods are men and they always talk through their penises. How true. God speaks through his penis, and that's surely why the religious knuckleheads liken abortion to preempting god's message.
Using insensitive and terrorizing language to sway the unsuspecting…
thescian | May 29, 2007What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st century?
How do we measure the scientific literacy of a society? How do we boost it? What is the value of this literacy? Who is responsible for fostering it?
Explore these questions in a 1200 words essay. First prize is $2,500 Prize followed by a
2nd prize of $1,000 Prize. Details here.
thescian | May 29, 2007I mean, literally. A recent APOD image shows a football ground size hole in Mars.
Quite possibly, the spots are entrances to deep underground caves capable of protecting Martian life, were it to exist... Such holes and underground caves might be prime targets for future spacecraft, robots, and even the next generation of human interplanetary explorers.
thescian | May 24, 2007Category error knows no boundaries. Well, that's why it is called a category error, I hear you say. Wait. Lend me your eyeballs for a minute and I'll show you what I mean: A category error that crosses continents and technology boundaries.
This fine example of a category error was dropped into our home yesterday: a leaflet from the St. Mary's Parish of Amersham. In it was an account of how the rector who is in Amersham persuaded his daughter who was on an african safari to stay inside the car through mobile phone text messages. While on the safari she witnesses a reckless man dragged off by a…
thescian | May 24, 2007No homeopathetic cure. No idiotic dilutions and molecular memories bullshit. This is healing water. For real.
The key ingredient of the water, called Microcyn, are oxychlorine ions - electrically charged molecules which pierce the cell walls of free-living microbes.
The water can only kill cells it can completely surround so human cells are spared because they are tightly bound together in a matrix. -BBC
For comparison here's what an early homeopathy pioneer did to water: Jenichen sat or stood stripped naked to the waist, holding the bottle in his fist in an oblique direction from left to…
thescian | May 22, 2007If it is in a supermarket in the UK, here's all the rotten details from an undercover scoop by BBC. This isn't new. Those in the US have grown up with the likes of Walmart and McDonald's for years. Compared to the US giants, the UK supermarkets are toddlers, still they pack the same sick punch that's the hallmark of obscenely large businesses.
Mass production and consumption is, as everyone knows, not geared towards quality; in the case of food, quality is treated strictly as a legal issue, and is met in word, not in the spirit of the word. From the origin to it's eventual sale, there's…
thescian | May 20, 2007The Scene: A human is fending off a group of pathogenic bacteria.
Human: Hey you, bacteria, don't come near me. I've got a badass virus with me.
Bacteria: Oh, yeah?
Human: It is so bad, man! You try me and you'll get blisters that you may not even see in your nightmares. [unexpectedly exposes certain body parts]
Bacteria: [scream and run]
Human triumphs, ably supported by herpes virus. End of a bacterial invasion.
Herpes co-evolved with us for the past tens of millions of years. In a study reported at ScienceNow, we learn that herpes virus in mice keeps bacterial pathogens away indirectly. A…
thescian | May 18, 2007Have you wondered if the subtle and not so subtle differences in the way people, say from India and USA, conduct themselves? Differences in facial expressions, walking, use of emoticons in writing...
I have wondered often. Cultural influences contribute to many of our physical expressions and the way we perceive expressions that other wear. Indians would shake their heads from side to side in agreement and invite you to do the neck dance with them. Italians would build spires with their hands (the Duomo's influence, surely). And, American emoticons would cause Japanese ones to wrinkle their…
thescian | May 18, 2007A three minute video at NY Times of LHC, the particle accelerator in Switzerland. The video starts with the question "what's mass", and briefly describes what's at stake: fundamental nature of our world and a handful of nobel prizes.
thescian | May 17, 2007Read a New Yorker essay on Atheists with Attitude by Anthony Gottlieb where books by Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens are reviewed.
Religious belief is as diverse as the number of living species in amazon, many of them, I am sure, are yet to be discovered and evolving rapidly. It is impossible for a book to contain all the diverse beliefs in its scope. Of the three books above, I have only read Dawkins book and Dawkins clearly restricts his book to monotheistic religions that have a personal god as their central dogma. Still, diverse religious beliefs is a swamp with many lurking things that…
thescian | May 11, 2007Reuters story.
A Hindu group in Wales are fighting to save the life of a bull they believe is sacred from slaughter after it tested positive for bovine tuberculosis.
Followers at the Skanda Vale Hindu temple in the western Welsh town of Llanpumsaint, Carmarthen, are considering forming a human chain in an attempt to save Shambo the temple bull from the abattoir, and have launched a petition on their Web site.
Appeals to the Welsh Assembly and Britain's Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs have failed, and a notice of intended slaughter has been issued.
The Hindu order at Skanda…
thescian | May 9, 2007A news story at BBC on the Australian city of Perth.
The Australian of the year 2007, environmentalist Tim Flannery, once predicted that Perth in Western Australia could become the world's first ghost metropolis, its population forced to abandon the city due to lack of water.
...
People consume a lot of energy. It is a car-dependent city with little public transport. Many of the luxury houses overlooking the ocean (known locally as "starter mansions") boast currently fashionable black roofs that soak up the heat in temperatures of up to 42 degrees in summer, and produce a greater need for air…
thescian | May 8, 2007A soldier could take no more of the plight of a robot getting blown up by bombs and pulling itself with one leg forward. [via] The question "What's human" will be redefined one day in the far future. Today is not that day however much we would like it to be. The harware and software aren't there yet, and moreover the wetware (atleast the one making this blog post) isn't ready to concede territory yet. This case is just another empathetic misfiring of neurons (darkly ironic too, empathy is out of question with an enemy in the battlefield). Of course, the soldier wouldn't agree with my flippant…