Archive for February, 2010
February 28, 2010 at 11:15 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I’m going to be microblogging from the set of Big Bang Theory this coming Tuesday night. The taping starts around 6:00pm PT, so tune in to our Facebook and Twitter pages starting a little before then. So long as my iPhone isn’t confiscated and there’s reception in the soundstage, we’ll be holding at least one contest, perhaps two. Details as they unfold, but I already know what the prizes are going to be:
1. A 2-Disc Collector’s Edition of Disney’s Atlantis – The Lost Empire
2. Matt Groening’s The Simpson Futurama Crossover Crisis, a deluxe slip-cased hardcover
3. Any t-shirt from our the Science T-shirt section of our store.
If you want a chance to win, make sure you’ve Fanned us over on our Facebook page and are following us on Twitter.
Original post by David
February 28, 2010 at 8:41 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
In 1964, British PM Alec Douglas-Home was staying overnight at the home of Lord Hailsham in Scotland. In an astonishing security lapse, his bodyguards did not guard the door to the house. Left-wing college students, on a whim, decided to kidnap him and met the PM, alone, at the door. That’s when our hero, beer, stepped in to save the day:
Faced with a determined group of militants, the resourceful prime minister decided that there was only one option.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the liquid refreshment did the trick and defused any of the group’s lingering desire to kidnap their genial host, along with assurances they would guarantee his party a landslide victory if they went through with their plan.
This otherwise unverified incident was discovered in the recently-discovered diaries of the late Lord Hailsham, which included this passage:
“He asked and received permission to pack a few things and was given 10 [...]
Original post by John Farrier
February 28, 2010 at 8:38 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
What does climate change mean to you? from Andrea Posner on Vimeo.
As a project of American University professor David Johnson’s class this semester on interactive media, AU students have created a beta version of a new social media and discussion site to serve as the hub for the American Forum series.
In anticipation of Monday night’s event on “The Climate Change Generation: Youth, Media, and Politics in an Unsustainable World,” the site features video interviews with AU students on the topic (above), a Twitter feed that student attendees and public radio listeners will be posting to, a Facebook group, a news aggregator on climate change, and various topic driven discussion boards ranging from policy options to media evaluation.
Use of the site is just getting started and there is likely to be a swarm of activity at the site leading up to tomorrow night’s event and across the week as [...]
Original post by Matthew C. Nisbet none@example.com
February 28, 2010 at 8:29 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
(Video Link)
The Sandpit is a video composed of 35,000 tilt-shift photographs taken in New York City. Director Sam O’Hare wrote about this project:
I have always loved time-lapse footage, and films like Koyaanisqatsi especially, which allow you to look at human spaces in different ways, and draw comparisons between patterns at differing scales. I also really liked the tilt-shift look of making large scenes feel small, and wanted to make a film using this technique with New York as its subject.
via Bits & Pieces | About the Film
Original post by John Farrier
February 28, 2010 at 7:16 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Four years ago today a young researcher at the beginning of his graduate program in primatology sat down with the most intelligent, engaging, and downright beautiful fellow primate he’d ever had the opportunity to share a beer with. Freshly minted with her Master’s degree in women’s studies (emphasizing public policy), our conversation quickly moved to a discussion of evolution and male vs. female strategies. It’s only in hindsight that it seems bizarre to be talking about theories of male promiscuity and female choosiness on a first date. I had recently returned from my first primate field research trip and at the end of our fascinating conversation I asked her, “Do you want to come over and watch my bonobo videos?” (No, they weren’t what you think, mostly just grooming. Mostly.) She did. Little did I know that, four years later, we’d have a baby [...]
Original post by Eric Michael Johnson none@example.com
February 28, 2010 at 7:13 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
YouTube link.
After an introduction by Ernie Kovacs, Richard Valentine Pitchford (“Cardini”) performs the “intoxicated English gentleman” routine that made him famous. This recording from the “Festival of Magic” television program in 1957 is the only known footage of Cardini in action. He reportedly developed his ability to manipulate cards with gloved hands by practicing while in the trenches during WWI.
Via Professor Hex.
Original post by Minnesotastan
February 28, 2010 at 6:00 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The main theme of this year’s Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting should come as no surprise to regular readers: sequencing. Generating as many bases of DNA sequence as quickly, cheaply and accurately as possible is the goal of the moment, and the number of companies jostling to achieve that goal is growing rapidly.
The meeting saw impressive performances from established players in the field, especially Illumina: their new HiSeq 2000 instrument seems to have dug in as the platform of choice for generating vast amounts of high-quality short-read data. Life Technologies seem to be slowly abandoning the research genomics market (already dominated by Illumina) with their SOLiD platform, focusing instead on capturing the clinical sequencing market; they showed some impressive accuracy improvements for their technology.
As I mentioned in my previous post, PacBio largely underwhelmed the audience with their theatrical unveiling of a massive box with quite limited applications, although we’ll [...]
Original post by Daniel MacArthur none@example.com
February 28, 2010 at 4:00 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I knew I could count on my fellow Science Blogger Dr. Klemetti for a good take on the physical reality of the Chilean Earthquake, so I checked in this morning, only to see him, quite property, take the MSM to task for inane rhetoric, notably an MSNBC headline that reads “Is Nature Out of Control?”
Klemetti rightly observes that this is bad science. He points out:
Earthquakes happen, and they happen in a random distribution (more or less), meaning sometimes we get more, sometimes less. Spend any time looking at the USGS earthquake feed and you’ll see sometimes we have lots of M3+ earthquakes in a day, sometimes we can go a day or two without really any around the world. More importantly, looking at any of these earthquake patterns in a short timescale (geologically - which means in a human lifetime, maybe two lifetimes) is not sufficient to understand the [...]
Original post by Sharon Astyk none@example.com
February 28, 2010 at 3:20 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
You know how people help their cats to reach upper floors by installing cat ladders? Those can’t hold a candle to this cat-operated automatic feline elevator! Link (embedded video)
Original post by Miss Cellania
February 28, 2010 at 3:16 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
(YouTube link)
Designer Steven Heller gives an overview and critique of Olympic pictograms used over the past 74 years for the New York Times. When you only see these every few years, you don’t realize how different they are for each Olympiad. -via the Presurfer
Original post by Miss Cellania
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