Video: Bad Universe

So the most excellent Phil "the Bad Astronomer" Plait  has a new Discovery Channel show coming out called "Bad Universe". It seems to be based on his book Death From the Skies! about all the ways the universe could snuff us out. The first episode is on asteroids; and it looks frekkin awesome. Embedded below, or click here for the direct link.

Technology Quarterly

The Economist released the latest edition of their wonderful Technology Quarterly a while back. Here are my very belated picks:

• MIT biomechanic Hugh Herr (fascinating profile and overview of his work).
• Sexing chickens (a new biochemical method to determine the sex of chickens - alas, the end of the human chicken sexers is in sight).
• The Net Generation (on whether it's useful or meaningful to talk about a new generation of "digital natives").
• Translating the web (machine translation and human translators working together. Related: this)

Fun with Buzz

Now, I'm not nearly as much of a Google fanboi as Owen Swart, but I'm a fanboi nonetheless. So I was unreasonably excited about the launch of Buzz, Google's latest social web product. I've played around with it a bit, and, essentially, it's Twitter + FriendFeed, nicely integrated into many of Google's products, and especially Gmail.  If you're not subscribed to my mini-blog (which, for the uninitiated, is a stream of links I share via Google Reader), I suggest having a look at my Buzz profile. If you have a Google Account (and you should anyway, if only for Gmail) you can "follow" me from there, which will then stream my blog posts and shared items straight into the Buzz section of your inbox. (I'm not quite sure how the mechanics work yet, but I think this is how it will go. Buzz is also supposed to PageRank items, so whether it filters stories from people you follow, or only 'recommends' extra items based on a ranking system, I don't know).

We'll have to wait and see whether Buzz takes off or not, but it certainly looks promising. My major concern at this point is duplication. Say you're (1) following me in Google Reader and (2) subscribed to my blog, and now, (3), decide to "follow" me in Buzz. When you scroll through my shared items in Reader, will you again have to do so in Buzz? What about vice versa? And what about my blog rss and Buzz? Will reading it in Buzz mark it as read in Reader?  I have seen that a "like" in Buzz transfers (a while later) to Reader, so hopefully Google have found a way of avoiding such annoying possible duplications.Anyway, enough off-topic fanboi ranting from me...

See also: Ten Pressing Questions about Google Buzz at PC Magazine, the Wikipedia entry on Buzz (which will quickly evolve into something useful and informative) and ReadWriteWeb on Buzz's missing features.

Video: Eyes on the Skies

There is more science to celebrate in 2009 than just anniversaries relating to Charles Darwin, 2009 is also the International Year of Astronomy. (Because it's the 400th anniversary of the first astronomical observations with a telescope). Anyway, since my fiancée is such an astronomy nut, I downloaded "Eyes in the Skies" for her, the freely-available official documentary of the IYA. (Alas, they don't have a single file for download, so you have to download 7 separate 'chapters')

My verdict: watch it. While it's not quite professionally produced, and while there is weird and annoying pronunciation throughout (e.g. NAzzzA for NASA), the actual content is great. It's basically a primer on the history of telescopes - not just optical, ones that observe all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum - and, most interestingly, it covers future telescopes that are being built or that are on the drawing board.

(Hopefully South Africa will win the bid for the Square Kilometer Array. That would be awesome).

Video: Smoke Ring Collision

So this video (embedded below, or click here) has nothing to do with my blog, but it's too awesome to pass up. Apparently, it's what physicists do when they're high...

See more funny videos and Technology Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Fun with the Economist

The Economist has a bunch of cool recent articles, so I thought I'd link to some of them.

Richard Dawkins is not popular in some circles, indeed, he's attracted a whole host of critics or, as he puts it, "fleas". The latest is "The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin’s Legacy" by Fern Elsdon-Baker, a philosopher at Leeds University. The Economist has a good review of the book, which concludes Elsdon-Baker misses her mark. I especially liked the final paragraph:

What is left, once these attacks are dismissed, is a critique of Mr Dawkins’s proselytising atheism. It is true this wins him few converts, when a collaboration with religious moderates against the creationists might bear weightier fruit. But if his intellectual rigour forbids him making common cause with people he thinks are wrong, that perhaps only shows he is indeed the rottweiler of legend.

The Lexington column had a interesting piece about Camp Inquiry, an American summer camp for atheist / freethinking children. (If you listen to Point of Inquiry, you've no doubt heard about it before). I was somewhat surprised (though, I shouldn't have been) that the camp has been strongly condemned by fundamentalists like the nuts over at AiG. I'm always amazed how controversial teaching critical and independent thinking is.

The Economist is renowned for its dry, pithy, final sentences. Indeed, it's joked that the ability to pen such lines is more important for being hired as an Economist journalist than anything else. Anyway, I thought the closing sentence of this article on searching for Dark Matter was wonderfully crafted and apposite.

Oh. And I just can't resist linking to this review of a book on World War II. The sub-heading: "A British historian argues that Hitler lost the war for the same reason that he unleashed it—because he was a Nazi." Glorious.

Technological Quarterly

The latest edition of the Economist’s always-fascinating Technological Quarterly is out. Highlights: combating malaria by shooting down mosquitoes with lasers (no, really), a lengthy but worthwhile piece on Marty Cooper the father of the mobile phone, the benefits of building a smart electricity grid, shades of Knight Rider with smart and connected cars, and using the ubiquitous cellphone as sensors (to answer scientific questions, respond to emergencies and so on).

Clay Shirky on newspapers and the web

Ok, so this is seriously off topic, but Clay Shirky's post about the impact of the web on newspapers, and the revolution in how we manage information more generally, is an absolute must read. Shirky argues, in brief, that there is nothing natural or inevitable about how journalism is current conducted -- it's simply a product of the economics of the printing press. And, rather disconcertingly, we simply don't know -- can't know -- what system will replace the current one. A snippet:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

Picture: A High-Resolution Map of Science

This map of science (from this PLoS paper) is awesome:


(Yes, yes. We must be careful about how we interpret this, the methodology must be carefully checked and the limitations spelled out, etc. But it's pretty. And interesting).

Louis Theroux

I never thought I'd have a favorite documentary film maker, but over the last couple of months I've fallen in love with Louis Theroux's magnificent oeuvre. Theroux, son of the famous travel writer Paul Theroux, makes sympathetic but penetrating documentaries about fascinating and often overlooked subcultures, like porn-stars, UFO-hunters, Boer separatists, American black nationalists and body builders. These documentaries are so interesting, it seems to me, because Theroux disarms his interviewees with a (in my view at least, affected) wide-eyed naivete, which, when combined with his genuine affection for people, allows him to to delve impressively deeply into his subject matter.

Anyway, watch and judge for yourself. I've embedded the documentary Theroux made about (the batshit crazy) Westboro Baptist Church below (or click here). You can find more of Theroux's work on Google Video and there are a couple of working Torrents here.

Fun with RSS

Thanks to fellow SA science blogger Orion Spur, I found myself perusing RealWriteWeb's 100 Best Products of 2008 (a fantastic resource), and there came upon their list of the Top 10 RSS Syndication Products of the year. It's via the latter that I discovered PostRank, perhaps the most useful RSS tool since the invention of Google Reader... So why do I like it so much? Well, say you subscribe to a high-volume but intermittently interesting feed. That is, you're subscribed to a blog that's very good but gets updated very regularly -- a bit too regularly. Traditionally, in such a case, you basically had two options: unsubscribe and miss out on the good stuff or wade through tons of not necessarily interesting posts in order to get to the good stuff.

PostRank, bless it, adds a third option... Using a PageRank-esque algorithm (that takes account of the number of comments, Diggs, inbound links, del.ico.us saves and so on) PostRank gives a feed's individual posts a score of between 1 and 10, and these rankings in turn allows filtering for quality. So, for example, I love Phyrangula but I can handle only so many three-line posts about some random US politician defending creationism (or whatever). So all I have to do is add Phyrangula's feed to PostRank, specify that I only want to see "Great" posts (i.e. those with a PostRank score higher than 6), and then subscribe to the custom feed that gets generated, using my customary feed reader. The result? No to Jolly Squidmas wishes, but yes to the conversion of a prominent atheist blogger to Christianity. Best of all, there are two helpful Firefox addons that works with the service: a feed manager that makes handling all those RSS's simple, and AideRSS Google Reader integration that improves Google Reader with various PostRank tools.

Of course, the filtering is only as good as the algorithm, but so far I'm very impressed with the results. Obviously, also, there are a bunch of other ways PostRank is useful; I've only focused on the filtering because I'm so keen to reduce my RSS reading duties...

Audio: The Library of Babel

The greatest short story writer of all time, without a shadow of a doubt, is Jorge Luis Borges and his best short story, in my opinion at least, is "The Library of Babel". There is no way I can do the story justice in summary so just trust me on this, download the mp3 and have a listen. It's absolutely sublime.

And if you're keen to explore the philosophical implications of Borges' library, pick up a copy of Daniel Dennett's (magisterial) Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Unusual articles

I really love Wikipedia. And I don't mean love as in 'like' or 'find very useful', I mean love in the sense of deep uncompromising positive affect. Wikipedia is without a doubt one of the most important products of the internet and the greatest general encyclopaedia in history. (For a defence of Wikipedia against old fogies, see Clay Shirky's Bloggingheads.tv discussion with Will Wilkenson).

One beautiful illustration of Wikipedia's greatness is its comprehensive and fascinating list of unusual articles. A small sampling of the fun:

• "Japanese toilets" (Japanese people can be weird),
• "David Hahn" (a 17 year old boy who tried to build a nuclear reactor in his backyard),
• "Heavy metal umlaut" (to prove your band is ütterly hardcore),
  
• "Gay bomb" (weapon the US miliarty wanted to develop to, erm, "soften up" enemies),
• "GoldenPalace.com Monkey" (a species of monkey named after an internet casino),
• "Acoustic Kitty" (CIA wanted the use cats as spies), and
  
• "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" (an example of a grammatically correct sentence that is nearly impossible to parse).
  

Science is awesome

So I blogged about an unconfirmed direct picture of a planet around a sun-like star a while ago, but now it seems we have the real deal. The image is below and, as usual, Phil Plait has the details. Wow.

Censorship is bad

This week is the American Library Association's Banned Book Week, an awareness campaign dedicated to opposing censorship. To mark the occasion, Time magazine has put together a list of some of the 10 most challenged books in history. It's sobering to see how many great books are on that list - indeed, my favorite novel, Lolita by Vladimir Nobokov, is on the list. Imagine the sheer cultural loss if censorial organizations still had the power to suppress books.

(See also: "List of most commonly challenged books in the U.S." and "List of banned books").

Perspective

Because sometimes we forget.



How - The best free videos are right here

Note: According to Wikipedia's "List of largest known stars", VV Cephei is in fact not the largest star known, that honor goes to VY Canis Majoris (although there is controversy about how big it really is).

Awesome science: First picture of an exoplanet around a sun-like star

Oh wow. It seems that we have the first image of an exoplanet around a sun-like star! (It's yet to be confirmed though. Some skepticism is in order). The image:


Phil Plait has all the details over at Bad Astronomy.

Google juice

Ignore this post, I'm just supporting the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique.

Truth.

Video: Slow-motion bursting water balloon

Ok, so this is totally random and has nothing whatsoever to do with this blog, but you just have to see the video embedded below (or click here). It's awesome.

Fun with geography

Warning: this game is very, very addictive.

One of the benefits of a political science major (with lots of International Relations thrown in) is a solid knowledge of geography. Try this "Traveler IQ Challenge" and see whether you can beat my score: on my first try, I got to Level 11, with 446,361 points and a "Traveler IQ" of 119 ... [Edit]: I managed to get to Level 12 on my 4th try, but there's no way I'm beating it. My knowledge of Russian, Chinese and Canadian geography isn't nearly good enough.

(Hat tip to Kelly).