half-baked food for thought
Sushi Science and Hamburger Science: I had always regarded science as universal and believed there are no differences in science at all between countries. But I was wrong. People with different cultures think in different ways, and therefore their science also may well be different. In this essay, I will describe differences I have observed between Western science and Eastern science. Let me start with a parable……
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Dear Dustin…
http://www.odeo.com/flash/audio_player_standard_black.swf
(it takes a few seconds to load, be patient!)
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Muslims upset over Doritos
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Debord’s Board Game
Playing Kreigspiel on a LAN. Guy Debord created a board game in 1977 called Kriegspiel, a war game ostensibly based on the principles of Clausewitz as articulated in On War. An online version of this game was recently created by the Radical Software Group, and released online. The rules seem slightly more complicated than chess.
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You are not yet enlightened, Inky-san.
Retro Sabotage is a collection of recreations of classic video games. Or is it?
Hint: It’s not, but to explain them would be to spoil it. If a button needs to be pressed, it’s the space bar unless it’s explained otherwise. My advice is to try the Pac-Man and Space Invaders ones first, but Pong 2.0 is a highlight.
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SurveillanceSaver: “A haunting live soap opera.”
“SurveillanceSaver is an OS X screensaver that shows live images of over 400 network surveillance cameras worldwide.” There is also a Windows version. Or check out the camera feeds without installing a screensaver.
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Interviews with people who only wear one colour
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The Eye of Sauron
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Beer barrel R2D2 sculpture
This beer-barrel R2D2 sculpture comes from Deviant Art’s Amoebabloke, who’s hoping to find a buyer who isn’t just a rich collector.
http://backend.deviantart.com/embed/view.swf
antique d2 project 8 by ~amoebabloke on deviantART
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Paper Pilot: Battle of the Air
Design a paper airplane and then see how far you can fling it. (Sound warning).
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Recomendation!
From Spaceballs.ca:
View, comment, recommend, and email my friends post on blogTO! BookArtBookArtBook
For 2008 I aim to build up my portfolio of published work. To submit to blogto, I learned how to hyperlink and I set up a flickr account. While I generally carry around a pen and notebook, I’m going to start carrying around my camera as well, the Canon SD1000.
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StuffWhitePeopleLike.org
This is a scientific approach to highlight and explain stuff white people like. They are pretty predictable. (from the About section.)
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Around the world in 195 days, six hours – by bike
A Scottish man became the fastest to cycle around the world yesterday when he arrived in Paris after nearly seven months on the road. Mark Beaumont, 25, completed the trip in 195 days and six hours – beating the current record of 276 days.
After almost seven months of dodging drivers, sleeping rough and struggling to get enough to eat, Beaumont is expected to enter the Guinness Book of Records, once the feat is verified.
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Truth about teleportation
Scientific American’s JR Minkel interviewed CalTech physicist H. Jeff Kimble about quantum teleportation. In the article, Kimble explains in simple terms why recent experiments in quantum teleportation have nothing to do with the Star Trek transporter. As Minkel sums it up, the phenomenon “turns out to be more relevant to computing than to commuiting.” From the interview:
Scientific American: What’s the biggest misconception about teleportation?
Jeff Kimble: That the object itself is being sent. We’re not sending around material stuff. If I wanted to send you a Boeing 757, I could send you all the parts, or I could send you a blueprint showing all the parts, and it’s much easier to send a blueprint. Teleportation is a protocol about how to send a quantum state–a wave function–from one place to another.
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Another success in Homeland Security’s War on Babies
A 14-day-old Samoan infant died in DHS detention at Honolulu airport earlier this week, and American Samoa’s delegate to Congress is calling for an investigation:
The baby had been flown to Honolulu for emergency heart surgery. He died while detained inside a customs’ room at the Honolulu airport with his mother and a nurse.
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Valentine’s Day Surprises
http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1075416/valentines_day_surprises.swf
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Melt a beer bottle in a microwave
http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/1004040/melt_a_frickn_beer_bottle.swf
The Unwise Microwave Experiment guy shows how to melt a beer bottle in a microwave oven. You have to prep the bottle by using a blowtorch to make a red hot spot on the bottle. Stick around for the end of the demo to hear his explanation of how it works.
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Man lived with corpse for years
The body of a man believed to have been dead for more than five years has been found in a Bristol flat where a tenant continued to live.
The corpse was discovered by council workers on a sofa in the lounge after neighbours reported a foul smell.
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Find 14 Uses for Orphan Socks
It’s one of life’s greatest mysteries: Two socks enter the washing machine, one sock leaves, its mate gobbled up by laundry goblins. Besides suffer the sartorial indignity of wearing mismatched pairs, what else can you do with an orphan sock that’s all by its lonesome? Here are some ideas:
1. Sew a pet bed
2. Make a chew toy
3. Make an animal puppet
4. Protect fragile holiday ornaments when you put them away for the year
5. Sew a sock monkey
Most of the ideas link to instructions!
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Heat-Sensitive wallpaper changes patterns when you crank the thermostat
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How to Cheat
Here’s a roundup of students’ how-to-cheat YouTube videos. The best one is definitely the guy who scans the label off a Coke bottle, replaces the nutritional information with cheaty stuff, prints it, and glues it around a bottle (presumes that your teacher lets you bring Coke into class — I suppose this works best in schools where Coke has struck a deal requiring their products to be available at all times and in all places.)
When I was a kid, we were obsessed with figuring out methods for cheating — far more so than with actual cheating itself. We used binary encoding to sneak in long lists of numbers, stitching them up the outer seams of our jeans or cuffs — a stitch for 1, no stitch for 0 — that we could read by fingertip. After we learned the resistor color-coding scheme, we started to shave pencils and then decorate them with colored bands that actually contained the same lists of numbers. We tried — and failed — to produce a decent tapping code for interactive cheating, though this is certainly possible. One exciting failure was a light-based semaphore wherein the conspirators would flash reflected discs of light up on the wall over the teacher’s head using our watch-faces.
The kids in these videos are awfully sanguine about their teachers’ YouTube cluelessness. I’m relatively certain that the adorable little English moppet pictured here has never actually succeeded in using his cheat, as it relies on your teachers allowing you to keep playing cards on your desk during the exam. This is surely a purely theoretical cheat.
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Scientists to turn women’s bone marrow into sperm
British scientists are ready to turn female bone marrow into sperm, cutting men out of the process of creating life.
The breakthrough paves the way for lesbian couples to have children that are biologically their own.
RobDurdle.com 
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