brainwagon

The unholy lust of scientists / It may be time to curtail public financing of scientific research I’ll only add that it might be time to curtail public financing of University philosophy departments.

As part of my usual scuffling around, reading about intelligent design, I ran across this article: Typical Objections to Intelligent Design by Bob Murphy which appears to be a sincere attempt by someone who doesn’t follow the issue of intelligent design very closely to make some sense out of the recent hullabaloo regarding it. He […]

SimplyPhysics has a nice page of objects which have close encounters with the magnets inside MRI machines.   Now I know why people with stints and other metal in their bodies can’t have MRIs. 🙂 [tags]Bizarre,MRI[/tags]

Reader Bill Harris reminded me that tonight is the night that Stardust, NASA’s comet sample return mission, will return to earth carrying its cargo of aerogel that was exposed to the particles in the wake of Comet P/Wild 2. At 2:12AM PST on Sunday morning, the probe will jettison it’s cargo at 105,000 feet over […]

In keeping with my recent reading on volcanos, here is a link to the Alaska Volcano Observatory which is observing the increasingly active volcano on Augustine Island in Alaska. Recently earthquake activity has significantly increased, and some kind of eruption seems imminent. They even have a pair of webcams. The streaks running down the snowcapped […]

Check out these free [tag]webcasts[/tag] of courses going on at UC Berkeley. Among the more interesting ones are Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and a course on Search Engines, with many guests you’ve probably heard of. Good stuff, although somewhat sadly, all in my least favorite format: Realplayer. Berkeley Courses as Webcasts Via Lifehacker

I’m a bit of a nut about ancient writing (probably as an outgrowth of my interest in codes and cryptography) and one of my interests have always been with the Maya (after all, astronomers and writers, okay, the human sacrifice thing was not so good, but still…). Scientific American has just published this link about […]

A couple of days ago I mentioned the idea of supercooled water existing in liquid form well below the freezing point. Perhaps more dangerous is another delayed phase transition: water can exist in liquid form at temperatures much higher than the boiling point and can flash boil when subject to a disturbance. This usually happens […]

Courtesy from digg, check out this article with video dramatically demonstrating the freezing of supercooled water. If you ask most people with the freezing point of water is, they will confidently answer that water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius (or 32 degrees Fahrenheit if you are in a backward country that never shifted to the […]

Austrian scientists have found that people are better able to remember a sequence of letters after taking 100mg of caffeine, otherwise known as a Venti drip with non-fat milk and two Splendas. I was going to write something else, but I can’t remember what it was. See you at Starbucks.

As the Kansas Board of Education review gut their science standards to appease creationists, the NAS and the NSTA have decided to revoke their permssion to use their copyrighted materials in the new proposed standard. Yeow. From their letter to the Kansas BOE: While there is much in the Kansas Science Education Standards that is […]

Wow: another terrific article from The Panda’s Thumb, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite destinations on the web. This article is discussing some of the interesting research surrounding prions, self-propagating variants of certain proteins that are the infectious agents behind diseases like scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and variant Cruetzfeld-Jakob disease. What’s really interesting […]

Irrefutable evidence that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is behind all of modern society. The remains of the world’s oldest noodles have been unearthed in China. The 50cm-long, yellow strands were found in a pot that had probably been buried during a catastrophic flood. Isn’t it obvious that the story of Noah is derived from this […]

An awesome example of Intelligent Design, much more rigorous than the normal Intelligent Design hypothesis, and therefore is much convincing.

From the “It’s fun to be a Luddite” file, witness this bit of news from the BBC that Merck’s new vaccine to prevent cervical cancer might be available within the year. Cervical cancer is associated with the human papillomovirus. The drug Gardasil was apparently 100% effective at preventing early stage cancers and pre-cancerous abnormalities, which […]