ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Name
that telescope: NASA is looking for a memorable,
easy-to-pronounce name for its new orbital infrared observatory.
The grand prize includes a trip to the launch, and the contest is open
to all Earthlings not affiliated with NASA, JPL, or Cal Tech.
Send in a proposed name and a supporting essay of
250 words or less.
Use of the job site monster.com seems to have
serious
privacy problems, especially for people who don't want their
current employers to know they're looking. Worse, resumes may not
really be removed from the database on request, as promised.
A friend recommended this service, and told me to budget an hour to set up my account and resume. But first I'm going to have to spend time thinking about the risks involved, and compare them to the potential benefits. (On the other hand, they're buying Hotjobs, and I have a resume there, so it may be too late to worry about it. Feh.)
John McKenna proposes
reparations
for slavery that would actually repair damage:
a guarantee of superior education for all black Americans.
Ample advanced placement classes would become available and extracurricular academic activities (museums, libraries and hands-on opportunities) would be routine. Adult education would be available for those who need retraining for advanced employment opportunities, including the many who have been incarcerated and now are able to return to society.Educational reparations would be long-lasting and would create a true emancipation of those who have suffered for generations. The result would be a population of citizens who are able to compete, achieve and produce at a superior level.
If someone could shoot a nuclear-tipped missile out of the sky,
where
would it land?
If you saw someone threatening suicide, would you yell
at her to "get it over with"? Some
Seattle
motorists did, because the police officers trying to talk
her down were delaying traffic. The woman is now in critical condition
after jumping off a bridge into shallow water.
Michael Swanwick is working his way through the periodic table,
at one short story a week. A few weeks ago, sodium led to
electric
pickles.
The "mimic octopus" does
convincing
imitations of at least eleven other animals, all of
them poisonous.
Quote of the day, from an article on the
lesser-known
New York mayoral candidates: "He whiles away time until
the general election healing injured squirrels."
[free registration required]
Stephen Wolfram, inventor of Mathematica, is ready to
talk about the
new
kind of science, based on computer programs instead of equations,
that he's been working on for the last ten years. His claims
are large:
In physics, for instance, I can finally explain why the second law of thermodynamics works--that is, why many physical systems tend to become irreversibly more random as time progresses....I've discovered that many things we might have thought were special about life and intelligence, for example, can also emerge in all kinds of physical systems. Consequently, I don't believe "anthropic" arguments that say for us to be here it's necessary for there to be stars, galaxies, and so on. There can be things just as complex as us without any of that.
Rather than publish papers as he went along, Wolfram has put the whole thing into a book, A New Kind of Science.
Genetic analysis strongly suggests that the
forest and savannah populations of African elephants are
distinct
species, though more closely related to each other
than to Asian elephants.
Other evidence for this theory includes visible differences
between the two groups, and of course their different habitats.
Writing can be a dangerous occupation: Maya conquerers
broke
the fingers of scribes who had served defeated kings,
then executed them.
Guilty
until proven innocent is the motto of the MPAA--and the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act enables them to enforce it,
cutting off people's Internet access before informing them of the
charges against them, let alone proving they've violated
anyone's copyright.
Are parsnips
really fish?
The newest straphangers will be blue mussels:
It turns out to be cheaper to
turn
old subway cars into artificial reefs than to use them
for scrap metal:
the problem is that the "redbird" cars have a layer of asbestos
insulation. The asbestos would case expensive problems if the
cars were taken apart for scrap, but the EPA says the asbestos
will stay put in the waters off the Delaware coast.
[free registration required]
Monsanto and other biotech firms are
forcing
farmers to buy, or at least pay for, GM seeds,
and trying to prevent consumers from knowing whether what
we buy is genetically modified. They had claimed that GM foods
would increase consumer choice--but when consumers chose
not to buy, the market's response wasn't to provide other foods,
but "come the Revolution, you will eat modified
corn!"
Follow the bouncing ball: the newest proposal for a
Mars
rover would need no fuel, and might serve as its own parachute.
[via More
Like This]
The growing collection of planets around other stars
finally includes a
familiar-looking
system, with two gas giants in circular orbits at a reasonable
distance. Nothing Earth-sized yet--our detectors aren't that good--but
there's room for an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone
around 47 Ursae Majoris.
Jamie Raskin proposes a
constitutional
amendment to give all Americans a basic right: the
vote. This would undo profoundly undemocratic Supreme Court
decisions that there is no federal right to vote, and that
states may deprive citizens of the vote as
long as they don't explicitly do so on the basis of race or sex.
Charlotte Raven
isn't
interested in the meaning of life, seeing it
as an easy distraction from more immediate problems:
"What's it all about?" is an exemption from analysing the material circumstances that make people with good jobs feel unhappy. The fact that many of them will be putting in 50- or 60-hour weeks might have some bearing on the matter, with all the concomitant strain on family life. This is just one suggestion. If you looked at the thing more closely, you'd probably come up with 30 or 40 related reasons why this category of worker leaves the house on Monday morning with a kilo of lead in his boots. There will never be a single "answer".
A blacksmith and a metallurgist claim to have
rediscovered the art of making
Damascus
steel. Their technique depends both on processing--"You
heat it up really hot and beat on it really hard"--and on the precise
composition of the alloy.
[via Slashdot, so may be hard
to reach]
Copyright 2001 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.