Recommended Reading

The universe is immensely large.

To try imagining how big, place a penny down in front of you. If our sun were the size of that penny, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be 350 miles away. Depending on where you live, that’s very likely in the next state (or possibly country) over.

In our ever expanding knowledge of: animals are basically just like us. Rats appear to have empathy. Also in the article, rats will share food and give up chocolate in order to help another rat.

Who are the 1%? They tend to vote Republican even if they aren't more conservative. They tend to have far more education with a simple caveat - being highly educated doesn't guarantee vast membership in the top 1%:

This is not to say that college degrees guarantee vast wealth. To the contrary, only a small fraction of all Americans who report having a postgraduate education (1.5%) or an undergraduate degree but no postgraduate education (0.8%) fall into the top 1% category.

And Some videos in order of educational - funny.

Via Freakonomics:


Via GOOD:

A Real Water World

About a month ago I wrote about the possible cancelling of the James Webb Space Telescope program. I see such an action as a symbolic gesture of our countries larger unwillingness to invest in science and infrastructure. On a more literal level this is why you need the JWST.

Who Are We?

Just a quick note.

The US is the best country in the world because we do things that other people think won't work or can't be done. Not because we are the most fair or have the best healthcare or because our foreign policy is even tolerable. No, people look up to us because we get shit done.

Well, congress is thinking of shutting down the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project that NASA has been working on since 1996. The JWST is a technological marvel that will enable astronomers and physicists to peer far deeper into space than Hubble currently does. It is a mammoth undertaking.

The technology created for projects like this eventually find their way into consumer products, and in the mean time they help advance science and push the limits of engineering and the like.

What American doesn't look back on all of our great achievements without some tinge of pride? Why do we so deeply want to be just another country that aspires to nothing other than our own comfort and entertainment?

Tons of Links

"I believe in arithmetic." - Ben Bernacke when asked how he felt about Bush's tax cuts. According to Paul Krugman the Bush years are responsible for roughly 20% of our national debt.

Astronomers discover a HUGE sun.

Windows 7 might not suck like just about everything else Microsoft. Even Bing isn't too bad.

Olympus came out with a camera that I think is a step in the right direction. See, point and shoot cameras (the small ones that just about everyone has) are awesome in a number of ways. They're small (so you always have them), relatively inexpensive, and are really powerful (most image sensors on point and shoots aren't much worse than my nice DSLR). But they lack manual control and nice lenses. Here's Olympus's solution... not amazing, but definitely worth noting.

A crazy smart mathematician solves an age old math problem (video, kind of long).

Crows are amazingly smart as demonstrated here. Then it turns out they're not only smart but also better than us at recognizing members of another species. Both are must reads/watches for the truly dorky.

Starbucks goes incognito to look like a local coffee shop.

Neatorama

Musicians can pick out sounds and hear better in crowds than the non-musically gifted.

Monday Reading

Beautiful compact fluorescent light fixtures that open like a flower as they become warm.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D... again.

A great Q&A with Sam Adams Brewery founder Jim Koch.

The nine nations of North America. I've been saying this for years, but apparently someone realized it far before I did.

Just days from entering grad school for a profession that clearly doesn't need more people (architecture) I find that my other calling (statistics) is actually worth while... hmmm?

I don't know why I found this short article by Paul Krugman so interesting. It's just a comparative line graph between the US and Germany showing what the current recession has done to both countries' GDP. I guess it's just shocking to see what a 4% drop in GDP can do to our whole country.

I forgot to put in my "life update" below that I visited the more respectable part of my family; a neurosurgeon, a physicians assistant, a retired three star general, and between their three kids they have like... a doctor and three more masters degrees... it's sick; in Lafayette, IN. They, being part of the medical profession, are way more attune to the problems of socialized medicine than I. I learned some really interesting things and am of course a bit more skeptical now of the whole thing, but I just can't drop it. Why can't everyone in our country get decent health care? Why not? I get to have F-18's fly over my head every year, my whole city is power washed every week, we can land men on the moon, but I can't get affordable health care? There has to be a compromise. Here's an article from GOOD Magazine that highlights one of the many key issues to health care. That is, that we're willing to pay exorbant amounts of money on unneccesary or ineffective parts of health care (yes we all know this but their spin is interesting).

Oh, and one more. I was ready to tear this article to shreds, but it turns out I agree with the author. Want an affordable well built home? Make it smaller.