Now every time I post one of these obnoxious lists I'll point out the best article, or at least the one's that you can't skip.
Required Reading - This is a great (and lengthy) article by Malcolm Gladwell on brain damage and football. Kind of glad I never played.
Google says they overpaid when they purchased YouTube to the tune of 1 billion (they paid 1.65 billion for the site). Best part, they knew they were doing it.
According to Krugman the Fed, even under really rosy circumstances, won't raise rates for at least 2 years.
Ever hear of Conservapedia? They're hilarious, but now they've outdone themselves. They're going to rewrite the Bible to "remove the liberal bias."
New York City made a law requiring restaurants to show calorie counts on menu items. Oddly, the new law doesn't seem to be changing the amount of calories that people purchase in any given transaction.
New theories on altruism vis a vie termites.
A Nobel in medicine this year went to three scientists who discovered telomerase, an enzyme that allows a cell to divide perpetually without dying. It has implications for future cancer research.
Krugman says healthcare reform will happen.
Google's Android OS is about to tip. By the end of the year it'll be available on 12 phones.
Ugh, this wasn't even half of my list... more later.
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
17 October 2009
17 September 2009
Required Reading
Color-blind monkeys get gene therapy and are cured. That's insane. They did it by injecting a type of virus carrying a gene that essentially activates a protein that the monkeys are lacking in their cone cells. Wired and MIT.
Interesting video on tangible statistics. So fascinating...
More interesting food research by Brian Wansink. Short
More on high speed rail. It's so cool but just not cost effective for the most part. More on this later when I eventually talk about sunk cost fallacy.
Great article on entrepreneurs in Africa. Must read.
Cameras in London and cops driving around in cars in America are really expensive and both don't do ANYTHING to deter crime... (sarcasm) shocking (/sarcasm)!
Buzz Aldrin gives a Q&A on Freakonomics.
Well written piece about the future of cars, or rather; electric cars are taking over.
New Scientist puts out a list of 13 things in science that can't be explained. Here's round two.
Contact lenses that can monitor your bodily functions. They actually have a working model too.
Penn and Teller's show, Bullshit, covers The Bible. It's good but I wish they'd scream less and be a bit more objective. Then again, it's a show called bullshit.
Some college professors are giving money back to their students that they receive in royalties for required texts that they authored.
Some 9/11 Bush hate pieces. One by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture and excerpt of an article in The Atlantic (long) commented on by Chris Blattman (short), a professor of economics and political science at Yale who runs this insightful blog.
Finally, an explanation of why people who don't necessarily agree with Republican candidates vote Republican; they prefer their moral values and views on personal wealth. The strongest indicator? "Whether candidates view themselves as 'better than normal' human beings because of their wealth."
Think the Tevatron (ever notice that just about everything cool was either invented in Chicago [skyscraper] or resides near Chicago?) or Large Hadron Collider is huge? The US was planning one back in the 90's that was over twice as big as the LHC and actually started construction. Here's a photo gallery and story about what remains - yeah I'd totally live there. Here's a piece from Wired about how Fermi Lab's Tevatron is working around the clock to churn out ground breaking research before the LHC comes online.
A company has found a way to detect autism in children much earlier - 2 years old instead of the usual 5 to 6.
A university professor lands in jail for sharing research with Chinese graduate students... really? And apparently The State Department classifies satellites as munitions so that some cutting edge research done on them is considered classified. Short.
A 48 pound genetically engineered rainbow trout was caught in Canada. Just go look at the photo.
The highest resolution photo of Andromeda ever taken can be seen here. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away and is the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy.
Interesting video on tangible statistics. So fascinating...
More interesting food research by Brian Wansink. Short
More on high speed rail. It's so cool but just not cost effective for the most part. More on this later when I eventually talk about sunk cost fallacy.
Great article on entrepreneurs in Africa. Must read.
Cameras in London and cops driving around in cars in America are really expensive and both don't do ANYTHING to deter crime... (sarcasm) shocking (/sarcasm)!
Buzz Aldrin gives a Q&A on Freakonomics.
Well written piece about the future of cars, or rather; electric cars are taking over.
New Scientist puts out a list of 13 things in science that can't be explained. Here's round two.
Contact lenses that can monitor your bodily functions. They actually have a working model too.
Penn and Teller's show, Bullshit, covers The Bible. It's good but I wish they'd scream less and be a bit more objective. Then again, it's a show called bullshit.
Some college professors are giving money back to their students that they receive in royalties for required texts that they authored.
Some 9/11 Bush hate pieces. One by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture and excerpt of an article in The Atlantic (long) commented on by Chris Blattman (short), a professor of economics and political science at Yale who runs this insightful blog.
Finally, an explanation of why people who don't necessarily agree with Republican candidates vote Republican; they prefer their moral values and views on personal wealth. The strongest indicator? "Whether candidates view themselves as 'better than normal' human beings because of their wealth."
Think the Tevatron (ever notice that just about everything cool was either invented in Chicago [skyscraper] or resides near Chicago?) or Large Hadron Collider is huge? The US was planning one back in the 90's that was over twice as big as the LHC and actually started construction. Here's a photo gallery and story about what remains - yeah I'd totally live there. Here's a piece from Wired about how Fermi Lab's Tevatron is working around the clock to churn out ground breaking research before the LHC comes online.
A company has found a way to detect autism in children much earlier - 2 years old instead of the usual 5 to 6.
A university professor lands in jail for sharing research with Chinese graduate students... really? And apparently The State Department classifies satellites as munitions so that some cutting edge research done on them is considered classified. Short.
A 48 pound genetically engineered rainbow trout was caught in Canada. Just go look at the photo.
The highest resolution photo of Andromeda ever taken can be seen here. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away and is the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy.
16 August 2009
Life Update?
I start orientation for school in three days. Yikes.
I walked home last night from just north of the Loop down Wabash Ave. to my apartment on 9th St. and I noticed something I really hadn't up until the last week. There are some really scary vacancies in commercial real estate here... places that I frequent - large businesses. A quick rundown of places within about two blocks of me that have went out of business in the last month or two include: Fedex Kinkos, Sam's Wine and Spirits (just opened and beautiful too), Orange (great breakfast place, closed a while ago), a variety of other smaller shops, and now Prairie Avenue Books (story here) is planning to close in September if they can't find a buyer. It's considered the best architectural bookstore in the world. Damn. I start school and they close down a week later, but in the mean time books are 60% off. My area has really improved over the last four years that I've lived here, but this is a regression I could do without.
I've had some really interesting religious... talks/explanations recently with some rather devout Catholics and other Christians. It always kind of amazes me the extent to which logical gymnastics must be performed in order for something to fit into a religious paradigm. Which really is not all that different from scientists working within a certain framework (quantum mechanics and Einstein's theories on gravity) and inventing things to make their observations fit with reality (see: dark matter). The difference being that scientists will move on to the next paradigm when the proof dictates such a shift. Anyways, I found this quote and it reminded me of another that I am fond of:
"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brains, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness." - Dalai Lama
"When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion." - Abraham Lincoln
And as long as I'm talking about science and religion. Why do Christians, generally the more "extreme" ones, often use the fact that the natural world isn't fully understood by science as a reason for God's existence?
Them - "Where did the universe come from then?"
Me - "The Big Bang."
Them - "Well where did the material for the Big Bang come from?"
Me - "That's harder to explain but if I could magically make you understand a lot of physics and make the internet appear before your eyes I'd say baryogenesis."
Them - Pick any of the following: confused look, "You're going to hell.", "There's no proof for that." (yes there is two guys won a Nobel Prize for it and O how ironic).
I promise I will never debate science and religion with anyone who denies evolution or the commonly accepted laws of physics as we currently understand them. And of course I'm going to hell. I've had way too much fun thus far.
Edit: The Air and Water Show is going on in Chicago. Everyone goes "ooohhh" and "aaahhh" when the FA-18's fly by and the F-22's seem to defy gravity, but I always think, "Can you imagine if those things were flying over your city for keeps? Instead of flying 300 knots they were going mach one point something and dropping munitions? Scary is an understatement."
I walked home last night from just north of the Loop down Wabash Ave. to my apartment on 9th St. and I noticed something I really hadn't up until the last week. There are some really scary vacancies in commercial real estate here... places that I frequent - large businesses. A quick rundown of places within about two blocks of me that have went out of business in the last month or two include: Fedex Kinkos, Sam's Wine and Spirits (just opened and beautiful too), Orange (great breakfast place, closed a while ago), a variety of other smaller shops, and now Prairie Avenue Books (story here) is planning to close in September if they can't find a buyer. It's considered the best architectural bookstore in the world. Damn. I start school and they close down a week later, but in the mean time books are 60% off. My area has really improved over the last four years that I've lived here, but this is a regression I could do without.
I've had some really interesting religious... talks/explanations recently with some rather devout Catholics and other Christians. It always kind of amazes me the extent to which logical gymnastics must be performed in order for something to fit into a religious paradigm. Which really is not all that different from scientists working within a certain framework (quantum mechanics and Einstein's theories on gravity) and inventing things to make their observations fit with reality (see: dark matter). The difference being that scientists will move on to the next paradigm when the proof dictates such a shift. Anyways, I found this quote and it reminded me of another that I am fond of:
"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brains, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness." - Dalai Lama
"When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion." - Abraham Lincoln
And as long as I'm talking about science and religion. Why do Christians, generally the more "extreme" ones, often use the fact that the natural world isn't fully understood by science as a reason for God's existence?
Them - "Where did the universe come from then?"
Me - "The Big Bang."
Them - "Well where did the material for the Big Bang come from?"
Me - "That's harder to explain but if I could magically make you understand a lot of physics and make the internet appear before your eyes I'd say baryogenesis."
Them - Pick any of the following: confused look, "You're going to hell.", "There's no proof for that." (yes there is two guys won a Nobel Prize for it and O how ironic).
I promise I will never debate science and religion with anyone who denies evolution or the commonly accepted laws of physics as we currently understand them. And of course I'm going to hell. I've had way too much fun thus far.
Edit: The Air and Water Show is going on in Chicago. Everyone goes "ooohhh" and "aaahhh" when the FA-18's fly by and the F-22's seem to defy gravity, but I always think, "Can you imagine if those things were flying over your city for keeps? Instead of flying 300 knots they were going mach one point something and dropping munitions? Scary is an understatement."
25 February 2009
How to/Funny Videos
Fold a t-shirt really quick. This will potentially save me hours throughout my lifetime.
Solve a Rubik's cube! It's really fairly easy. I solved my first one yesterday.
Funny ones:
100 people randomly running towards strangers... good social psych experiment.
Creedocide; a religious take on rat control.
Solve a Rubik's cube! It's really fairly easy. I solved my first one yesterday.
Funny ones:
100 people randomly running towards strangers... good social psych experiment.
Creedocide; a religious take on rat control.
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