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Showing posts from December, 2009

Cool Gadget For Reading Web Pages

If you get sick of looking at all the advertisements on webpages then try Readability. The writeup below is from Pogue's Best Tech 2009 list. READABILITY The single best tech idea of 2009, though, the real life-changer, has got to be Readability. It’s a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar (get it at lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability). When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else. Times Square just goes away. You wind up with a simple, magazine-like layout, presented in a beautiful font and size (your choice) against a white or off-white background with none of this red-text-against-black business. You occasionally run into a Web page that Readability doesn’t handle right — no big deal, just refresh the page to see the original. But most of the time, Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place. Go forth and i

Legalize All Drugs

The only solution to the drug problem is to legalize all drugs. Why? Am I saying this so I can do drugs legally or get more drugs? No I do not advocate drug use either. My children were raised to understand the problems associated with drug use. The reason the US needs to legalize drugs now is that the so-called war on drugs has corrupted our society and other countries as well. Recent killings in Mexico highlight the depth of the corruption in that country. Ensign Melquisedet Angulo Córdova, a special forces sailor killed last week during the government’s most successful raid on a top drug lord in years, received a stirring public tribute in which the secretary of the navy presented his mother with the flag that covered her son’s coffin. Then, only hours after the grieving family had finished burying him in his hometown the next day, gunmen burst into the family’s house and sprayed the rooms with gunfire, killing his mother and three other relatives, officials said Tuesday

Parents - Trust Your Own Analysis About Your Children

Parents should trust their own analysis of their children's learning capabilities. I can still remember being told to hold my son back a year in preschool for no other reason than he was a boy and on the young end of the curve for other children in his grade. It had nothing to do with his ability to learn, comprehend or socialize. I am very happy I did not listen to the well-intentioned advice. He now is in his 4th year of engineering school and doing fine in all aspects of his life. The quotes below from a recent article summarizing recent cognitive neuroscience research illustrate the capabilities many young children have that teachers of preschool and grade school age children may completely miss because of their own education which has created blind spots to what is possible. Many 4-year-olds cannot count up to their own age when they arrive at preschool, and those at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center are hardly prodigies. Most live in this city’s poorer dis

Top Scientific Photography from 2009

Lots of excellent photos of recent scientific achievements, applications, natural phenomenon and new technologies. Link is here.

Biodynamic Plant Cultivation

This article on growing wine biodynamically explains one winemakers understanding and vision. A few highlights of the article are his analogy of fertilizer to salt; his opinion about plant cloning (don't think I agree with this one yet); and how the natural yeast growth on grapes is a sign of a healthy system. These concepts would apply to any fruit, vegetable or ornamental plant. Link is here.

Google demonstrates quantum computer image search

This could revolutionize how we store and interact with data. Think if you could just store pictures and did not have to tag that picture like today to say what was in it. Also, then you could just store pictures of information and completely eliminate digital text - what would that mean to us? Pictures take up more storage but with the cost of data storage lowering by leaps and bounds (1 TB HDD's < $100 US) that might not matter. It will definitely make storage of information easier because we will not have to describe the picture anymore and can then gather new information that is contained in pictures that we did not even know was there. Google demonstrates quantum computer image search - tech - 11 December 2009 - New Scientist

The Great Global Warming Swindle?

Watch and you be the judge. Please post your comments! Addendum: when first posting this video yesterday I had not completed watching it. Long, at 1 hour and 15 minutes, it does not waste your time. For those of us that were convinced of man-induced global warming by the ice core data presented in The Inconvenient Truth, I recommend you watch this (around 22 - 30 minutes in) and know the science of understanding that data has changed since the movie was made. I consider myself an environmentalist and when the co-founded of Greenpeace says to watch out (towards the end) I listen to him. If you have an open mind to this subject, please watch. If you are more dogmatic in your beliefs about Global Warming then you will probably not make it through the first 15 minutes.

Hacked Emails from CRU

This video talks about the so-called fabricated evidence on global warming from the hacked CRU emails.  I think it does a good job of debunking the idea that the scientists were deliberately falsifying data.  It does not attempt the impossible effort to show fully supporting evidence for the whole idea of global warming. My previous post on global warming contains a graph I find difficult to ignore and that seems to show the earth is currently in a normal temperature fluctuation. The entire argument on global warming, so far from what I can see, is that there are scientists who believe the rate of temperature increase is abnormal and not the temperatures per se at this time. Please review and post your comment!

Scientists Confirm Eastern Concept of Ren

In the Confucian Analects, Confucius introduces the Eastern concept of Ren.  Ren is described in a couple ways and though difficult translate directly the English equivalents are virtue (noun), virtuousness (adj), and virtuosly (adv).  That Ren can be used in many lexical categories is not surprising since language translation is difficult especially with concepts.  Western scientists have recently done studies on young children to determine if humans have an innate desire for sociable and helpful behavior.  But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human. The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to surviv

Skiing and Flying

The French guy in this video is really taking it to the limit. It looks like you could never get hurt doing this, but, watch the whole thing....

Global Warming

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There is more information and evidence coming out everyday that the global warming scenario painted by many scientists and public figures may not be true.  The Al Fin web blog has many articles summarizing the recent disclosures.  While doing some more research on my own I came across this graph which portrays the current temperatures as within normal fluctuation for the last 5000 years.  While I was convinced in the beginning by Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth movie that the earth was in the throes of a man-made global warming disaster, the skeptic in me is coming to the forefront.  When I look at the graph above I see the earth's current temperature well within normal fluctuations of the last 4500 years and thus it is very doubtful that current temperatures or trends are any kind of issue. With all the problems in the world, and, the small odds that there is even a global warming problem and even smaller odds that it is man-induced, I find it strange that