Fun with Liquid Nitrogen

Question of the Week
What the hell happened to the weekend?

Sorry. I’m having a bear of a time catching back up, here, and I haven’t been running at 100% brain power for some time now, for reasons I’ll explain below. So today I figured I’d get at least something up and go through the massive backlog of links to cool things to share with you. So, yes, it’s Monday, but it’s a Saturday-style post; sort of blogging training-wheels until I can ride all by myself again. Yes, I know the old adage is “like riding a bike” to mean something one never forgets, so perhaps that wasn’t the best analogy to use, but let’s pretend that in this situation I suffered cerebellar damage or something like that. Or an inner ear infection. The point is, lack of coordination. Which is like not being able to write… good.

Hey, look at this! It’s a video interview of Conan O’Brien at Google I found via Neatorama!

There, now go watch Conan make teh funny for 48 solid minutes. That sort of makes up for my absence, right? A little?

Graph of the Week

Okay, folks, it’s time I admit something: I’m overweight. And I need to do something about it. In late spring of 2008 I was running 20+ miles per week and I weighed about 190 pounds. I’m 6′ 3″ (that’s 191 cm for you folks outside the US) and fairly broad-shouldered so that’s actually a very healthy weight for me. Since then my fitness has devolved to fatness, though:

That includes 5 vacations I’ve taken since then (the last of which being the time off including my hiatus from here) and two holiday seasons, the result of which was gaining over 30 pounds in 2 years. Not good. You’ll note that I’ve done nothing but pack on the pounds throughout 2010, too, whereas in between vacations I’d normally manage to drop a couple pounds or at least break even. This is because of writing here.

Oh, don’t worry, I don’t blame you, dear reader. You see, I’ve very much enjoyed writing this blog and I wanted to continue it as best I could. Unfortunately, this required taking up the free time I’d have normally spent exercising. Furthermore, since I’m mildly hypoglycemic and I struggle with being the clever witticism-generating machine you’ve come to know me as when I have low blood sugar, I wanted to keep my brain floating in as much ATP as it wanted as I was focused on writing here the first 5 months. The result of both was a healthy and happy brain but a body that got winded walking to my car. Which I’d then drive to KFC. To get a Double Down. Which would make it worse.

And so, when I returned from our vacation a couple of weeks ago, I weighed 221 pounds. I’d lost not one but two notches on my belt, which is leather and therefore was probably stretching some, anyway. Even my fat pants were tight and the majority of the rest of my pants didn’t fit at all unless I fancied rupturing my kidneys. I needed to go on a diet. And so, as of June 1, I have. It’s sort of a variation on the Public Humiliation Diet (hence this), with the exception that I do not weigh myself daily as I find it to be counter-productive, but rather shoot for 5-day intervals. This will go on for 30 days and then I’ll switch to 10-day intervals for weigh-ins. Results thus far are as follows:

So that’s a good start, I think. I’m running 16 miles per week now and I’m watching what I eat and curtailing (though not eliminating) my alcoholic beverage intake. It seems to be working so far. The trouble is that it has taken my body some time to adjust to the lower caloric intake and greater exercise and so, in addition to not having as much time to write as I’ve gone jogging more (not that I could have done much with a broken laptop last week, anyway), the hunger pangs and desire to KILL EVERYTHING THAT MAKES ME SO ANGRY WHICH IS EVERYTHING EVER that is associated with low blood sugar for me has left me struggling to relate the wonderful world of Science to you as I would like to. My body is grudgingly coming to terms with this regimen, though, and so I hope I can start producing some more quality material in the near future. Until then, here are some links:

Links of the Week

• The 5 Most Famous Musicians Who are Thieving Bastards. As big of a deal intellectual property law is these days, it’s pretty dismaying to see how many successful musicians crossed the line between “adapting” and “stealing” in some of their more famous songs. I gotta come down on Cracked for not including Coldplay in the list but perhaps they felt it was unnecessary as everyone knows they’re rip-off artists.
• The Prague Pneumatic Post. Apparently, pneumatic tubes were all the rage for postal delivery in major cities in the late 19th/early 20th century and Prague continued to use theirs until just recently. On a scale of 1 to Very Steampunk this registers about a 12.
• Isolated Settlements at the Ends of the Earth. Who knew Antarctica would be such a prime location for urban exploration?
• No, Seriously, Why is the Sky Blue? Best part: the sky wasn’t always blue, even when there was life on Earth.
• Celebrating 50,000 Generations of the Long-Term Lines. Richard Lenski’s lab has been carrying out an experiment with E. coli called the Long-Term Evolution Experiment in order to show evolution in action in bacteria under controlled laboratory settings. So far the experiment has been going on for some 50,000 generations, which, if it were run on humans, would have taken in the ballpark of a million years. Not bad for one experiment [Ed: a word of warning - there is a Wikipedia entry on the LTEE but it is often heavily vandalized by anti-evolution thugs and other ne'er-do-wells with little else better to do than deface websites that present them with uncomfortable facts].

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Question of the Week
How many nuclear warheads exist in the world?

In this post-Cold War era of nuclear disarmament counteracted by rogue states, it’s difficult to get an accurate count on just how many nuclear warheads are out there. Still, in the name of transparency to further efforts with Russia to promote nuclear disarmament, the US government recently released the exact number of warheads the United States possesses in its usable stockpile: 5,113. You’ll note that 5,113 nuclear warheads is, in fact, still enough to blow up the entire planet several times over. As Neatorama explains, Russia is believed to possess a bit more than that, too. This is why joint US-Russian talks are key to properly disarming and disposing of unneeded nuclear warheads.

You’ll also note on that graph there are 9 confirmed nuclear powers in the world right now, with the US and Russia – the top two – constituting roughly 90% of the total military nuclear capacity of the planet, and the other seven combined constituting the latter 10%. Still, with the exception of the United Kingdom and France, that lower part is largely constituted of states not known to have the greatest stability nor transparency of government, which is probably more troubling than anything else; these are where there’s a chance of a nuclear warhead being sold – or stolen by – a corrupt or extremist regime that could potentially use it against normal civilians. This is why limiting nuclear proliferation is absolutely key to the safety of the planet in the 21st century.

When humanity took the Nuclear War Demon out of the box in 1945 we knew it would be difficult to put it back. 65 years later there has thankfully not been another incident of nuclear weapons being employed against civilians, though the threat is still there. The fact of the matter is that though the Cold War is long over and the United States and Russia are closer allies now than in nearly a century, the Doomsday Clock still exists for the very good reason that there are still far too many nuclear weapons on the planet. Or at least Iron Maiden think so.

Graph of the Week

It’s that time again: time for the monthly update on the top 20 most-viewed posts I’ve written:

TOP 20 MOST-VIEWED POSTS THROUGH 04/30/10

Not too many surprises, though I’m happy to report that Becky now has 5 posts in the Top 20 despite contributing only one day per week. This is well-deserved as she puts far more effort into each post than I do as she has to make a painting and then research and write about the subject; I just do the latter two, thankfully. Other than that not too much; I’m glad the post on the potential for microbial life elsewhere in the solar system (“Little Moon Big Hope”) is gaining traction as that was one of my favorites to have written. I also think it’s funny that of the two newcomers to the list, neither are new posts, just older ones that gradually accrued enough hits. I suspect there will be a couple additions to the Top 20 from April as of the end of this month, though.

Links of the Week

• Nuclear Reactor Cutaways. A theme! My mom used to buy me books of hand-drawn cross-sectional diagrams like these back in the dark ages of the late 80s and early 90s before computer graphics became so ubiquitous and man, I loved them. So this gives me a little squirt of the nostalgia neurotransmitters in addition to being awesome of its own right.
• Goodhart’s Law: Once you measure something, it changes. A note on market dynamics and how the instantaneous transparency (another theme) afforded by the Internet will affect branding.
• Floating Wind Farm. A good idea to combine wave energy and wind energy. The only problem I see is that wind turbines require tons of regular maintenance, which might be difficult to do on these deployed far off-shore.
• Piezoelectric Promise: Charge a Touch-Screen by Poking It with Your Finger. This is really neat: basically, there’s no good reason we should have to charge our hand-held electronic devices with wall outlets since they use such a low power draw. The regular movements, currents and thermal energy of the human body should be sufficient to keep them charged, if properly captured. The trick is figuring out how to do that in a non-invasive manner.
• XKCD: Color Survey Results. Any children begotten by Randall Munroe will surely revolutionize the world of school science fair projects.

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Question of the Week
I’m bored. Entertain me.

That wasn’t a question. Fortunately for you, though, I found the following short film via Bioephemera. Enjoy its steampunky goodness:

The Anachronism (Full Film) from Anachronism Pictures on Vimeo.

Graph of the Week

On Tuesday I ate my first KFC Double Down and, in the process, became a real man. The sandwich is being seen as the very archetype of the unhealthy American diet but is it really worse than what we already eat? Geekologie takes a look at it:

Scientific Knowledge: How Many KFC Double Downs Is Your Fast Food Sandwich?

So the answer is that it’s bad but not nearly as bad as some other things. I had a Triple Baconator on the road somewhere in Oregon once. It was a thing of beauty, I’m not gonna lie.

Links of the Week

• That Mighty Sorting Machine is Certainly One for the Books. About the automated sorting machine for the NYC Public Library. Not as cool as their series of tubes but still pretty neat.
• A New Strategy for Cheap Solar Power in Africa: Pokeberries. Pokeberry! I choose you!
• The Search for Genes Leads to Unexpected Places. Excellent article from Carl Zimmer on why finding genes with specific functions in complex organisms in the genomes of simpler organisms is helping along biological research.
• Legendary Giant Earthworm Finally Appears, Disappoints Everybody. The now-rediscovered giant Palouse earthworm is probably good evidence that observers of cryptids almost always over-estimate their size.
• Airspace Rebooted. Visualization of air traffic during and after the Efylliksuudurskiworskifjordinheimesteinkillikili eruption. Rather hypnotizing.

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Question of the Week
I am not a scientist by trade. How can I get involved in science and therefore be more awesome?

An excellent question and one to which I can now provide a semi-decent answer: gaze ye upon the “Finder” in the recently-launched Science for Citizens (no, I don’t know what the deal with the .net is, either). It’s presently just getting going, but it lists a number of science projects that are open to the public and are utilizing crowdsourcing to accomplish their goals. And you can be a part of it! For example, the first hit I see is counting osprey nests on Cape Cod. Now, your family might say “come over for dinner and pretending you can stomach the politics of your relatives!” And you can be all like, “no, I have to go to the beach. FOR SCIENCE!”

Wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

Graph of the Week

You’ve probably seen a couple of infographic breakdowns of the 2010 US Federal Budget already, also known as “how $3,518,000,000,000.00 gets spent in one year.” [NB: might be some rounding error there. Maybe] That said, Jorge Cham does a good job of breaking it down and focusing on how comparatively little of it goes to science research and just where that comparatively little amount goes:

As he says, 2 cents on the dollar in the federal budget. Not exactly much of an investment in the future, is it?

Links of the Week

• Presenting… Isopod Woodlice. If you or your family lives in a wooded area, you probably have crustaceans in your back yard.
• LIFE Exclusive: The Day Einstein Died/ Pictures from around Einstein’s (very private) funeral released for the first time after being withheld for 55 years. Definitely worth perusing.
• The Anatomy of a Tribble. What, did you think I could make a post without a Star Trek reference? I fully agree that tribbles would have cloacae. I see them as being close to monotremes.
• 10 Weirdest Urban Ecosystems on Earth. This was pretty neat but the link to Kowloon Walled City really blew me away. It was like a little patch of Blade Runner that actually existed.
• What is the Memory Capacity of the Human Brain? 2.5 petabytes? Sure, why not. Seems incredibly arbitrary to me but I know that, if it were translated to a binary digital form, it would have to be pretty enormous. Screw you, Johnny Mnemonic!

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Question of the Week
What one YouTube video from the past week should I see?

So apparently Conan O’Brien is on tour now doing his thing. The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour is a reference to the fact that his payout from NBC stipulated he not appear on TV until September 1. At his first show over the weekend he covered Radiohead’s “Creep” to much hilarity.

I kind of want to see him when he comes to Boston in early June but as that’ll be right after I get back from a two-week vacation I’m not entirely sure I can justify the expense of the tickets. In the mean time, apparently he’ll be back on TV in the Fall Season on TBS. Yeah… I know.

Graph of the Week

In an infographic surely designed by one Bender Bending Rodriguez, we have the following via the Consumerist:

Epic Map: Pizza vs. Guns vs. Strippers

I’m assuming that by “pizza” they mean “pizza parlors” and by “guns” they mean “gun stores.” The line at the bottom referencing churches instead of strip clubs is rather funny but I’m certain based on the splotch of yellow surrounding Las Vegas (not to mention the ones in Quebec) that it actually shows strip clubs, not churches.

Links of the Week

• Scientists, film makers team up to expose illegal international trade in whale meat. Seriously, Japan? You’re not very good at being the one who the rest of the world gets pissed off at. Take it from us, we know.
• Lost 1913 Lincoln Film Surfaces in Barn. 1913 was only one year further removed from Lincoln’s assassination than the JFK assassination is from today.
• Discovery and TLC viewers lean Right? As Razib Khan indicates, these sort of informal political polls need to be taken with a huge grain of salt, but there are some interesting things. It doesn’t surprise me that TLC leans right (one commenter explains my reasoning perfectly) and Discovery would have been a surprise until it became 23 hours a day of fishing and cutting down trees when Mythbusters isn’t on, but I think the real surprise is that CNN is practically in-line with MSNBC here. Meaning that, at least by this metric, even if they try to be more centrist than their two main competitors, their audience does tend to lean left.
• Retro Calculators. For your outer nerd.
• Saturn’s North Pole Hexagon Mystery Solved? Which is to say, if you didn’t know: there’s a giant hexagon roughly the diameter of the Earth on the North Pole of Saturn. This is the first bit of understanding we’ve got now about why it’s there.

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Question of the Week
Has anything come to mind recently that you haven’t thought of in a long while?

Within the past few days articles about Biosphere 2 (doesn’t that take you back to school days?) came across my Google Reader not once but twice. The first time was this excellent photo essay published in January of this year describing the project in its present, semi-abandoned state. The pictures are really something and it makes me want to visit it myself (apparently they do some limited tours of it now) the next time I’m in Arizona, whenever that is.

The second was a link to the following TED Talk by a member of the original Biosphere 2 crew via mental_floss:

Oh, and just to get it out of your system: Bio-Dome. There, happy? That’s two Pauly Shore movies I’ve referenced in one week and I don’t exactly feel good about myself for that.

Graph of the Week

This is a most awesome pan-canonical time travel infographic via Information is Beautiful:

Time travel in popular film and TV

I am a touch disappointed they didn’t place a tumor-like gnarled mass of lines around 2004 labeled “Primer,” though. Still, any infographic incorporating Star Trek IV knows the way to my heart.

Links of the Week

• Oldest Man-Made Structure Found in Greek Cave. Pre-Neolithic structures are hard to come by because, well, why build a permanent settlement if you’re only going to be there temporarily? So finds like these are really awesome in filling in the gaps between hunter-gatherer societies and agrarian ones.
• Two New Nanotech Breakthroughs Point the Way to Nano-Electronics. Finally we can all become Borg. About time.
• Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and the long road to the iPad. Excellent (and relatively brief) article on the battle between Steve Jobs and computer nerd O.G. Steve Wozniak for the direction Apple took as a company. Woz wanted to keep the software and hardware both open, Jobs was all about the proprietary firmware. Guess who won. A great little story about the tragic triumph of form over function.
• Why Do We Dream? Dreams are one of the areas where we can probably really make progress in the near future in terms of bridging the gap between the neuroscience and the psychology.
• Evolution, Big Bang Polls Omitted from NSF Report. Since I first saw this I’ve seen several bloggers weighing in on how understandably distressed they are about this. I hope the mainstream news media picks up on this, too, because it’s frankly disgusting that someone was of the mind that they could make these problems in terms of science awareness in the American public simply go away by ignoring them.

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Question of the Week
How’s the weather up there?

Ugh. My basement hasn’t been dry in about 3 weeks now. The rain has finally stopped – briefly – but it’s still damp outside. It seems that whereas God came short of drowning the Godless Northeast, He did feel it necessary to dunk our heads into the toilet a few times. The tale of the tape from Logan is as follows, via Weather Underground:

• Precip: Actual Month Total: 14.87 Normal month total: 3.85

Yep, that says we got roughly FOUR TIMES as much rain as usual in March. Apparently this caused the worst flooding since 1955 in eastern New England. You see, the whole area’s a glacier deposit, and, as anyone who’s tried to dig a hole deeper than about a foot and a half around here knows, much of what’s underneath the soil is chock-full-o’ big-ass rocks. And rocks, as you might recall from high school science class, don’t absorb water all that well. So eventually all that rain had nowhere to go and started pooling on the streets and in our basements. Not exactly like living in the Mississippi flood plane, but, hey, this is New England. Snowstorms we can handle. This rain frightens and confuses us.

Graph of the Week

Yesterday I made some rather hand-waving comments about which posts I’ve put up that have the most comments. This week, though, I realized that I could just do away with all that and put up a list of all my highest-trafficked posts so far. And here it is:

TOP 20 MOST-VIEWED POSTS THROUGH 03/31/10

You’ll note that there isn’t many from March but a ton from February. A lot of times it seems that stuff takes a few weeks to slowly start gaining interest. The #2 and #3 on that list are good examples of that. So, with the exception of the #1 spot – which will probably stay until I write something else the Internet, be it ever so mercurial, deems to be lulz-worthy – I don’t know how the list is going to look in another month. It’ll be interesting to see!

Links of the Week

Five links today:

• First Amphibious Insect Found Cruising Around Hawaii’s Streams and Shores. Though I am hardly an expert on bugs, I officially declare amphibious insects to be “wickid awesome.”
• The Hooded Pitohui – a Poisonous Bird. Speaking of awesome species diversity: poisonous birds. Seriously.
• Found: 90% of the Distant Universe. Science blogging superstar Phil Plait explains how astronomers were able to locate 90% of the theorized Universe that was, until recently, mysteriously absent from our view.
• Don Herbert: Archive Interview. A lengthy interview with Mr. Wizard himself shortly before his death. Difficult to listen to at parts due to Herbert’s advanced age at the time of taping, but very much worth it, I think.
• Rats fed on Bacon, Cheesecake and Ding-Dongs Become Addicted to Junk Food. Sounds not unlike my diet freshman year of college.

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