27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Gratitude for the Scientists Who Saved Lives
When I was a boy, a popular literary genre for children was the heroic biography of a medical pioneer such as Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, William Osler, or Alexander Fleming. On April 12, 1955, a team of scientists announced that Jonas Salk’s vaccine against polio—the disease that had killed thousands a year, paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt, and sent many children into iron lungs—was proven safe. According to Richard Carter’s history of t... 1 
notes
notes30 MAY 2016 by ideonexus
Rural Communities "Deserve to Die"
It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces... [N]obody did this to them. They failed themselves.
[...]
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect a...Folksonomies: politics
Folksonomies: politics
1 Commentary from a conservative lamenting the rise of Donald Trump
24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Computer Metaphors for Biochemistry
The metaphor of the computer represents in some crude fashion the chemistry of life. Nowadays one may assume that the average citizen of an industrialized country is at least as familiar with computers as with rain forests. The idea of using the computer as a metaphor is a natural one. A computer is a device for handling information according to a program which it is able to remember and execute. A living cell, to remain in control of its vital functions in a variable environment, must also p...Folksonomies: metaphors
Folksonomies: metaphors
1 notes
notes09 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
The Northeast Megalopolis
The megalopolis encompasses the District of Columbia and part or all of 11 states: from south to north, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. It is linked by Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 1, which start in Miami and Key West, Florida, respectively, and terminate in Maine at the Canada–United States border, as well as the Northeast Corridor railway line, the busiest passenger rail line in the count... 1 notes
notes29 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Video Games Reduce Attentional Blink
Our visual processing abilities are by no means hardwired and fixed from birth. There are limits, but the brain's nothing if not plastic. With practice, we can improve the attentional mechanisms that sort and edit visual infor¬ mation. One activity that requires you to practice lots of the skills involved 1 visual attention is playing video games.
So, what is the effect of playing lots of video games? Shawn Green anc Daphne Bavelier from the University of Rochester, New York, have research... 1 notes
notesPlaying games improves the brain's ability to recognize new things entering the environment.
07 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Understanding Heat and Temperature
Our sense of touch tells us quite definitely that one
body is hot and another cold. But this is a purely quali-
tative criterion, not sufficient for a quantitative descrip-
tion and sometimes even ambiguous. This is shown by
a well-known experiment: we have three vessels con-
taining, respectively, cold, warm and hot water. If we
dip one hand into the cold water and the other into the
hot, we receive a message from the first that it is cold
and from the second that it is hot. If we th... 1 notes
notesAn excellent description of the distinction between the two.
22 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
A Brief History of Signals
Prior to the advent of practical electrical communication, human beings had been signaling over a distance in all kinds of ways. The bell in the church tower called people to religious services or “for whom the bell tolls”—the announcement of a death. We knew a priori several things about church bells. We knew approximately when services were to begin, and we knew that a long, slow tolling of the bells announced death. Thus we could distinguish one from the other, namely a call to relig...Folksonomies: communications signals
Folksonomies: communications signals
1 notes
notesFrom church bells, speech, body language, semaphores, fires, and smoke signals.
25 APR 2012 by ideonexus
The Importance of Hay
The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially importa...Folksonomies: invention agriculture
Folksonomies: invention agriculture
1 As an invention, it allowed humans to migrate into northern Europe.
16 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
Thomas Paine and George Washington Conduct an Experiment
The muddy bottom of rivers contains great quantities of impure and often inflammable air (carbureted hydrogen gas), injurious to life; [begin page 309] and which remains entangled in the mud till let loose from thence by some accident. This air is produced by the dissolution and decomposition of any combustible matter falling into the water and sinking into the mud, of which the following circumstance will serve to give some explanation.
In the fall of the year that New York was evacuated ... 1 notes
notesThey light aflame methane gases stirred up from the Millstone River as part of a bet.
12 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
Earth's Curve, Flat Maps, and the Fastest Route Between T...
Imagine, say, that you wanted to travel from New York to Madrid, two cities that are at almost the same latitude. If the earth were flat, the shortest route would be to head straight east. If you did that, you would arrive in Madrid after traveling 3,707 miles. But due to the earth's curvature, there is a path that on a flat map looks curved and hence longer, but which is actually shorter. You can get there in 3,605 miles if you follow the great-circle route. which is to first head northeast,... 1 notes
notesBecause the Earth is a sphere and maps are flat, the fastest route between two points on a map is actually a curved line and airlines take this into account when plotting flight paths.
