Science!

The European Union is trying to stir more interest in the sciences, and so produced this video to help explain elemental principles.  

Robot Chicken Star Wars

Robot Chicken, a stop-motion animation show on Adult Swim, parodied the Star Wars movies.  It's really really funny.  

Link. 

Not the Movies

A mobster was blown up today in Tel Aviv.

I ride by the place the car blew up on my bicycle and on the bus when I go to work and go to the university.

Link to the Story

Brown Cloud

BEIJING — A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations.

The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, cooking on dung or wood fires and coal-fired power plants, these plumes rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.

“The imperative to act has never been clearer,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in Beijing, which the report identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities, and where the report was released.

Link to the Story

Ed, your flying car is on its way....

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/11/darpas-flying-c.html

Here is an article that shows us why living in the future is going to be so cool.

Light Pollution

This month's National Geographic instructs about the dangers we have created by ridding ourselves of the night.  The planet is pretty used to being swathed in darkness for about half the day, and our little discovery of electricity and the incandescent light bulb has weirded out a lot of the critters.  And, of course, there are some great photos.  

For the past century or so, we've been performing an open-ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body's sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a biological toll.

Link.  

Mini Nuclear Reactors

A new company claims that it has miniaturized nuclear reactor technology to the size of a person.  Each reactor will be $25 million, the technology will be ready in five years, and it uses no material capable of weaponization.  There are 100 orders already placed, including by oil and gas companies.  They are considering using it to help out developing nations with cheap power.  Big changes coming?  Is this the answer to Obama's energy plans?

Link.  

Psychopathy

The New Yorker Magazine recently published an article on psychopathy and its study.  Very fascinating article.  

In the late nineteen-thirties, an American psychiatrist named Hervey Cleckley began collecting data on a certain kind of patient he encountered in the course of his work in a psychiatric hospital in Augusta, Georgia. These people were from varied social and family backgrounds. Some were poor, but others were sons of Augusta’s most prosperous and respected families. Cleckley set about sharpening the vague construct of constitutional psychopathic inferiority, and distinguishing it from other forms of mental illness. He eventually isolated sixteen traits exhibited by patients he called “primary” psychopaths; these included being charming and intelligent, unreliable, dishonest, irresponsible, self-centered, emotionally shallow, and lacking in empathy and insight.

“Beauty and ugliness, except in a very superficial sense, goodness, evil, love, horror, and humor have no actual meaning, no power to move him,” Cleckley wrote of the psychopath in his 1941 book, “The Mask of Sanity,” which became the foundation of the modern science. The psychopath talks “entertainingly,” Cleckley explained, and is “brilliant and charming,” but nonetheless “carries disaster lightly in each hand.” Cleckley emphasized his subjects’ deceptive, predatory nature, writing that the psychopath is capable of “concealing behind a perfect mimicry of normal emotion, fine intelligence, and social responsibility a grossly disabled and irresponsible personality.” This mimicry allows psychopaths to function, and even thrive, in normal society. Indeed, as Cleckley also argued, the individualistic, winner-take-all aspect of American culture nurtures psychopathy.

Link.  

Historic

I'm quite happy that Barack Obama was elected president.  It's cool, I'm with it.  It is, undeniably, historic.  Everything he has done since he was elected the nominee of the Democratic Party has been historic in the sense that he is the first African American to achieve these things.  But I think it is overboard that the press is calling everything he does "historic".

We get it.  First time for everything.  It's cool.  But please stop calling everything he does "historic".  From today's Reuters feed:  Obama makes historic White House visit

Drunk men attempt to mount a fiberglass horse

Oh, this is good.  Police are on the lookout.  

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1407952373/bctid1900392308

Making an Old Soldier Cry

General Colin Powell on President-Elect Obama's victory last night.

I Know I'm Late...

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10172008/watch3.html

Video on voting fraud and democracy in America.

Green Porno

Isabella Rosellini and the Sundance Channel have made a series of videos demonstrating how certain types of non-mammals procreate.  It's very well done and quite creatively told.  

http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno/#/watch-snail