Magazine Update

The New Yorker

Interesting review of the 2008 election. Always interesting to read everything in hindsight. I mean they plug the whole "change" thing and say that was the essence of the election. Had McCain won what would "change" of meant?  Bottom line was "change" was what the people wanted and from the sound of it the cash that flowed to Obama was a dominating factor in helping him to win.  Good all around articles.  Later in the issue was a fiction piece by Jonathan Lethem called "Lostronaut" Weird ass story about a failing space station and the occupants aboard. Kind of a sad story....

Magazine Updates

New Yorker

July 28th issue (!) had an interesting article about the brain and creative thought or where does the instant clarity come from when trying to solve something (the got it or eureka moment). A cognitive scientist, Jung-Beeman, insists that insight requires the brain to make a a set of distant and unprecedented connections. It would seem that concentration comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity. Allowing the brain to wander, to relax allows the cortex to seek out more remote associations. Connections are best made in the morning before the brain becomes structured for the day. The drowsy brain is unwound, disorganized and open to all sorts of unconnected ideals. 

Basically what I like to hear...more time in the shower before I start my day!

Magazine Update

Banksy update

Wired
Online Telescopes
Bradford Robotic Telescope
Micro-Observatory
Seeing in the Dark
Slooh

New Yorker

"In Plato Symposium, Aristophanes tells how, at the beginning of time, human beings were spherical creatures, rolling around contentedly. Then the gods cut them in two - into males and females, condemned to spend their lives seeking their other half. India has a similar "myth of the androgyne," but with a happier ending. At the time of creation, the "one" split into two parts, male and female. Every person contains both parts, however, and the two live in harmony, sometimes separating, sometimes uniting ecstatically."

"In a review of the book, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, it sums things up by saying, "Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless--they are systematic, we all make the same types of mistakes over and over." Offered FREE shipping , we take it, even when it costs us." Hate it when the literature is right....

Magazine Wrap Up

Rolling Stone

REM has a new "live" album coming out next year some time.

The "Boss" is 58!

Would Godzilla and Mothra kick Megatron's ass?

The New Yorker

Good article on Scott Boras or as this article claims, "The Extortionist." Is he evil or just playing the system? We hate his methods but honestly teams are willing to pay his clients, so who is the fool? I mean the Rangers did drop 252 million on A-Rod. The statistics show that less than one percent of players will have a 6 year major league career and maybe only 3 - 4% will have a three year career. So if you are that special player who transcends the sport do you not try to get the biggest buck? Should we be critical of A-Rod for getting all that he can? There always seems to be a sucker out there willing to spend $30 million a year for a 32 year MVP. Boras just exploits the owners...eventually they will get smart. For years the Rockies ownership probably took a good chunk of the revenue and didn't add to the field. I mean if baseball is such a losing proposition then why do people buy these teams? There is always ebb and flow in anything...I think as a viewer of baseball I just have difficulty in spending $8 for a beer to watch someone take his god given talents and exploit us all. I thought his World Series ideal about moving it to 9 games and making it a spectacle. was good. The game and sport could use some shaking up. Presently he represents 65 players and takes a 5% commission on the salary of his clients.

Another issue with multiple good articles and the second article was about another odd ball entrepreneur from Boulder. In 2001 a company called Dagoba started to sell chocolate..it was a fancy chocolate not your massed produced stuff. Chocolate is known for its content with 70% being the benchmark. The beans when grinded produce a liquid which is mainly unsaturated fat (more than half the bean!). First chocolate shop opened in London in 1657. A dark chocolate has the equivalent of one cup of coffee and theobromine (which by the way makes you pee and can cause cardiac arrest in dogs) Cacao also has serotonin, a cannabinoid component similar to found in marijuana, and phenylethylamine an amphetamine like antidepressant. Wow...anyway back to the crazy entrepreneur he finally ended up selling his company to Hershey and he claimed,

"How could I make a difference at Dagoba, working on such a small scale?" I find this interesting because I knew someone who worked for a similar type outfit in Boulder selling Soy Milk and he also sold his company so that he can make a difference...well they fired him 2 years later. People shouldn't sell out...they do make a difference they just need to stick with it.

Wired

Your ears are filled with tiny calcium carbonate crystals called otoconia and help you maintain balance and sense gravity and linear acceleration. Also cause vertigo if they fall into the wrong canal in the inner ear.

Susan Kare? Anyone? Yup see designed some of the all time classic icons







Since the issue was on manga it has an interesting note that has manga sales increased comic book sales plummeted. The ideal being that manga would have hundreds of pages for $10 while most 32-page comics cost $3. The magazine Shonen Jump (500 pages) for $5 with a circulation of 250,000 while Amazing Spider-Man sells only 100,000.

Air & Space

Good article on the X-15, my personal favorite X-plane of them all. Flown from 1959 to1968 and 199 flights with a maximum altitude of 67 miles and a speed of 4,519 mph. Great plane, who knows what we would have done if NASA hadn't come along.

Magazine Wrap-Up

The New Yorker

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published an article entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." The basis of the article is that US really has no strategic interest in supporting Israel. Obviously it is more in depth than that but the purpose of the paper was to stimulate discussion about the lobbying power of Israel and the foreign policy that the US follows in the Middle East (and whether there is a link). The authors, both respected political scientist, have been labeled anti-Semite in some corners which then usually leads to an end of the discussion which is too bad. It is always easy to fall into the trap that there is this big Israeli conspiracy and that the world is secretly being manipulated. Unfortunately too many people assume that this is partially true which is plain ignorant. My opinion is too much of our foreign policy (and for that matter, most of the current policy, is driven too much by lobbying and money. Is it too much to ask for our elected officials to be honorable and do what's right? Am I just naive to think that this is how it as always been and that the dollars changing hands today is just bigger? The sad part of it all is that foreign policy decisions, if they are being swayed by lobbying, are causing deaths to American soldiers and disgrace to our country. I would appreciate a healthy dialogue regardless of labels and I applaud Mearsheimer and Walt for at least trying. Our Middle East policy is in tatters as it is, it would be nice to know that policy is being laid out to benefit our country and ultimately the world.

David Owen puts together a nice article on light pollution. Being a fan of the night sky and seeing the sky from atop Mt Kilimanjaro, I can attest that there is a lot that we don't see! There is a group, International Dark-Sky Association, whose goal is to reduce the night, light signature. I have always thought that the incessant need to put up street lights and light everything up is silly and expensive. Image how much towns could save by making it dark again? The article moved beyond the night sky and launched into a discussion on circadian rhythms. Pervasive artificial illumination has begun to possibly interfere with our biological machinery. One such link is cancer, specifically breast cancer in women in the industrialized world. A researcher on a whim studied the link of nighttime employment and found a strong association between working at night and an increased risk of cancer. In addition migrating birds can be fooled by artificial lights. Finally the need for lighting is supposedly to deter thieves but because of the common place night time light criminals really don't stand out and basically fade into the background. Know imagine if it was dark a flashlight was needed? Interesting article.

Wired

On to a later topic: Standards as in what makes a kilogram, a meter, or a second? Well Wired is telling us:

Kilogram: 215 x 10^23 silicon atoms
Meter: Distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 seconds
Second: The time it takes for cesium-133 atom to cycle 9,192,631,770 times between to specific quantum states

Magazine Stuff

Wired

Make a glowstick!

Distilled Water, 2 L
Hydrogen Peroxide (3% Concentration), 50 mL
Luminol, 0.2 g
Sodium Carbonate (Soda Ash), 4 g
Copper Sulfate Pentahydrate, 0.4 g
Ammonium Carbonate, 0.5 g

Add hydrogen peroxide to 1 L of distilled water to one bowl. In another bowl dissolve luminol, sodium carbonate, copper sulfate, and ammonium carbonate in 1 L of distilled water.

Use sealable clear containers and pour equal measures of each solution into the container. The hydrogen peroxide solution oxidizes the luminol producing 3-aminophthalic acid. As electrons drop to a lower quantum state, a photon is emitted at wavelengths between 430 and 470 nm or a purplish blue.

New Yorker

About every 4th issue the New Yorker has articles in which I read practically every one. This one had its usual wide spectrum of topics...

Lesch-Nyhan syndrome - Awful genetic disorder but amazing how one genetic defect causes a protein to not function and result in a phenotype where the individual (only males) have a predisposition of causing physical harm to themselves among other things.

CIA Black Sites - Horrendous article about torture but interesting in that they used SERE techniques as there starting point for how to torture. Having gone through SERE myself I can comment that just spending 3 days in a "camp" can begin to make things go weird. The droning music, the dark closet, the "discussions", and stress positions was an interesting simulation.

Olive Oil - You might be getting hazelnut oil!

Joe Kittinger - OK if you think Chuck Yeager was a stud or Scott Crossfield...check out what Joe Kittinger is famous for! On August 16, 1960 he made the final jump from the Excelsior III at 102,800 feet (19.5 miles!). Towing a small drogue chute for stabilization, he fell for 4 minutes and 36 seconds reaching a maximum speed of 614 mph (1,149 km/h) before opening his parachute at 18,000 feet. The journey took about 14 minutes. The picture says it all...I mean that's high.

Magazine Wrap Up

WIZARD

- X-men 200 (Great Cover by Finch)

- Batman Ego and other Tales Darwyn Cooke

WIRED

- Why does a magazine get it and not NASA. Priorities should be 1) environmental research on the nearest earth planets, 2) Locate asteroids and comets that could hit the earth and devise a plan to deflect it, 3) study the universe, 4) develop a cheap way to orbit.

What NASA does, 1) Maintain a pointless space station, 2) go the moon for no good reason, 3) study the unverse, 4) keep money flowing to favored aerospace contractors and congressional districts

- Famous Thought Experiments

Schrodinger's Cat - Two probable states of cat (dead or alive)
Borel's Monkeys - Infinite number of monkeys will produce the complete works of Shakespeare
Searle's Room - A man sits alone in a room, someone slips him a letter in Chinese and instuctions on how to read. To an observer the man knows Chinese.

NEW YORKER

- Interesting article on Banksy, at an antiwar demonstration he distributed signs that read, "I Don't Believe in Anything, I'm just here for the Violence."

- Antikythera Mechanism

- Amyris Biotechnologies

- The Higgs Particle first postulated almost 40 years ago has been sought at every collider built since then. If found it would mean the void of space is not really void but permeated by an invisible field that acts like cosmic molasses. The Higgs Field if it exists exerts a drag on matter passing though it, lending mass to particles that otherwise wouldn't have any (the God Particle)

OUTSIDE

It's really about keeping in shape for life...

If it's potato chips in, its potato chips out. You eat garbage, you're probably goint to perform like garbage.

Vacation is an opportunity to get in a good routine.

Learn to rest...

You have to go and try different stuff

Chew more...

We are each out own greatest inhibitor...