the new gold rush
A host of unemployed are mining for gold in California.
“Some days you sit here and make two cents. Some days you make a couple of hundred dollars,” said John Gurney, who like his crusty predecessors came from the East to find gold by digging around in California river beds.
“I had one good day and made about $10,000,” Gurney told the KNBC-TV in Los Angeles.
Rock Shows
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If you don’t read the monolinguist, you should.
Periodic Table of Controllers
click to enlarge. via Quips
Where The Wild Things Are Trailer
For the few who haven’t seen the trailer yet.
mind like a steele trap
Steele: I am very introspective about things. I don’t do — I am a cause and effect kind of guy. So if I do something, there’s a reason for it. Even, it may look like a mistake, a gaffe. There is a rationale, there’s a logic behind it.
Lemon: Even with the current events in news–
Steele: Yeah.
Lemon: There’s a rationale behind Rush, all that stuff?
Steele: Yup. Yup.
Lemon: You want to share it with us?
Steele: Sure, I want to see what the landscape looks like. I want to see who yells the loudest, I wanted to know who says they’re with me but really isn’t.
Lemon: How does that help you?
Steele: It helps me understand my position on the chess board. It helps me understand, you know, where the enemy camp is and where those who are inside the tent are.
Lemon: It’s all strategic?
Steele: It’s all strategic.
the case of the two year old artist
This would make a good Christopher Guest movie. Read more
Dracula bad, Elizabeth Bennett good
This seems a bit chicken and egg, but a study of Darwin’s theories of evolution applied to literature argues for the novel as a social conditioner.
The researchers asked 500 people to fill in a questionnaire about 200 classic Victorian novels. The respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, and then to describe their personality and motives, such as whether they were conscientious or power-hungry.
The team found that the characters fell into groups that mirrored the egalitarian dynamics of hunter-gather society, in which individual dominance is suppressed for the greater good (Evolutionary Psychology, vol 4, p 716). Protagonists, such as Elizabeth Bennett in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example, scored highly on conscientiousness and nurturing, while antagonists like Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula scored highly on status-seeking and social dominance.
synaptic pruning
A study suggests synaptic pruning occurs while teens sleep, streamlining the open-ended mind of a child into the more focused mind of an adult.
Between ages 11 and 17, children’s brain waves reduce significantly while they sleep, a new study found. Scientists think this change reflects a trimming-down process going on inside teenagers’ brains during these years, where extraneous mental connections made during childhood are lost.
“When a child is born, their brain is not fully-formed, and over the first few years there’s a great proliferation of connections between cells,” said physiologist Ian Campbell of the University of California, Davis. “Over adolescence there is a pruning back of these connections. The brain decides which connections are important to keep, and which can be let go.”
from the spam
You are chosen to be the best lover!
Elizabeth Perry in ink and stopped air
Elizabeth Perry from Lucy Foley on Vimeo.
The book cover referred to is of course the cover of Daryl Scroggins’ remarkable This Is Not The Way We Came In. The audio was originally recorded during a Clusterbook discussion of the book.
when satellite navigation goes wrong
Follow the rocky footpath, stop at the fence.
Type Slam Posters
John Hope Franklin
Historian John Hope Franklin has died at the age of 94.
I’m seeing a trend
Mercedes-Benz Fuel-Cell Roadster
Mercedes offered its junior designers the chance to experiment with fuel-cells.
The F-CELL Roadster marries Benz Patent Motor Car stylings with 21st century tech wonderfully, including that legendary vehicle’s general aesthetic and proportions, along with old-meets-new technologies like carbon-fiber buckets capped in hand-stitched leather and a drive-by-wire central control joystick.
The centerpiece, of course, is the Roadster’s fuel cell powertrain, which has a power rating of 1.2 kilowatts, a top speed of 25 kilometers-per-hour, and a range of 350 kilometers. That means you’ll have a long, slow trip, just like those adventuring motorists back at the turn of the century.
robot fish to detect pollution
The carp-shaped robots, costing 20,000 pounds ($29,000) apiece, mimic the movement of real fish and are equipped with chemical sensors to sniff out potentially hazardous pollutants, such as leaks from vessels or underwater pipelines.
They will transmit the information back to shore using Wi-Fi technology.
Unlike earlier robotic fish, which needed remote controls, they will be able to navigate independently without any human interaction.
it’s like talking to a three year old
A study of the three year old brain.
The pupil measurements showed that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present. Instead, they call up the past as they need it.
“For example, let’s say it’s cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,” Chatham explained. “You might expect the child to plan for the future, think ‘OK it’s cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm.’ But what we suggest is that this isn’t what goes on in a 3-year-old’s brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.”
scent of a pharaoh
Scientists have set out to recreate the perfume worn by Hatshepsut, one of the few female Pharaohs.
Hatshepsut stepped in as one of ancient Egypt’s rare female leaders when her half-brother and husband, Pharaoh Thutmose II, died without an adult male heir. She was meant to rule as a co-regent only until her stepson Thutmose III matured, but she effectively took the reins and was recognized as the pharaoh by the royal court and religious officials until her death in 1457 B.C., Egyptologists say.
“Incense was extremely valuable in ancient Egypt and was used only in temples and for living gods (such as the king),” said Michael Höveler-Müller, curator of the Bonn University Egyptian Museum.
It is this incense that researchers suspect they have found in a filigree container bearing the queen’s name. Using powerful X-rays, the remains of a dried-out fluid were discovered at the bottom of the flacon. Pharmacologists will now analyze the residue and break it into its constituents, in the hopes of putting the scent back together, 3,500 years after Hatshepsut last wore it.
why did the dog chase its tail
Obsessive tail-chasing in dogs and panic attacks and OCD in humans have been linked to high cholesterol.
A team of veterinarians has found a surprising link between compulsive tail-chasing in dogs and high cholesterol, according to a study published in the March issue of the Journal of Small Animal Practice.
The finding adds to a growing body of evidence — mostly from studies on humans — that high cholesterol may be a marker for behavioral problems such as panic attacks and obsessive compulsive disorder, which could be expressed by frequent tail-chasing falls in dogs.
DNA unites siblings
John Smithers spent sixty years looking for the father who abandoned him.
At 82, he had about given up on ever learning what happened to James William Smithers. He had long suspected his father got in trouble with the law and fled abroad. Decades ago, it was easy enough to disappear, and Smithers’ father had seemingly vanished into thin air.
On the other side of the world, Lucinda Gray had always wondered what her father’s life was like before he moved mysteriously from the United States to Australia. She had spent years just trying to find out his real name.
27 Visualizations to Understand the Financial Crisis
(via andrew sullivan)
61727-054
A New York man played Bernie Madoff’s prison number in the state lottery and won $1,500.
A lottery spokeswoman says people often play numbers they see on the news.
So many people played the flight number of a jet that landed safely in the Hudson River that the lottery had to halt sales.
ball of cold fusion
The cold fusion controversy continues:
Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is “significant” evidence of cold fusion, a potential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community.
The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.
“To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from a LENR device,” added the study’s co-author in a statement.
But:
Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss’s published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.
“It fails to provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons,” he told the Houston Chronicle.
“The whole point of fusion is, you’re bringing things of like charge together. As we all know, like things repel, and you have to overcome that repulsion somehow.”
Texas
has shown itself quite adept at voting for patently absurd persons. I’ll abstain from offering the most obvious example and go instead for John Cornyn. That said, I must ask you, “What is going on in Minnesota?” This ‘fine congresswoman’ apparently doesn’t understand the difference between the Constitution on the one hand and, on the other, the laws which Congress (of which she is a member) passes based upon the Constitution. (I was tempted to select ‘comedy’ as a category, but the representative is serious about what she is saying.)
Visual Rhetoric
I am doing a series on visual rhetoric over at Marks and Meaning. The idea came from my thoughts about The Whirl by Dave Gray and the importance of visual langauge:
The first two in the series are on repetition and allusion. This is largely new territory for me, so any thoughts/critiques would be welcome.
