Gaming, Science, History, Feminism, and all other manners of geekery. Also a lot of dance
243 posts
Latest Posts by stubborn-turtle-blog - Page 3
Thousands of years of human breeding transformed wild species into the domesticated varieties we enjoy every year. Most of these foods were originally found in the Americas. Some of my favorite details:
The original domesticated carrots were purple. Carrots were bred to be orange by Dutch farmers in the 17th century, and then used as a political symbol of the ruling family - the House of Orange.
The ancestors of pumpkins were mainly eaten by mastodons and giant sloths - they were too bitter for smaller animals to stomach.
Turkeys were bred to have white plumage so their skin would be more uniform in color.
Happy Thanksgiving!!
Does No One Understand How To Deport A Man?
After visiting the Soviet Union in 1930, Massachusetts-born and reared Burton K. Wheeler, Democratic Senator from Montana, urged that the United States abandon its isolationist policy and extend diplomatic recognition to Russia. He had learned that Britain and France were buying U.S. cotton and selling it to the Russians, and thought that doing business directly with Russia might help pull the United States out of the growing depression.
When a newspaper in Red Lodge, Montana, said that wheeler ought to be deported for urging recognition of a Communist government, the Senator exclaimed: “Where would you deport me – back to Massachusetts?”
I think it's Java? Just really, really bad Java
The Sciences, in Brief
Geology: lick the rock
Psychology: brainception
Genetics: Punett squares and percentages
Chemistry: what is water?
Biology: no math for the love of God
Physics: 1001 ways to throw things
Astronomy: the nerds of the science world
This map shows where the polls got it wrong Purple = Trump received more votes than expected Green = Clinton received more votes than expected Click here for full election results
Remember back in August when the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) asked for the public’s input on where future subways in the city might run by means of an interactive “draw a subway map” tool?
Well, thy’ve just released the collated results of that survey – wich had some 2,600 respondents – as a heat map, and the results are certainly definitive. It would seem that almost everyone wants a subway line along the length of Geary Boulevard, with another major “crosstown” connection running south along 19th Avenue. An extension of the Central Subway to Fort Mason also seems popular, as is – if you combined all the disparate routes into one – a second Transbay Tube.
Though these corridors have been identified, there’s still a lot more planning and funding work to be done before any concrete plans start to take shape. Still, an interesting conclusion to this little public outreach exercise! There’s also an online GIS-based version of this map showing all of the submitted ideas, but it takes forever to load all 2,600 of them!
Source: SFconnect website
Why do we not discuss clouds more?
I mean look at that. That’s water.
Flying water.
FLYING
FUCKING
WATER
LIKE WHAT THE FUCK, WHY DO WE EVER STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS
WHAT IS THIS
HOW IS THIS EVEN
AND NOW THE FLYING WATER IS EATING A MOUNTAIN
GOD DAMN, WHAT
IS SCIENCE EATING ITS YOUNG?
Background. Scientists and policy makers around the world increasingly worry about the plight of young researchers in academia, and for good reason. Competition for tenure-track positions has surged, and some early career researchers face tough odds in the quest for funding. This week Nature pleads the case for the young in a special issue.
Design challenge. How do we visually convey the idea that science is eating its young? We felt it was important to represent a system that has gone wrong, with various consequences, in an engaging way. The metaphor of a video came to mind, as young scientists find themselves trapped in framework, playing along.
We gave this brief to Megapont, an artist that specializes in isometric pixel art, and he created a fantastic scene for the cover. The retro gaming vibe gives a sense of an aging system that needs an overhaul. The detail in the artwork rewards the observant reader, with hidden treasures and references to iconic games and other worlds. And check out the tiny rat fleeing the scene - only a few pixels!
Have your say. Perhaps you are a young scientist who identifies with a cover character? Maybe the one slouched in dispair on the floor, or the one cutting out in bunny slippers? We’d like to hear your story – here’s a tumblr just for you: researchrealities.tumblr.com
-Kelly Krause
10 “Out of This World" Facts About the James Webb Space Telescope
Wouldn’t it be neat to see a period of the universe’s history that we’ve never seen before? That’s exactly what the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to do…plus more!
Specifically, Webb will see the first objects that formed as the universe cooled down after the Big Bang. We don’t know exactly when the universe made the first stars and galaxies – or how for that matter. That is what we are building Webb to help answer.
Here are 10 awesome facts about this next generation space telescope:
1. The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest and next premier space observatory. It will extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space telescope and observe the birthplaces of stars, galaxies, planets and life over billions of years.
2. It is named after James Webb, NASA’s second administrator and champion of our science.
3. At 3 stories high and the size of a tennis court, it will be 100 times more powerful than Hubble!
4. It is so big that it has to fold origami-style to fit in the rocket, which is only 5.4 meters wide…And then it will unfurl, segment by segment, once in space.
5. The telescope will observe infrared light with unprecedented sensitivity. It will see the first galaxies born after the Big Bang over 13.5 billion years ago.
6. Webb’s infrared cameras are so sensitive they must be shielded from light from the sun, Earth, and moon. The 5-layer sunshield is like having sunblock of SPF 1 million.
7. Webb will orbit the sun 1 million miles from Earth, where the telescope will operate at temperatures below -390 F (-235 C).
8. Webb’s mirrors are coated with a super thin layer of gold only about 1000 atoms thick to optimize their reflectivity in the infrared.
9. Webb will launch from French Guiana in 2018. It is launched near the equator because the faster spin of Earth there gives the rocket an extra push.
10. Webb is an international mission, with contributions from the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency. Once operational, scientists from all over the world will be able to use Webb to explore our solar system, planets outside our solar system, stars and galaxies.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
Edgley Design builds family home around 100-year-old pear tree in south London »
Roboticists are putting a tremendous amount of time and effort into finding the right combination of sensors and algorithms that will keep their drones from smashing into things. It’s a very difficult problem: With a few exceptions, you’ve got small platforms that move fast and don’t have the payload capability for the kind of sensors or computers that you really need to do real-time avoidance of things like trees or powerlines. And without obstacle avoidance, how will we ever have drones that can deliver new athletic socks to our doorstep in 30 minutes or less?
At the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab, where they’ve been working very very hard at getting quadrotors to fly through windows without running into them, Yash Mulgaonkar, Luis Guerrero-Bonilla, Anurag Makineni, and Professor Vijay Kumar have come up with what seems to be a much simpler solution for navigation and obstacle avoidance with swarms of small aerial robots: Give them a roll cage, and just let them run into whatever is in their way. Seriously, it’ll be fine!
This kind of “it’ll be fine” philosophy is what you find in most small flying insects, like bees: They don’t worry all that much about bumbling into stuff, or each other, they just kind of shrug it off and keep on going. Or, if you’re a roboticist, you might say something like, “The penalty due to collisions is small at these scales and sensors and controllers are not precise enough to guarantee collision free trajectories,” so stop trying to solve the collision problem, and just focus on not completely trashing yourself when you hit something. (Swiss startup Flyability was among the first to demonstrate the benefits of collision robustness by equipping a regular-size drone with a gimballed protective cage and flying through forests and ice caves.)
Let's elect politicians who could pass a high school science class
I’m re-posting this comic because I live in America.
Here, the places I love most in the world are gripped by drought. I’m thinking of giving away my winter tracking guides because there’s never enough snow. Climate change is knocking on our door, and the fact that it’s already so evident is a bad sign: it means that we’re headed for a lot more warming.
But we can deal with this, people. We’re brilliant. We’re brave. What we need - besides some kinda magical cooling ray - is a batch of elected officials who are ready to be brave alongside us.
If climate change bums you out, don’t lose heart: it means you’re strong. You’ve personally confronted a huge issue. Why let yourself be governed by scared people who can’t face it, who equivocate and attack scientists and hide their heads in the sand?
My brave dear friends: let’s get our climate vote on.
Four regions with the same GDP
No ripping up this rental agreement. And the punishments for not looking after the property, not paying the rent, etc. Nuts. Plus new legal terminology. Great stuff.
The first worry I have follows from one of the five principles of robotics, which states: robots should not be designed in a deceptive way to exploit vulnerable users; instead their machine nature should be transparent.
To design a gendered robot is a deception. Robots cannot have a gender in any meaningful sense. To impose a gender on a robot, either by design of its outward appearance, or programming some gender stereotypical behaviour, cannot be for reasons other than deception – to make humans believe that the robot has gender, or gender specific characteristics.
When we drafted our 4th ethical principle the vulnerable people we had in mind were children, the elderly or disabled. We were concerned that naive robot users may come to believe that the robot interacting with them (caring for them perhaps) is a real person, and that the care the robot is expressing for them is real. Or that an unscrupulous robot manufacture exploits that belief. But when it comes to gender we are all vulnerable. Whether we like it or not, we all react to gender cues. So whether deliberately designed to do so or not, a gendered robot will trigger reactions that a non-gendered robot will not.
Our 4th principle states that a robot’s machine nature should be transparent. But for gendered robots that principle doesn’t go far enough. Gender cues are so powerful that even very transparently machine-like robots with a female body shape, for instance, will provoke a gender-cued response.
My second concern leads from an ethical problem that I’ve written and talked about before: the brain-body mismatch problem. I’ve argued that we shouldn’t be building android robots at all until we can embed an AI into those robots that matches their appearance. Why? Because our reactions to a robot are strongly influenced by its appearance. If it looks human then we, not unreasonably, expect it to behave like a human. But a robot not much smarter than a washing machine cannot behave like a human. Ok, you might say, if and when we can build robots with human-equivalent intelligence, would I be ok with that? Yes, provided they are androgynous.
My third – and perhaps most serious concern – is about sexism. By building gendered robots there is a huge danger of transferring one of the evils of human culture: sexism, into the artificial realm. By gendering and especially sexualising robots we surely objectify. But how can you objectify an object, you might say? The problem is that a sexualised robot is no longer just an object, because of what it represents. The routine objectification of women (or men) because of ubiquitous sexualised robots will surely only deepen the already acute problem of the objectification of real women and girls. (Of course if humanity were to grow up and cure itself of the cancer of sexism, then this concern would disappear.)
What of the far future? Given that gender is a social construct then a society of robots existing alongside humans might invent gender for themselves. Perhaps nothing like male and female at all. Now that would be interesting.
Alan Winfield is Professor in robotics at UWE Bristol. He communicates about science on his personal blog… read more
Don’t try this at home!
I talked about the interesting structure of graphite (aka pencil lead) in our latest video:
But I didn’t have time to touch on one of the fascinating side effects of this structure - graphite’s conductivity. A single, two-dimensional sheet of graphite (known as graphene) is the most conductive material we know about. Diamond is among the least conductive materials we know about.
Impure graphite - like the stuff we find in pencils - is somewhere in between. It’s more conductive than sea water and less conductive than steel. As free electrons flow through it, it lights up like a filament and puts out a lot of heat.
Some risk-taking YouTubers (MausolfB Education and ElectroBoom) demonstrated this property so you don’t have to.
Diamond photo credit: Macroscopic Solutions, Graphite photo credit: DerHexer
Flat House + Atelier So-So. 鶴川の家 - Tsurukawa House. Kanagawa. Japan. photos: Flat House
There’s only one way to clean the inside of your hood. Here we see our rotation student, Cam, demonstrating the effectiveness of the technique;)
A Brief Intro To Pre-historic Egypt
Humans have lived in the Nile River valley since at least 30,000 BCE. Stone age communities hunted, gathered, and fished in the fertile river valley. Then, around 5,500 BCE, agricultural communities emerged. Over the next 3,400 years the communities became self-governing. Each community developed independently and at different rates politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Then suddenly, by 3,100 BCE, Egypt was politically unified with a highly efficient bureaucratic system and elaborate kingship rites worshiping a single ruler. How the transition happened between each of these stages of Egyptian history is an argument historians and archaeologists are still having.
Biomimicry in action to aid robots in walking
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZBD2tcKOU4)
