sword-billed hummingbird » Science

When We Tested Nuclear Bombs

Ben — Mon, 09 May 2011 20:40:53 +0000

A typically excellent slide show put together by Alan Taylor (formerly of the Boston Globe’s similarly excellent Big Picture feature): When We Tested Nuclear Bombs.

(hat tip: Coudal Partners Blended Feed)

You say “Google Doc”, I say “Awesome”

Ben — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:01:24 +0000

An animation using only Google Docs.

Weirdest Post Ever (not really)

Ben — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 13:52:45 +0000

Things like National Geographic’s “Ten Weirdest New Animals of 2010″ always seem like a mixed bag, to me. It’s definitely great to promote public awareness of new species, but any list is going to be at least somewhat biased (admittedly, this particular list doesn’t limit itself to the cute and the furry — between the tyrant leech king and a dart-shooting slug, it establishes that pretty firmly). Fair enough; it’s still getting awareness out there, reminding people that new species are being discovered all the time, reminding people that there are rich and not-wholly-explored ecosystems still out there, still in danger.

The tendency I noticed in this particular list, however, is one I’m ambivalent towards: relating these animals to the public through a pop culture filter. I suppose you have to present these things in a way that people can relate to, but describing the one bat as a “Yoda” bat? Or the “Simpsons” toad? People are going to call ‘em like they see ‘em, but it’s particularly irksome when the pop culture reference edges out any actual information. I don’t even know where you’d go to find more information about the Simpsons toad, given that there’s not any other identifying information in the article. (Again, the criticism is a little unfair when we’re talking about a list with limited space marketed toward a casual audience [in this case] in a periodical that’s promoting research in other ways, too, but…)

(originally via BB)

Return of the Rundown

Ben — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:59:15 +0000

Timewaster: Typewar. Think you know fonts? Try this game, which you’ll either find completely boring or riveting.
Best aggregated reference word site: Wordnik. My favorite reference site right now. All about words.
Maps of Disaster: Informative, curious, unnerving. View map (or maps) of the world, with icons of disaster superimposed. For added effect, project image onto your office wall. You’ve got things under control. (This is: a service of the Hungarian Emergency and Disaster Information Service)
Best specialty science-writing blog: Tetrapod Zoology. Fascinating, curious, informative, and detailed without alienating those not totally familiar with the science at hand. Aside: I want this book.
Best easily digestible good news story: “Feeling grumpy is ‘good for you’” (via BoingBoing). Bonus: “File photo” used for BBC article appears to have been taken from One Foot in the Grave.

Hippos

Ben — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:07:29 +0000

Of course there’s always debate about invasive species, but usually… Well, usually you don’t think hippopotamus, not in the same mental grouping as zebra mussel and starling. But apparently we live on a place where that can happen; where Colombian drug lords decide to create a haven (of sorts) for hippos; and where, even today, the problem lingers. (NYT, via MeFi)
But who’d hijack a hippo? Probably no one. But maybe you want precautions in place, just in case:

The crate was hoisted onto the flatbed with a 120-ton construction crane. For security reasons, there were no signs on the truck indicating that the cargo was a hippopotamus, the zoo said.

(WaPo, via Schneier)
But it’s not all fun and games. (Actually, part of #1 is already treading into the not-fun-and-games category, if you read into it.) Sometimes hippos fight sharks. At least in Italian natural history books from the 60s, maybe. (via Tetrapod Zoology)

Cleaning House (Rundown)

Ben — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:58:46 +0000

It turns out computers can figure out what language you’re speaking without actually hearing you. In at least some controlled circumstances, anyway. (NewScientist, via Monochrom)
“Astonishingly”, (1) people forget their passwords all the time, but (2) the ever-helpful “secret” “questions” are not really either — at least, not as far as security is concerned.
If I had a car I needed to get into on a regular basis (as in, for driving), this would be wicked awesome. It’s not everyone who can open a car with his shoes.
And this video montage is just kinda sweet.
This post is a good example of why I’m recently drawn to reading Tetrapod Zoology on a regular basis. The lead-in sentence (I think) sells itself:

I used to receive random unsolicited emails from an individual who strongly promoted the idea that birds could not not not not be dinosaurs, that the entire dinosaur family tree was screwed up beyond belief, that ‘dinosaurs’ had evolved from random assorted diverse archosaurs, that cladistics was rubbish, and that all mainstream palaeontologists were idiots.

Read on.
I am still waiting for these business cards made out of meat to get real. (No, not like that.)
Without having perused it much, Ficly at minimum stands out as an interesting concept — a place for collaborative story-telling (in a time & place where social networks are, weirdly, moving us away from that kind of collaboration). (via SimpleSpark)

Aliens, astronomers, or super-intelligent aardvarks?

Ben — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:22:00 +0000

You decide. Whatever the case, it’s kind of amazing.

(via Ectoplasmosis)

I can see your brain

Ben — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:12:13 +0000

Of course, movies have known for years that this was possible–it’s just taken reality a while to catch up. Yes, science can see images in your brain, although for now it’s seemingly mostly proof-of-concept, and fairly limited. (No full color perfect simulacra of your dreams, yet.)

“Researchers from Japanâ€™s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a personâ€™s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other peopleâ€™s dreams while they sleep.”

(Via Pinktentacle via Monocrom; also, the complete journal article is available online in PDF format: Neuron: “Visual Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity using a Combination of Multiscale Local Image Decoders” by Miyawaki et al. [11 Dec 2008])

A search engine that predicts the future

Ben — Wed, 13 May 2009 01:19:12 +0000

The future:

…which is even stranger when you consider that it’s predicting the release of itself. Stay tuned.

I’ve been playing around on the preview, and while I’m not as impressed as I was by the initial (guided/rehearsed) demo searches, I’m still mighty curious. As long as WolframAlpha survives, it certainly won’t get worse. And there are already some interesting types of calculations it can summon.

There’s a whole world of math and physical usefulness, but much less so in the biological world, so far. Is my impression.

We’ll see.

The Future Is Now

Ben — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:02:33 +0000

Two tidbits from NewScientist:

Robots have made their first independent scientific discovery (i.e., made its own hypotheses based on data it was given, and then tested those hypotheses);
The internet might soon (or already) be self-aware.