Jan 26 2005
General disorder
- Nalgene, forever! Or not. Over at Grist, Umbra makes a case against Nalgene bottles. (Although the column is actually a clarification of an earlier column, so if you’re new to the Nalgene question, you may want to do a little reading.)
- How about Orangene? A research team at Cornell has apparently discovered a way to make plastics from citrus fruit. (via BoingBoing)
- It’s all just numbers. Via Alas (and on the tails of the “Summers controversy” ), here’s a mighty interesting graphic, which shows the percentage of women on physics faculty by country:
(I don’t know much about the context or source of this graphic, so it’s of limited usefulness. But assuming it’s not an outright falsehood–for whatever time period–it at least goes toward debunking some of the arguments being tossed around re: women’s cognitive predispositions, etc. etc. etc.) - Sleep thin. A new study on sleep (yes, another one) seems to indicate that body mass index increases as sleep time decreases. In other words, the thinner sleep longer. As with virtually any sleep study, no one’s sure if there’s actually a cause-effect relationship. But hey, there might be!
- Things left behind.
An estimated 11,300 laptop computers, 31,400 handheld computers and 200,000 mobile telephones were left in taxis around the world during the past six months, a survey found Monday.
Taxi drivers in nine cities also said they had found a range of other items left by passengers, including a harp, 37 milk bottles, dentures and artificial limbs. One driver said he even found a baby in his taxi.
- No more secrets. Exxonsecrets.org is “the first chapter of a larger Greenpeace project provide a research database of information on the corporate funded anti-environmental movement.” An interactive flash-based tool with lots of information. (via MeFi)
- 35.
Minimum number of countries with a greater capacity to produce nuclear weapons than Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion.
(via Harper’s)
- Snow.
