going down a tall slide
May 28th, 2007 Filed Under fun, homevideo
In the seventies, we didn’t have the Internet, so we had to learn about gravity the hard way. Here’s a home video my father took of my sister going down a slide at the park. She’s about 18 months old.
The silver-haired woman was our grandmother and puppeteer.
Stumble it!Fungi use radioactivity for energy
May 22nd, 2007 Filed Under news, science
ScienceDaily reports that fungi can use melanin to eat ionising radiation as an energy source:
“Just as the pigment chlorophyll converts sunlight into chemical energy that allows green plants to live and grow, our research suggests that melanin can use a different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum–ionizing radiation–to benefit the fungi containing it,” says Dr. Dadachova.
…
The researchers also carried out physico-chemical studies into melanin’s ability to capture radiation. By measuring the electron spin resonance signal after melanin was exposed to ionizing radiation, they showed that radiation interacts with melanin to alter its electron structure. This is an essential step for capturing radiation and converting it into a different form of energy to make food.
Anarchism
May 22nd, 2007 Filed Under books, empty
New Scientist: Recent CO2 rises exceed worst-case scenarios
May 21st, 2007 Filed Under news, science, sustainability
Seems that we’re not getting better at dealing with carbon emissions; in fact, every part of the world is getting worse:
During the 1990s, emissions grew by 1.1% per year on average, but the number shot up to 3.3% between 2000 and 2004, when the study ended.
…
They concluded that the rise in CO2 emissions is not due to a growth in global population, but a reduction in global efficiency. “We are not getting more efficient at using CO2 in the way we projected,” explains co-author Corinne Le Quéré from the University of East Anglia in the UK.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, the world as a whole was becoming better at producing more energy for the same CO2 emissions, and more GDP with less energy. But the trend reversed in 2000.
The researchers found that no part of the world reduced the amount of carbon used to produce energy between 2000 and 2004, despite widespread publicity in support of greener sources of energy.
So we’ll have to revise our worst-case predictions to match new worst-case trends.
a trio of geniuses
May 11th, 2007 Filed Under news
Several news stories over the past two weeks really tickle my sense of irony. The first one is a cracked-out pastor:
According to the police report, Lewis showed up and tried to pay a restaurant cook to have sex in his car. Pointing to his Corvette outside, he handed her a $50 bill. When she said no, he grabbed her by the wrists and attempted to get her out of the building. She put up a fight and refused to go with him.
Police say when officers tried to arrest Lewis, he put his car in reverse, rammed a patrol car several times, and led officers on a brief chase in his Corvette.
[...]
He said he had been using church money to pay for the prostitutes and drugs.
Then, BoingBoing alerted me to a stoned ex-cop who called 911.
Finally, this guy shot at a woman in court:
SUFFERN, N.Y. - A man who had been acquitted of charges he groped a woman fired a sawed-off rifle at her during a court hearing over attorney’s fees, authorities said. No one was injured but the shot narrowly missed the judge’s head.
“I should have shot that bitch two years ago,” Leo Lewis Jr. said as he stood up and pulled the trigger on Monday night, according to a felony complaint issued Tuesday. The complaint also said Lewis confessed he had previously thought about killing the woman.
All three sound like they could be hoaxes, but they all seem to be legitimate. At least as real as anything else in the media.
