Craig's Blog : Science

Science podcasts

craigg75 — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 21:13:00 GMT

Slashdot recently had a topic on podcasts that talk about science. I was amazed at how many there are out there for free. I compiled a list of them for my use and anyone else who's interested. For those who pop in here and believe in intelligent design and think angels really exist, please challenge yourself and give one of these a try -- science, it's good for the soul...

http://www.sciencefriday.com/audio/
http://www.npr.org/templates/topics/topic.php?topicId=1007&ft=2&f=1007
http://radio.cbc.ca/programs/quirks/
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/
http://www.redshiftnow.ca/report/default.aspx
http://www.mos.org/cst/article/6140/1.html
http://www.slackerastronomy.org/slack-live.xml
http://skepticality.libsyn.com/rss/
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~clgroks/
http://sciencecast.net/
http://www.twis.org/
http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/index.html
http://science.nasa.gov/podcast.xml
http://www.universetoday.com/audio.xml
http://www.regulusastro.com/regulus/whatsup/podcast.rss
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/spaceguide/skyatnight/proginfo.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/
http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/default.htm
http://scienceweek.com/
http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?show=33
http://www.newscientist.com/podcast/
http://www.thespaceshow.com/
http://www.intellectualicebergs.org/
http://www.podcast.net/cat/74
http://www.bluejack.com/
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/default.htm
http://podcast.seti.org/index.xml
http://kgnu.net/audio/HowOnEarth/
http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/scitech/index.html

R is for Rocket

craigg75 — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 17:31:00 GMT

Chris ran across a good article recently on the worth of manned spaceflight. It's preaching to the choir. I've always said the space shuttles have no real purpose since the majority of activities could be robotic. I understand the need to get and keep humans in space since it's really the only way I can forsee the species surviving in any long term way. But why not use humans when they are really needed. Like saving the Hubble telescope as the article talked about. Fixing satellites or building an orbiting space station. Make this space station useful. Design it as a jumping off point for the moon. Build a huge optical telescope on the far side of the moon to search for stars that have "Earths". Do something useful other than watching how a plants grow in microgravity. It just seems like we are just exploring just to be exploring. Because historically those that explored sustained their civilization so we better do some exploring. What?! There doesn't seem to be any purpose behind it, more like empty exploring. Real exploring is running a rover all over Mars or landing a camera on Titan. That shit blows the mind of most people, that is purposeful exploration. Putting people in orbit to perform tired out microgravity experiments seems insane. Hell I hand it to the Russians for trying out space tourism, in a way there is some profit exploration going on. Somebody should hand them a capitalist prize! the irony!! I hope Branson and Burt Rutan can figure out how to get a passenger space plane to be profitable, that would shut down NASA's low orbit efforts. Another thing I've wondered about is why NASA built a spacecraft that was intended to be used for 20+ years. Don't they know technology is always improving and they are wasting money by sticking with obsolete tech? Big goverment agencies and good planning never seem to work right.

Here's an interesting question -- why ensure the survivability of the human species? What do we care when we are dead and gone? What stake do I or anyone have in the species? What if tommorow there's a plague outbreak that spreads like wildfire. Of course I'd want myself and the people close to me to live. But what if that part is removed, if we all get wiped out then what? Poof. The marks we left on the Earth would disappear in a million years through subduction and decay. Do we really matter as a species to anyone but ourselves? We think as individuals but rarely as a community so why concern ourselves with the continued existence of the community? It's very likely that the extinction of intelligent self-aware species happens on a frequent basis in the universe. Self-awareness is often seen as the heart and mind of the universe, giving the universe an ability to look at itself. With every death of that mind there is probably a birth, negating any effect. How unique are we? Is that worth saving? Will anyone miss us?

All hail to Thorium

craigg75 — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 14:14:00 GMT

I just read an interesting article on scifi.com about a new type of nuclear reactor. Apparently by using the element Thorium (just to the left of Uranium) and low energy neutrons a safer reactor can be built, one that doesn't operate on the chain reaction principle. Scientist recently discovered this process in the late 90's and India is currently developing a pilot plant. The article says that Thorium is in good supply in the country of India. I wonder how it's abundance compares to a common heavy element like Lead?

Neandertal souls?

craigg75 — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 16:10:00 GMT

So I've been reading this book Hominids by Robert Sawyer. As usual he's put together a good story. About a parallel universe in which the Neandertals became the dominant Homo species instead of us. So one them gets transported over to our universe with a wave of the scifi author's magic wand and so ensues the story. The part I just read about was the Neandertal's discovering religion since his universe had no concept of religion. So my question is this -- If we all agree that all life evolved from self-organizing molecules, who was the first human to have a soul? Did the Neandertals (in our universe) have souls? If so why did god allow them to go extinct? So I guess we need to agree on what a soul is. My guess it is something only human beings have apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. So maybe it has something to do with self-awareness, foresight, enlarged cerebral cortex? Or maybe it has a lot to do with our godspot, our ability to perceive a god? I don't see too many dolphins going off to church or praying to the almighty oil tanker. So are souls another made up fairy tale that most religions like to espouse? So what if you were the first caveman to have a soul. You end up in heaven with god and ... well nobody else is there ... yet. Dang all of these clouds and angels, what am I going to do to pass the time? I'd rather be in hell, at least there I'd have something to do..haha. Which reminds me of a joke. Bill Gates dies, goes to heaven and god gives him a choice Heaven or Hell. Even better he says heck you can have a 30 day trial version of each. So Bill checks out Heaven first, seems to be nice and comfortable and well ..a bit boring. So he checks out Hell. Wall to wall babes, a sunny beach, women's sand volleyball, tropical drinks. Great he says, I choose Hell. So god says okay, and sends him to Hell, where he ends up being tortured endlessly by devils and the whole works. So god checks in on the fallen angel and Bill screams “hey this isn't what you showed me!”. God replies “oh hi Bill, sorry but that was the beta version”. Waw waw waaaaaaaw!!!

What the bleep do we know?

craigg75 — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 17:53:00 GMT

So Gregg and I finally got around to seeing the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? I give it a 6 out of 10. It's sort of reminded me of some of the jazzed up specials on Nova or Discovery channel when they try to explain something in science that's esoteric. Throw in a little animation and cool special effects and suddenly you have a pretty cool show about quantum mechanics. Not that there is anything wrong with that but it's like only looking at the cool graphic on the physics book cover and going wow look at that, now I understand it. Really the joy is delving into the book and learning it. But quantum physics, consciousness, nature of reality, mysticism is so ripe for special effects and sheeple. The first third of the film dealt with quantum superposition. The second part had an awesome animation sequence to describe how we are basically slaves to the chemicals. A pumping hypothalmus, blobs of cells with neural receptors and emotions and rock music. The last part went off the deep end and added the mystics in with the mix. bah. The movie was about a woman dealing with her disgruntled life with cutaways of interviews with scientists and mystics. So in the end once we've figured out quantum physics, the chemical nature of emotions and all of it's possibilities it's only a short leap to mysticism and the magic wands of how we can change our environment. Mostly the power of positive thinking. It was fun ride though, a worthy bit torrent download if it ever gets out there.

Gregg found this interesting site detailing the movie's subject matter -- Forums

Too much Hawking radiation can be bad for your theory

craigg75 — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 13:16:00 GMT

Well it looks like Stephen Hawking corrected his theory to account for the “information sink“ a blackhole represents. The Non Sequitor cartoon as usual is about 50,000 feet over the average readers head did it once again this weekend --

Just a bump in the road

craigg75 — Fri, 13 Aug 2004 18:39:00 GMT

News story

Norm: Say Martha did you feel a bump in the road?

Martha: Why yes I did, I just figured it was some old roadkill.

Norm: Mmm.. ok. Say did the minivan's microwave oven finish popping my corn yet?

Martha: Why yes it did.. sorry I was too busy watching my movie on the dvd player.

Pay up

craigg75 — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 18:57:00 GMT

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 C. The Russians used a pencil. Enjoy paying your taxes--they're due again.

Austrailia

craigg75 — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 13:26:00 GMT

I found this cool web site Confluence Project. Basically it's taking pictures of the world's land mass at every point where latitude and longitude lines cross at whole numbers. Of course I had to wonder around the extreme spots like the high latitudes and where 0 - 0 cross. I took a look at Austrailia because whenever I see pictures/videos of that continent it always looked so desolate. Figured this is way to find out without actually being there. Well I'm still not impressed, it's still desolate looking to me. Scrub bushes, red dirt and flatness. Sort of like Oklahoma without the Baptists. I can now see why Australia has never been more populated than you'd expect from a first world country. Just a few major coastal cities and that's it. I once read somewhere that Austrailia is one of the only places on earth that is not geologically active. No mountain building or volcanoes. The result is a dehydrated flat continent. Apparently all continents spread away from Austrailia making it the last piece of the great continent Pangea. I read a book recently called Evolution by Stephen Baxter. An excellent read. It was sort of like the James Michner story for the human race. Baxter being a scifi author finished the book off by going forward in the far future, where will our species end up? The interesting part is that all the continents will eventually ram into each other again, forming another Pangea. His story described a massive Austrailia. Life is reduced to a hardy few tough plants and animals, featureless, plain, struggling to maintain themselves in a symbiotic fashion to scrape the last few organic chemicals left to them. Depressing ending -- but like many of Baxter's stories, really makes you feel insignificant. Sort of like Kurt Vonnegut.

Women's Viagra

craigg75 — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 17:44:00 GMT

My friend Chris keeps a running list of his recently read online/offline articles and books. One of his recent articles is from Time magazine --

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040119-574884,00.html

Typical Time magazine article, biased and trying to run up the reader's 'lusions to derive excitement and subscribe to their magazine. Irresponsible journalism at it's best. Anyway what I think is interesting is that nature puts limits on sexual desire to control population yet we keep finding ways of circumventing it. I still like the idea from Logan's Run where people can go to a room and have sex with anyone/anyway. Imagine a society with no sexual frustration? I guess the downside is societies do sink a lot of binding value in sexual morals. Sexual drive is a hard coded attribute of humans much like food and xenophobia. How has our society fared in the food department? For all intent we have free food available to us, we can eat as much as we like in any variety. I think everyone agrees we are a fat ass nation as a result. We've grown up in the last 30-40 years to blame someone else for our overindulgances, like drugs, smoking, eating, etc. It's society's fault, the environment, my parents, my goverment, my god, my congressman, my neighbor, etc etc. But we no longer deal with fear of starvation, working ourselves hard so we can eat another day. Very little work can feed yourself cheaply today. Has the work ethic suffered? Why work full time when I can easily afford a McDonald's value meal? Maybe that's oversimplistic. What if we had free accepted sex available outside our typical marriages and relationships? How does the sexual drive influence us individually and as members of a society? Perhaps I should brush up on Psych 101.

We're doomed now

craigg75 — Mon, 12 Jan 2004 15:32:00 GMT

Can you hear me now...?

craigg75 — Fri, 26 Dec 2003 21:11:00 GMT

So the Brits lost the Mars lander Beagle 2. Damn bloody shame. It was a gamble at best that the craft would survive the landing and be able to land right side up so it could deploy it's solar panels. Guess it's just sitting there like a piece of junk among the martian rubble. We need to send up the Sprint guy with his phone -- “can you hear me now?“. Thought for the day --

In heaven, the Italians are the lovers, the Germans are the engineers, the British are the organizational leaders.

In hell, the Italians are the organizational leaders, the Germans are the lovers, and the British are the engineers