Cavalcade of Mammals

Designing The Best Board Game On The Planet: Twilight Struggle by Oliver Roeder
After 10 years, few payoffs from Gates’ ‘Grand Challenges’
the Mincome experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba, 19774-1979
State tax rates 2014
International SAT is Corrupt.
Great Commodore 64 game: The Castles of Dr. Creep (rewrite, description)
Science and the AAAS sell their souls to promote pseudoscience in medicine by Orac, link to Science advert Supplement
Bat hibernation, muted immune response, and aging
More Rotavirus Vaccination Means Less Rotavirus, paywalled article Sahni et al., 2015 in Pediatrics
Cooking charts
Pioneer Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder review

Travel ideas
30 Years of Conservative Nonsense, An Explainer By Kurt Eichenwald
The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare By Matt Taibbi
Japan, Awash in Chaos by Noah Smith
Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture by Robert Bruce Thompson
Why Didn’t Toxic Waste Cause a Cancer Epidemic, Like We Expected in the 1970s?
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson
Alientube, Reddit comments on YouTube
Every time zone tool
Vaccines Work
Nanopore Sequencing overview
“Manipulating the Pain: Chiropractic and Other ‘Alternative’ Treatments for Back Pain,” by
Richard A. Deyo

Shared DNA / relatedness among close relatives
Analysis of the midterm elections
Climate fiction: When literature takes on global warming and devastating droughts
Origins of BLAST
Charlie Brooks’s kriotherapy leaves me cold
Kryotherapy – Freezing the Balls off a Brazen Quack
Cost of new drug development (and patents), Dean Baker
Officer Darren Wilson’s story is unbelievable. Literally. by Ezra Klein

I bought a Sunbeam heating pad. It has low/med/high settings, and turns off after two hours.

The back of the controller says ‘Sunbeam SLA103’.

I wanted to eliminate the shutoff, I’m using it to heat my fermentation bucket.

(more…)

What really undid the Berlin Wall, interview with historian Mary Sarotte
Genome-wide Ancestry Patterns in Rapanui Suggest Pre-European Admixture with Native Americans. Moreno-Mayar et. al., 2014, Current Biology
Russian site has birch scroll in Old Novgorod language, 1000-1400
New Deal projects site with a map!
34 states have governor elections only in off years
Theodore Roosevelt 100 Years Ago, “The people of the United States have but one instrument which they can efficiently use against the colossal combinations of business – and that instrument is the government of the United States…”
Lee Sheppard: Taxes Are A Monetary Instrument

Hibernation in Lemurs
N-back memory task trainer
Pot research effectively forbidden in US

Ebola: Christian Althaus of the University of Bern in Switzerland just released a grim new calculation of the RO for this epidemic that finds that when the outbreak began in Guinea, it was RO = 1.5, so each person infected one and a half other people, for a moderate rate of epidemic growth. But by early July, the RO in Sierra Leone was a hideous 2.53, so the epidemic was more than doubling in size with each round of transmission. Today in Liberia, the virus is spreading so rapidly that no RO has been computed. Back in the spring, however, when matters were conceivably controllable, Liberia’s then-small rural outbreak was 1.59.

Egyptian D20

Banks control their Federal regulators
Lithium in water supply reduces suicide
Bennett Foddy’s Speed chess: up to 16 players, no waiting
Deep convolutional neural networks significantly improve computer vision in 2012
The destruction of Gary Webb over the CIA/crack history
Most People With Addiction Grow Out of It
Public health funding cut in half over the last decade

Hybrid balloon / vehicle approaches

Saw a recent news item about JP Aerospace. They are working on a two step to orbit approach. The basic plan is to put a large lighter than air (LTA) craft at 200,000 ft, and then accelerate it using a ion thruster to reach orbital velocity.

So I was interested in how this would work, and what the basic parameters (mass, thrust, time) are for approaches of this type.

The benefit of starting from a high altitude is very low air pressure. A balloon can provide steady support so a low thrust vehicle has time to accelerate.

Orbital velocity is roughly 9500 m/s.

What size solid fuel rocket would be required to put a 10 kb payload into orbit?

Bit of local history I never knew about. I had noticed, but no one ever mentioned the court case…

“But the fight didn’t end there; it just moved to the courts and the states. The 1970s saw a tidal wave of high-profile civil rights lawsuits taking aim at restrictive zoning laws, virtually all of which were lost. Most crucially, in 1977 the Supreme Court upheld a law that banned apartment buildings in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, denying an affordable housing developer’s claim that the law made integration almost impossible. (At the time, Arlington Heights had about 27 black residents out of a population of 64,000. In the nearly four decades since, its zoning has largely remained intact, and its black population is still under 1,000.)”

One of the best ways to fight inequality in cities: zoning By Daniel Hertz

OK, this is quite annoying. It was plenty annoying when I was at a univerisity and 90% of the articles were available at publication, but that 10% always included a handful of important articles so it has always been a PITA. So now I’ll start future blogging!

I’ll tag interesting articles when they get published and follow up when I can actually read them. Many journals now are open access, but some release an article six months or a year after publication. Or sometimes the pdf gets posted. So I’ll tag intertesting articles when they hit the news and write a follow up when I can read them. Because titles and abstracts aren’t enough for articles with useful information!

Duration of urination does not change with body size. Patricia J. Yanga, Jonathan Phama, Jerome Chooa, and David L. Hu. PNAS vol. 111 no. 33p11932–11937.

BTW, PNAS used to release articles at publication. When did they go dark?!

Nominations

These look interesting:

Best Novel (1595 nominating ballots)
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (Orbit US/Orbit UK)
Neptune’s Brood, Charles Stross (Ace / Orbit UK)
Parasite, Mira Grant (Orbit US/Orbit UK)

Best Short Story (865 nominating ballots)
“If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”, Rachel Swirsky (Apex Magazine, Mar-2013)
“The Ink Readers of Doi Saket”, Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Tor.com, 04-2013)
“Selkie Stories Are for Losers”, Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons, Jan-2013)
“The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere”, John Chu (Tor.com, 02-2013)

Best Related Work (752 nominating ballots)
“We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative”, Kameron Hurley (A Dribble of Ink)

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
Wesley Chu
Max Gladstone*
Ramez Naam*
Sofia Samatar*
Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Winners