HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY An essay by Freeman Dyson, 8.7.07 Wrong at every scale and in uninteresting ways. Unfortunately, it means his opinion was unreliable after he published this (and likely for at least several years).
Building Prototypes Part 4 of 18 (video) by Dan GelbartMachine Shop 1 (video) by Henrik Bak HeydeEverything We Know About Birds That Glow. Owls, puffins, and lots of other flying friends exhibit fascinating patterns under blacklights. by Cara Giaimo
Can intelligence be changed? by Martin Lövdén Broad cognitive abilities, narrow cognitive abilities, General crystallized intelligence (gc), and general fluid intelligence (gf)
For The Win (3rd Ed.) is field-tested to help even the smallest counties assemble a high-energy GOTV program with little money and limited computer skills. by Tom Sullivan
UCHealth: Making pseudoscientific claims about acupuncture. by Orac. Shame on U of Colorado! Michael Hudson: The Vocabulary of Economic Deception by Yves Smith “The income tax was a basic reform back in 1913. Only 1% of Americaís population had to pay the tax. Most were tax-free, because the aim was to tax the rentiers who lived off their bond or stock holdings, real estate or monopolies. The solution was simply to tax the wealthiest 1% or 2% instead of labor or industry, that is, the companies that actually produced something.”
“The Trials of Nina McCall” by Scott Stern “The American Plan. The forgotten initiative had resulted over several decades in the detainment of perhaps 100,000 women or more around the country, all on the mere suspicion of carrying STIs. Many of the women were imprisoned – usually without due process – and forced to undergo painful treatments, typically injections of mercury or arsenic.”
ARS Culture Collection (NRRL) “The ARS Culture Collection is one of the largest public collections of microorganisms in the world, containing approximately 98,000 isolates of bacteria and fungi. The collection is housed within the Mycotoxin Prevention and Applied Microbiology Research Unit at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Illinois.” Many beer yeasts!
Ale strains and the S. cerevisiae portion of allotetraploid lager strains were derived from admixture between populations closely related to European grape wine strains and Asian rice wine strains. Similar to both lager and baking strains, ale strains are polyploid, providing them with a passive means of remaining isolated from other populations and providing us with a living relic of their ancestral hybridization…
Recipe:Sweet Potatoes with Goat Cheese Mallows Laced with garlic and rosemary and topped with pecans and goat cheese, this easy casserole gives a savory wink to the traditional sweet-on-sweet Turkey Day staple.
My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles Martin Gardner’s Table Magic Mental Magic: Surefire Tricks to Amaze Your Friends Relativity Simply Explained Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?: Discourses on Godel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics The Universe in a Handkerchief: Lewis Carroll’s Mathematical Recreations, Games, Puzzles, and Word Plays A Bouquet for the Gardener: Martin Gardner Remembered The Last Recreations: Hydras, Eggs, and Other Mathematical Mystifications
How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation by Alexey Guzey, link. Some insights.
Open Borders Made America Great. For most of U.S. history, all immigrants were undocumented. It’s a fact Democrats should embrace. by Aaron Freedman, link
The three technologies bioinformaticians need to be using right now. by biomickwatson, link BioConda/Docker/Singularity, SnakeMake/NextFlow, Cloud computing
Use a teflon spatula to remove warranty sticker without leaving the ‘void’ mark: youtube Science division of White House office left empty as last staffers depart, link
cǎonímǎ 草泥马 Grass-mud horse tank man.Mascot of Chinese netizens fighting for free expression, symbolizing defiance of Internet censorship.
A teachable moment in why Uber/Lyft can never replace public transportation. That Uber was oblivious enough for this self-goal explains why their stock will soon be worth less than monopoly money. link
True Crimes. Why it’s important to name names when discussing the climate catastrophe. by Billy Wilson.
Syphilis Is Spreading Across Rural America. Back in 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had a plan to eradicate the sexually transmitted disease that totaled over 35,000 cases nationwide that year. While syphilis can cause permanent neurological damage, blindness or even death, it is both treatable and curable. By focusing on the epicenters clustered primarily throughout the South, California and in major urban areas, the plan seemed within reach.
Instead, U.S. cases topped 101,500 in 2017 and are continuing to rise along with other sexually transmitted diseases. Syphilis is back in part because of increasing drug use, but health officials are losing the fight because of a combination of cuts in national and state health funding and crumbling public health infrastructure.
In 2008, Johns Hopkins scientists urged doctors to advise parents of asthmatic children to get rid of their gas stoves or at least install powerful exhaust hoods.
The Myth of Fingerprints. by Clive Thompson Nonetheless, the reliability of fingerprinting today is rarely questioned in modern courts. One exception was J. Spencer Letts, a federal judge in California who in 1991 became suspicious of fingerprint analysts who’d testified in a bank robbery trial. Letts was astounded to hear that the standard for declaring that two prints matched varied widely from county to county. Letts threw out the fingerprint evidence from that trial.
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