True's beaked whale.jpg

Western spotted skunk

Hooded skunk

Yellow-throated Marten

Wolverine

Links for August 2014

August 1st, 2014

Turns out that the ‘crack baby’ epidemic was another racist popular delusion
Just like the ‘juvenile super-predator’ panic of the 1990’s
Angelina Fanny Hess invents agar culture of bacteria in the 1880s
Pot legalization has no effect on teen use (study pdf)
Invasive species in the Great Lakes
Spectrometer tests for drugged drinks (interesting to see if this turns out to be real)
The Higgs boson and the purpose of a republic
Two Americas: Ferguson, Missouri Versus the Bundy Ranch, Nevada
Republican House Benghazi committee finds bupkis
Confirmation that Nixon committed treason to win 1968 election Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, who else…
Ferguson PD Video Backfires; Brown Seen Paying For Cigarillos
Bob Altemeyer’s – The Authoritarians. Explores some of the roots of conservatism.
Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party
Welcome Trust historical images

Links for July 2014

July 7th, 2014

Virginia Teacher of the Year Tells Why He Resigned
Moleculo Technology is Available as TruSeq Synthetic Long-Read DNA Library Prep Kits (local assembly gives 8-10kb contigs
Biologists vs. Astronomers on the Fermi Paradox
Nutrition: Vitamins on trial by Melinda Wenner Moyer (little evidence of benefit of supplements, only for deficient individuals
10 algorithms that dominate our world
Heinlein in Dimension by Alexei Panshin
Kansas implements GOP economic polices and crashes
Texas Republican Party platform is nuts , Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker
SSRIs: not much better than nothing, but with serious common side effects
Pushback from the Dem establishment against the effort to eliminate public schools
About Steampunk
Chicago Prostitution Heat Map
Dinosaur Feathers Found in Amber!!! McKellar et. al., 2011
John H. Ostam: The Man Who Saved The Dinosaurs
So You Want to Watch Macross, But Don’t Know Where to Start
Notes on the defeat of charter schools in Mass
Ayn Rand’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
You Are Not Late (on the internet)

Links for June 2014

June 9th, 2014

What Became of The Entwives: Political Lesbianism
the Levitron
Politicians and Pundits Demanded an Armed Revolution, So the Millers Attempted to Deliver One
And Melissa McEwan at Shakesville on rightwing eliminationism
The GOP had adopted its current language by 1964: Barry Goldwater on Civil Rights: June 19, 1964
US healthcare: high cost and poor outcomes
OECD_health_2013
IOM_US_female_life_expectancy
Recovered Economic History: “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious”
Low lights of Obama’s first term

Links for May 2014

May 6th, 2014

Laser enthusiast (trans from German)
Economics: Opponents Of Transfer Payments Are Not Serious
Origin of the Toll House cookie recipe
Earthtainer planter pdf
Testing de novo assembly bioinformatics
CC number generator for web site registrations
Color enhancing glasses help correct colorblindness
Chopra text generator
Bill Higgins blog
Is gluten sensitivity common?
Flexible opals Stober process
Jacob’s ladder with a flyback transformer
How A Troublesome Inheritance gets human genetics wrong by Jeremy Yoder
Human genetic substructure papers–Tishkoff et al., 2009, Rosenberg et al., 2005

Idea: steampunk clock

April 2nd, 2014

Have the time displayed by colored liquids in glass tubes, either a column of liquid or a large segment. The time tube can be straight or circular.

Move the liquid by a mechanism where brass gears compress a bellows. The brass mechanism would be driven by a microcontroller.

Links for April 2014

April 1st, 2014

Tess, software for designing tesselations
FBI suppression of peaceful activists
True Bugs posters
Truth about vaccines
Private equity companies in business as slumlords
Outbreaks sourced to labs
Peter Baker’s Days of Fire hackery
Handmade kalliroscope
Crab-ble – A Table That Walks
Nanopore sequencing
The Meaning of Oaths and a Forgotten Man by Lt. Col. Robert Bateman
DIY fog curtain
Pyro Board: A Two Dimensional Ruben’s Tube
Wave simulation java applets
Obama Declares Obamacare Victory
Books to read: Joan Robinson’s “Introduction to Modern Economics” (1973)
Magnet platforms moved by circuit board coils
Crude demonstration of 2D linear motor

Idea: make a microcentrifuge using RC motors

March 30th, 2014

The motors made for RC planes and cars are high speed and high power.

For example, the Turnigy Trackstar 1/10 12.0T 3300KV Brushless Motor, $23 specs are:
Kv: 3300
Max Voltage: 15v
Max current: 35amps
Watts: 550
Resistance: 0.0221Ohms
Max RPM: 50000

The load on a microfuge will be greater–22 tubes x 1.5 ml can be roughly 44g, figure a 100g total load with the rotor. So slower than max, but still quite fast.

High power ESC modules are sold to run these motors. So they take DC power, and a servo like signal (PWM), +5, GRD.

So a 10k RPM microfuge can be made with one of these motors + ESC, a servo for locking the lid, and a microcontroller to run it, take speed / time settings, and monitor and show the RPMs on a display.

Power could be from a PC power supply or a dedicated supply.

Links for March 2014

March 5th, 2014

1 pixel moon
Guide to Convincing Parents to Vaccinate their Children
Boosting the signal: THE SMALL TOOLS MANIFESTO FOR BIOINFORMATICS
Zero senators per state
Why the Fed hates inflation
Progressive Caucus’s Better Off Budget
Levels of analysis of religion, Atran, Boyer & Wilson
Whistleblower Reveals Favoritism Toward the Rich, Robo-Signing at the IRS
Top 5 Bioinformatics papers
Measles spreading in the US
The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry by Lance Dodes (Author), Zachary Dodes
Autism risk

New public health measures

March 2nd, 2014

Could new measures substantially improve public health?

What would be the effect if, say, 90% of the country wore filter masks for one week, and concentrated on washing hands?

Infection is a chain, one individual infects one or more others, and an infection gets passed on. That is how disease persists–for most infectious agents, not in one person for months on end, but passed serially every few months as an individual gets infected, and over a few weeks mounts an immune response and fights it off.

An infectious agent requires a basic reproduction factor, an R0, of more than one. If R0 > 1, an infection is growing more common, if R0 < 1, an infection is disappearing. For more diseases, for infection to persist it must spread.

Currently there are constant but weak efforts to reduce the spread of infection–encouraging the sick to stay home and hand washing. Vaccines for influenza. But what if a serious effort was made? A big effort could not be sustained, at least not in the US culture.

But what would be the effect of a large, short effort? If infection transmission can be stomped down for a short period, but long enough to break the chain of infection, it might have a large effect on public health. I wonder if this has been modeled?

Setting up libcutter

February 28th, 2014

On Ubuntu 12.04.

Downloaded from https://github.com/vangdfang/libcutter/.

It was hard to compile, requiring libsvg and several other libraries.
I added to the include directories:

CMakeLists.txt

include_directories(${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/include/ ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/include/pub /usr/include/freetype2)

Download keys.h from: http://www.jestinstoffel.com/files/keys.h


#ifndef KEYS_H
#define KEYS_H
#define MOVE_KEY_0 1194338851ul
#define MOVE_KEY_1 1563510831ul
#define MOVE_KEY_2 992311905ul
#define MOVE_KEY_3 913389615ul

#define LINE_KEY_0 809461859ul
#define LINE_KEY_1 1902406960ul
#define LINE_KEY_2 1198081403ul
#define LINE_KEY_3 1832133993ul

#define CURVE_KEY_0 0x7D316E22ul
#define CURVE_KEY_1 0x4A4A7133ul
#define CURVE_KEY_2 0x5A3C5C5Ful
#define CURVE_KEY_3 0x78613A61ul
#endif

Full set of keys:

KEY0 - 0x272D6C37, 0x342A6173, 0x3663255B, 0x2B265A4D
KEY1 - 0x7D316E22, 0x4A4A7133, 0x5A3C5C5F, 0x78613A61
KEY2 - 0x47302A23, 0x5D31482F, 0x3B257A61, 0x3671382F
KEY3 - 0x303F6863, 0x71646D30, 0x4769457B, 0x6D342569
KEY4 - 0x45356650, 0x3A386D69, 0x575A7037, 0x335F357D
KEY5 - 0x343A2148, 0x614F3925, 0x753F6953, 0x47463626
KEY6 - 0x3F62626D, 0x7E555F44, 0x7E29425A, 0x52246268
KEY7 - 0x47302A23, 0x342A6173, 0x4769457B, 0x335F357D

Replaces include/pub/keys.h

./util/draw_svg ./util/svg_tests/Mini_DIY_circuit.svg /dev/ttyUSB0

Test run, worked!

Other options:
Freecut — Firmware replacement, haven’t tried.
Licut –Tried binaries and program compiled from source, did not work.

Cricut dissection, discusses the default blank cartridge.
ATX Hackerspace cricut page
Repair info
Build-to-spec Cricut Hacks Wiki (recovered from the Internet Archive)