Just saw a PBS Frontline special on an Arab family that was the victim of a hate crime. For some reason, the father, who spoke English as well as most people where I live, was given subtitles. He was perfectly understandable. The Frontline producers are jerks for making the Arab guy look more *foreign* than he was.
I learned something new today. I had thought “There’s a sucker born every minute.” was said by P. T. Barnum, but it turns out it was said by David Hannum, his competitor in the Cardiff Giant craze.
From historybuff.com:
The Cardiff Giant was the most talked about exhibit in the nation. Barnum wanted the giant to display himself while the attraction was still a hot topic of the day. Rather than upping his offer, Barnum hired a crew of workers to carve a giant of his own. Within a short time, Barnum unveiled HIS giant and proclaimed that Hannum had sold Barnum the original giant and that Hannum was now displaying a fake! Thousands of people flocked to see Barnum’s giant. Many newspapers carried the version that Barnum had given them; that is, Hannum’s giant was a fake and Barnum’s was authentic. It is at this point that Hannum — NOT BARNUM — was quoted as saying “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Hannum, still under the impression that HIS giant was authentic, was referring to the thousands of “fools” that paid money to see Barnum’s fake and not his authentic one.
Hannum brought a lawsuit against Barnum for calling his giant a fake. When it came to trial, Hull stepped forward and confessed that the Cardiff Giant was a hoax and the entire story. The judge ruled that Barnum could not be sued for calling Hannum’s giant a fake since it was a fake after all. Thereafter, Hannum’s name was lost to history while Barnum was left with the misplaced stigma of being the one to say “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
It’s also worth noting that the American people were gullible fools back in 1868 that ate up the improbable Cardiff Giant hoax. And also, the press was both soft-headed in credulously reporting on the Giant and also willing to stir up controversy and hype up a story. Quite similar to today’s press.
Neat idea for ocean multi-stage windmills, a design by Selsam called SuperTurbines.
They think the design has advantages over single static windmills:
Like a flock of geese, each rotor favorably affects the next in line. Like a set of louvres, the tilted rotors pull in fresh wind from above, deflecting their wakes downward to insure fresh wind for succeeding rotors and, like a stack of kites, to add overall lift which helps support the driveshaft against gravity and downwind thrust forces. The rotors act as gyroscopes or spinning tops, stabilizing the driveshaft where they are attached.
No prototypes made so far.
Funniest political blog, http://www.thingsyoungerthanmccain.com.
Things younger than John McCain include the chocolate chip cookie, the shopping cart, nylons, velcro, Cheerios, the Cobb salad (whatever that is), Spam, Kodachrome, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Slinky.
Before the Slinky, kids played in the mud. And before that, John McCain was born.
Over the period 1976-2006, Harvard’s endowment had a real growth rate of 6.7%, while US GDP growth in real dollars was half as large, 3.5%. Having some fun plotting exponential growth, in 2056 Harvard’s endowment is projected to be $747 billion (2006 dollars), and exceed 1% of US GDP.
In 2155, Harvard’s endowment is projected to be 20% of US GDP and in 2208, Harvard’s endowment is projected to pass total US GDP. Add in other universities with large endowments, and in time they are projected to dominate world investment dollars. This begins to look silly, so at what point are these large investment funds likely to stall out?
These endowments are professional managed for growth and spending less than they earn, and this is expected to continue indefinitely. They are diversified and large enough that their investments don’t depend on any one company, industry, or class of financial investment.
I read today that gorillas weren’t known to people in the West until 1847 when Thomas Staughton Savage described the gorilla from skeletons he obtained. And it wasn’t until later, in 1861 that Paul du Chaillu sent back specimens to England, and the general public became aware of them.
I hadn’t realized that gorillas were discovered in the West so recently. So many fundamental, basic things about the world were first understood in the 1800s. Scientifically it was a time of much greater change than any time before or since.
Chimpanzees and orangutans were sent to Europe in the 17th century. It sounds crazy, but the relationship of humans/chimps/gorillas (human-chimp closest, gorillas more distantly related) wasn’t definitively established until molecular biology techniques were applied in the 1970s! I wonder what Africans thought about chimps and gorillas, and their relationship? I think their ranges overlap in West Africa.
Few in the city, but a fair number in the new construction suburbs.
Image from http://hotpads.com.
In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol agreement to reduce green gases was signed by 30+ nations including (as best I can tell) all the Western countries except the US. So it was clear in 1997 that the world was warming and green house gas emissions needed to be reduced, but *when* exactly did scientists figure this out?
My memory of the issue with a little proding stretches back to the 1992 climate agreement signed by George HW Bush, officially called the U.N. Framework Convention of Climate Change. It called on countries to cut green house gas emissions but didn’t set binding targets. So global warming was understood back in ’92, and must have been known about years earlier for political action to have been taken then. I didn’t know about research earlier than the 1970s modeling research.
She lays out a number of landmarks. She gives an interesting talk–I’ve pared it away and just list the landmarks here:
Things I dislike about Battlestar Galactica:
Over done ‘artsy’ odd angle close-ups and misdirection camera focus. It builds up false drama and is annoying to watch. Combined with this is occasional bursts of drama highlight music building up to… nothing.
1980’s style gauges. On year 2200, 2500 or whatever year tech gear. And what year is it? The scene hasn’t been set, I don’t know what freakin’ year it is. And somehow they have spaceships but little other new technology. No AI, no nanotech, no advanced biotech.
The intro credits, with flashes of scenes that haven’t happened yet on the show, and introduce things not yet part of the show.
The weird, faux scenes. Are they set in the past, the future, are they dreams, hallucinations, or virtual reality? OK, the woman in lingerie/party dresses is hallucination. The other bits are annoying. I hope this isn’t a show like “Lost” that is lies and cheats the audience.
Who’s bright idea was ‘there are only 40,000 people left’? That means, say 400 engineers, 40 biologists, maybe 100 scientists of all types. Various specialities will be very thin or completely absent. Humanity has completely lost its agricultural and manufacturing capability and most workers with experience in those fields. These folks are going to be screwed. Even without running from and fighting an enemy. This might be workable with 400,000 people. With 40,000 people, technological capability will slip every day.
And yet when the President makes an announcement, there are 30 – 40 reporters there. That’s one per 1,000 people. Reporting to what news org? And how do they move from ship to ship? Shuttles would be rare and hard to get access to. These reporters can’t ‘drive across town’ to attend a press conference.
As space opera, the spaceships all run on fantasy drives and have artificial gravity. And star drives that jump from place to place.
Worse than that is the fighters using reactionless, inertialess drives. Inertia? What’s that? Instead of Newton’s second law we have, “A spaceship that starts out centered in a camera shot will remain centered on screen.”
Cylons that are indistinguishable from humans. No doubt ‘nearly’ indistinguishable, a macguffin will be invented when necessary. Look, if it is that hard to tell, what you have is a ‘human’. Made of flesh, cells, DNA and has a human brain–that’s a human. The Terminator movies pushed the ‘fake human’ idea about as far as it could go without getting stupid.
Medicine apparently has not advanced since the present. Still no effective treatment for common breast cancer, and the runs show morality plays on crappy alternative medicine. If in the far future people are still hoping odd brews will cure cancer, that’s one depressing future.
For some reason everyone ignores that the super scientist is nuts. Everyone relies on him, but he never actually does anything.
The huge, solid metal doors open like they are made of styrofoam.
BG has jumped on the trendy “Photos can be zoomed and ‘enhanced’ infinitely” idea. And for some odd reason this image enhancement process takes just as long in the future as it did in the movie “No Way Out” (1987).
Nobody specializes in the future. The image enhancement analysis gets done in a lab with organic chem glassware. Eh?
BG is really short on personnel–Starbuck, the ‘best fighter pilot’, is also the flight combat instructor, which makes sense. And is reverse engineering cylon ships and running intelligence interrogations, which makes no sense at all.
Hey, Season 1, Episode 11 (S1x11) has the Starbuck with one more job, now running security for the big political event.
And now Season 1, Episode 12 (S1x12) has the President doing the primary aerial reconnaissance analysis. Wow, the BG military seems to completely lack an intelligence command.
And it is the Bush years in the United States, so prisoners get tortured by the ‘good guys’ just like in real life. Got to keep America accomodated to torture. Even if it makes no sense because the man being tortured is a machine that doesn’t feel pain the way humans do. How fucking evil.
In the future, phones are the size of game consoles. And no one has a cell phone. Come on, even in the Star Trek 60’s the future had communicators. How did the set designers miss out on old Navy style talk tubes?
Things I like about Battlestar Galactica:
Gritty, nice sets.
Pretty CGI.
The basic ‘last humans on the run from bad aliens’ overarching plot from the old, horrible Battlestar Galactica series. Gladly, that’s all they kept.
Most recent numbers I find are from 2005 JAMA study in data through 2003. Total biomedical research is $94.3 billion in 2003, with 57% industry funded and 35% US government funded, 5% state and local, and 3% from private foundations.
This is 5.6% of total US health spending.
