Cavalcade of Mammals

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

I’m now set up for kegging beer, and am putting a brown ale into a keg. I want to hurry things along. Kegging usually takes 1-2 weeks, but I want the beer ready in 5 days. To speed things along, I’m doubling the pressure to 20 psi for the first two days, lowing the temperature, and shaking the keg a few times a day. After the first two days, I’ll reduce pressure to 10 psi. If I shake it after that and CO2 still goes in, I haven’t over carbonated. I’ll bring the temperature up to 38F the last day.

Here are instructions I found:

Kegging instructions

A carbonation table: Handy-Dandy Slow Force Carbonation Chart featuring Pressure vs. Temperature

Getting A Good Pour – Kegged Beer CO2 Line Length and Pressure

Cold and a long tap line help reduce foaming.

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

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)

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


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

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