I was at the park the other day throwing pinecones at my kids when a horrified mother asked, “How can you hit your kids with pinecones!” I said it was pretty easy: you just don’t lead them as much. First, this is important because my brain is almost completely incapable of accessing the proper pop-culture comeback (in this case, Full Metal Jacket) until the middle of the night after it was needed.
D'you dig the Geek Off? Did you email your answers to geekoff@gmail.com? If not, too late sucka! That is, too late until Monday morning, when we play another round of the feud. Yep, every week there's a Geek Off and every week you can win a free Geeks' Guide to World Domination: Be Afraid, Beautiful People. Check the quiz Monday, email your answers 'til Friday at midnight EST, then check the answers and fight about corrections starting Saturday morning.
Many parasites depend on their host’s behavior in order to successfully reproduce. Instead of leaving this behavior to chance, some parasites actively manipulate their hosts to produce the desired behavior. For example, after infecting a rat, the taxoplasmosa gondii parasite needs to be transferred to a cat’s belly to reproduce. To do this, the sneaky parasite rewires its rat host to actively seek the smell of cat urine. When the rat gets eaten, the parasite completes its necessary transfer. Cordyceps fungi infect insects and steer them to higher ground where, when the insect dies and the fungus bursts forth, the fungus spores will be more effectively dispersed by wind.
Do you have what it takes to be Scientific Blogging's alpha geek? Well it’s time put your geek where your mouth is…IF YOU CAN!But first a warning: yes, you could Google for these answers, but then, deep down, you’ll know you’re a bad person. Then again, you might win a free Geeks’ Guide to World Domination. So you’ll have to balance total loss of self worth with free geek schwag. It’s up to you.
No matter what you read in the various published strategy guides and online chat rooms about pot odds, implied odds, reverse-implied odds and pot equity, there is no mathematically definite strategy for poker played in casinos. Because the best poker is unpredictable and in casinos you are likely to experience the best poker, all decisions are eventually somewhat intuitive. (Like the stock market, you can’t figure out Dan Harrington—if you could, you could beat him. Note: you can’t.)
Okay, my last blog was a list of Spam haikus. I offer this post as self-flagellation before the scientific community at large.Traditionally, the crux of teleportation has been its seeming contradiction of the Uncertainty Principle, which states that you can never measure and thus know all the information contained within an atom (the more you measure, the more you disturb, until the thing no longer looks like what you started with). Without knowing the make-up of the original object, how could you replicate it across space?
The art of haiku poetry originated in Japan, with roots stretching back to the ninth-century or earlier. According to the US Census of 2000, people of pure Japanese descent make up 16.7% of the population of Hawaii. Residents of Hawaii annually consume nearly seven million cans of SPAM, or about six cans per capita. If you do the math, it leads you inevitably to the work of Keola Beamer, the Hawaiian slack-key guitar player and leading advocate of SPAM haiku, who graciously contributed the following, deeply moving verses:Silent, former pigOne communal awarenessMyriad pink bricks Twist, pull the sharp lidJerks and cuts me deeply butSpam, aaah, my poulticeIn mud you frolicked
To ring traditional church bells, a team of human operators pulls ropes that spin the giant bells (some in the multiple tons) and the mechanics of the system impose strict rules on what can be played. Gone entirely is melody, replaced by the idiomatically frenetic and somewhat cacophonous sound of cascading tones played for maximum note density.Within the two seconds it takes a bell to rotate, the tones are slightly offset so that each rings before any bell sounds twice.
In honor of my daughter's first birthday, today I thought I'd write about ray weaponry.With only a quick stop at your local box store, you can be ready to pop a conventional cap in someone’s ass; however, charring said ass to a crisp using a laser or other ray weapon is not so easy. This is because—despite many decades of government promises—laser weapons do not currently exist (despite the ubiquity of industrial cutting lasers and promises by high school tech ed teachers that one false move with a pointer will render your lab partner a cyclops).
Eggs and rabbits were common fertility symbols of the ancient world. Today come the spring equinox, we continue to worship the pagan, egg-laying bunny (with a massive display of consumerism).Saint Nicolas of Myra presented three impoverished girls with dowries so they would not have to become prostitutes. His modern incarnation was created and popularized by the 18th century cartoonist Thomas Nast. Come winter solstice, it’s time to worship the jolly old elf (with a massive display of consumerism).
As an ethical hedonist, the 18th-19th-century English utilitarian philosopher and proto-bleeding-heart-liberal Jeremy Bentham, believed that right and wrong could be determined by weighing the “pleasures” and “pains” of any given action, with an action that produced more pleasure than pain being morally right.While this would be great by itself (in a geeky kind of way), what makes it truly spectacular is the fact that Bentham actually created an algorithm to define exactly how much pleasure and pain an action would cause. (His application of algebra to life decisions is echoed by at least one complete whack-job modern author…)
There are four caffeine-induced psychiatric disorders recognized by the DSM-IV, the diagnosis manual of the American Psychiatric Association: caffeine intoxication, caffeine-induced anxiety disorder, caffeine-induced sleep disorder, and caffeine-related disorder not otherwise specified.And, as you know if you have ever had to walk low-Starbucks-density wastelands, withdrawal can result in nausea, lethargy and depression. But what of the classic, washed-up-child-star-style overdose?
If you haven’t the infinite ammo of the late Hunter S. Thompson or the lightning-fast trigger finger (and impressive spray radius) of a recent Vice President, it actually takes considerable skill to shoot a fish in a barrel (exact difficulty proportional to size of barrel and fish depth and inversely proportional to size of fish). Some of this trickiness is due to refraction, or the change in speed and thus direction of light waves as they move from air to water.Wait a minute!? Isn’t the speed of light constant?Yes. But only in a vacuum.
