Archive
Canadians are the World’s Biggest Net-Nerds
A report released yesterday by ComScore has found that Canadians spend more time online, about 43.5 hours per month in 2010, than any other country! Hurray!
The United States was second with 35.3 hours per month, followed by the UK with 32.3.
Some other notable statistics were that there was a 12% growth in Canadian users in the age group of 55+ in 2010 compared to 2009. Keeping in touch with the grandkids I guess.
And while traffic to Social Networking sites like Twitter and Facebook went up 13%, visitors to blogs went down by 9%.
C’mon people, close down your TweetDeck and drive up the site stats on my blog would ya?
I’m not really sure if Canadians should be proud of this or not. Does this mean we are the most tech-savvy of all nations, or that we have nothing better to do?
Of course it does get pretty cold up here in the winter time, so I’d rather be watching stuff on YouTube than braving the -25C weather in Calgary. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, right?
The Adventure of Links: Feb. 19, 2011
Since I’ve been slacking on my links, this will be a big one. Within you will find that sex in space would be tricky, a statue of Robocop, thundersnow, proof of “unintelligent design” and a genetically modified jalapeno.
Physics/Astronomy
Tesla vs. Edison Mad Lib. Yes, you read that correctly.
A biopic about Einstein is in the works.
Scientists smash giant granite balls together to simulate asteroid impacts (w/video)
Its been 10 years since Fox tried to convince people the moon landing was a hoax. Fox has not improved much in the last decade.
Learn physics from an NFL cheerleader. Science rules!
How Vikings navigated using crystals and polarized light.
Health
How long is a severed head conscious for?
Why beer batter is better for fish and chips.
You mean Nutella isn’t really healthy? Whaaa?
Sugary soda may increase efficiency of brain activity.
A jalapeno genetically altered to hold more cream cheese for jalapeno poppers. I feel fatter already.
Fun/Funny
Fantasy casting posters re-imagine classic sci-fi films. Tim Curry as the Joker? Weird…
Ancient humans used skulls as goblets. Mmmmmm…
The Angry Birds finally settle their disagreements.
Detroit to erect a statue of Robocop.
The mystery of which Cubs game Ferris Bueller went to has been solved!
Lions and Tigers playing with an iPad.
A piece of cake from Charles and Diana’s royal wedding sold at auction. Some people have WAY too much money.
Winston Churchill’s false teeth sold at auction. Seriously, TOO MUCH MONEY!
Sexy Stuff
Space sex would be tricky, says NASA.
Best Science headline I’ve read in a while: Two Timing Spacecraft has Date with Another Comet (w/video)
Why girls moan during sex. Sorry guys, turns out we aren’t THAT good….
Folk Myth : Can shoe size predict penile length?
Post Orgasmic Illness Syndrome. Yes, it’s a real thing.
Girls like monkey sex. Literally.
Internet/Technology
Internet users more likely to volunteer
New device uses EM pulses to detonate IEDs from a safe distance.
A robot that can hear you breathing. Through walls.
Want to have a confession but don’t want to talk to an actual priest? There’s an app for that.
Amazon adds real page numbers to the Kindle.
Mexican cops seize a home-made marijuana hurling catapult near U.S. – Mexico border.
We’ve run out of IP addresses! Run!
Nature
Japanese researchers plan to resurrect the Woolly Mammoth in 5 years. Don’t get your hopes up.
The essentials of bear hibernation
Natural selection limits how many attractive males can exist in a population
The mystery of how fleas jump has been solved.
Thundersnow. What else needs to be said?
Polar bear swims 9 days straight.
Skepticism
An explanation for why people hold on to irrational fears.
In India, Astrology is a science. I know, right? *FACEPALM*
Video Abstracts in a Physics Journal
The New Journal of Physics, which is an open-access journal from the Institute of Physics, has started to allow authors to submit video abstracts with their papers.
This is really cool because it gives authors a chance to explain their work in a more accessible and detailed way. Video abstracts are allowed to be up to 4 minutes long. That may not seem like much, but when you compare it to trying to fit all the important details of your paper in a 200 word abstract, it is really an eternity.
Besides the advantage for the authors, people like you and me can watch the videos and get a better understanding of what the paper is about. This is particularly useful if the subject is not in your field of expertise.
Researchers are already saying how much they think this is a good idea
‘Research is a human journey. The internet was invented to bring human beings together. To meet a researcher through an internet video is to be part of this adventure. New Journal of Physics is a high-quality journal at the forefront of current physics discoveries. NJP video abstracts humanize this journey somehow.’
Germain Rousseaux, Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, France (Rousseaux et al2010 New J. Phys.12095018)
I can’t embed any videos on a free WordPress blog (I might get my domain soon so I can do stuff like that), but here is what a reference page looks like with a video abstract.
Science and the internet. A perfect match.
Why I Was Almost Late for Work Today
Oh xkcd. How is it that you are so intuitive to my daily life?
Sometimes in the morning I just don’t move very fast.
Now to be fair, I did go to the gym around 6:30, showered and then sat at the computer to check emails and so forth. Then of course I check on my blog and see the comments to my recent post about water fluoridation in Calgary.
I just find it really interesting that I simply can’t help myself. I HAVE to immediately check people’s references, quotes and basically do fact checking. It sounds so unexciting, yet I just couldn’t wait until after work to do it.
Luckily though, a road along my bus route which was closed, opened today and made traffic run much smoother. Couple that with the bus arriving just as I walk up to my bus stop, and I actually got to work earlier than usual, despite leaving later than I should have.
I guess the scientific gods (?) were smiling upon me today.
Egyptian Crisis Explained using Indiana Jones
As explained on Moviefone, @furrygirl has devised a way to explain the Egyptian crisis to Americans, or those who simply need a more visual and familiar medium to understand the underlying causes of the unrest there.
Good stuff.
Do Cell Phones Cause Cancer? See What a Real Expert Says
I’ve written about the issue of cell phones and Wi-Fi and the supposed health risks associated with their use. The resounding scientific evidence shows they are perfectly safe, but the media continues to stoke fear in the public with unbalanced coverage.
When reading a news story about this sort of thing, I always wonder why they don’t ask an actual expert. The answer is that an expert would say how implausible the story is, and that they are silly for reporting it.
That doesn’t sell newspapers.
Instead, they find the one person on the fringe who maintains that there is a magical mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can harm us. But thankfully, Phil Plait posted on his blog today something I have been looking for a long time.
I’m not a researcher (anymore). I don’t have a Ph.D, so I can tell you what I think, and I can tell you I know what I’m talking about, but I will never have as much credibility as a real university professor in physics or electrical engineering.
Enter this talk by Professor Christopher Davis from the University of Maryland’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. It was given at a National Capitol Area Skeptics meeting, and posted on YouTube. It’s in 5 parts and each part is about 13 minutes long.
It is a fascinating talk and not too technical, so you don’t need a science background to understand the main points. He even touches on backscatter x-ray scanners which have been in the news quite a bit lately. Enjoy!
Happy Halloween!
Here are a few things to be afraid of today:
1. The WiFi hysteria in Ontario is still going on, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that WiFi is perfectly safe.
2. While its fun to go to movies about the paranormal, it seems actual belief in the supernatural may be getting even more common.
3. Christopher Walken reading Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”. (Thanks to Zee’s Wordly Obsessions for bringing this video to my attention).
Be Afraid of Your Wi-Fi! Be Very Afraid!
Wow. I cannot believe this is still in the news.
Its one of those things you hope only happens once and you never hear about it again. Like the Star Wars Holiday Special.
But unfortunately, the Wi-Fi hysteria remains in the news. This time with a couple of new foot soldiers. They include a drama teacher from Brock University, and a self-proclaimed specialist named Barrie Trower.
And perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, but the reporting of this story in the CBC is really starting to irk me. Lets explore shall we?
I wrote previously about the parents in Simcoe county in Northern Ontario were claiming that Wi-Fi was making their children sick. The supposed dangers of Wi-Fi has been dismissed by teachers, the World Health Organization, Health Canada and scientists worldwide; as it should be.
But proponents of the evils of technology continue to drag the story out and spread fear throughout the community. With a little help from their friends, the news media.
Take, for example, this audio clip of an interview on CBC with Barrie Trower.
Barrie Trower on CBC Metro News
Trower claims to have worked for the British military in the 1960s on experiments dealing with low-level microwave radiation. He claims that they caused adverse health effects; everything from affecting the blood brain barrier to the immune system. He is quite vague and never explains what frequencies or power levels of microwaves he studied.
A couple of my favourite quotes from the audio file are these:
I have a document here…it lists all of the illnesses that children and adults can get from very low-level microwave radiation. And it specifically says on the top…this must be kept secret…the ordinary general population must not be told because it will affect industrial profit.
What is this document? Who wrote it? There are no specifics given about the origin of this mysterious document. Trower claims he gets it from the freedom of information act, but if that were true he should have given us the specifics so we could look up the document for ourselves. I am skeptical…
When I saw Wi-Fis being put in schools at the same powers and the same levels that were used in the 1960s for experiments, I knew straight away that there were hidden dangers to the young children.
You knew straight away, did you Mr. Trower? What about when Wi-Fi was being put into offices, Universities, laboratories, airports, and coffee shops? Did you not think there was a danger then? It seems interesting to me that only when the story about the Simcoe area parents came out, did Mr. Trower decided that he should reveal to everyone about the secret 50 year old experiments that he did with microwaves.
Nor has Mr. Trower provided and clear arguments or evidence (at least, to the news outlets) that Wi-Fi poses any sort of threat to anyone.
And what about the other British scientists that performed these experiments? I find it odd that they all wouldn’t want to come out and save chidren’s lives if they thought that Wi-Fi was dangerous.
While the interviewer sounds slightly skeptical, he fails to ask the right questions to point out the weaknesses in what this man is saying, so thats YOUR fault CBC.
Now lets move on to the drama teacher from Brock University, one David Fancy. Said Fancy,
It’s not necessarily up to me to say that they cause harm. I think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that they do. But we certainly can’t say with any conclusive level that they’re safe.
Actually David, yes we can. There is a large body of literature which has studied and reported the effects of exposure to microwave radiation. The conclusion is that at the frequencies and powers associated with cellular phones, cell phone towers and Wi-Fi, the exposure level does not pose any danger.
In fact, 1 years worth of exposure to a wireless signal is roughly the same exposure as you would get in a 20 minute cell phone call. And in a recent large scale study, the long term effects of cellular phone use has not shown any mal-effects over the past 10 years.
Now, just to be fair, there is a small smattering of studies which suggest a health effect from low level microwave exposure, which these fear-mongerers can spout of the top of their heads. However, one has to take into account the entire volume of literature, not just a few isolated studies (most of which have had their conclusions contested).
You see, when a subject is studied as much as RF radiation, there is bound to be some random noise in the results of individual studes; particularly if the studies involve small sample sizes. This is completely expected. What is important is what the overall picture of the studies is, and that picture is that Wi-Fi is safe.
You can all relax now.
This all would be clear in the news stories, if the news outlets bothered to get an actual expert opinion. Why haven’t the CBC gone and interviewed physics Professors or doctors or biologists or RF engineers? Doesn’t this seem like an obvious thing to do?
Apparently not, and its having an effect. On a CBC poll about 1/3 of parents are concerned about Wi-Fi and its health effects. Kudos CBC on causing fear in these parents minds.
Sadly, talking to Physicists doesn’t boost ratings (unless maybe its Phil Plait) so we won’t get those opinions in the news. You have to go and search them out yourselves.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Twitter
I used to be a Twitter hater. An anti-Twitite, if you will.
I thought it was stupid. I thought “Why do I care what people are doing at every moment of every day?” It made no sense!
Well, eventually I gave in to peer pressure and got myself a Twitter account. It was peer pressure, and it was also because I heard myself say “I don’t understand what the kids are doing these days!”
THAT really freaked me out.
So I got my own Twitter account, fully expecting to find it stupid, inconvenient and irrelevant. My tune changed quite shortly after that.
First I added some famous people. Neil Patrick Harris, Sarah Silverman, and Stephen Colbert were among the first.
@StephenAtHome provides insight into current events with a ridiculous right-wing perspective.
@ActuallyNPH provides updates on his life which I find interesting. This completely disproved my thoughts that I would find these updates irrelevant.
@SarahKSilverman gives hilarity, often with too much of a graphic nature.
And there was much more information waiting for me.
I get to know right away when West Jet has a seat sale, or when my favourite bloggers put up a new post.
Me being a science nerd, I kinda like the idea of knowing whats going on at CERN at all times too. Never know when the Higgs boson will be found!
I also like knowing when Bill Nye, my hero growing up, will be making a TV appearance.
So while my own Twitter following leaves something to be desired (I have 11 followers, roughly half of whom I believe are NOT real people), I’m working on increasing my Twitter presence.
(Oh yeah, feel free to follow me!)
So I apologize Twitter, I prejudged. I was afraid of new things, like 90 year old man who can’t work the debit machine.
Perhaps its having all my interests in one place that is the appeal. Perhaps its the fact the information is in (nearly) real-time. Or maybe its because I always wanted people to speak to me in 140 characters or less.
Whatever the reason, in the future I will have more of an open mind to social media and the like. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go check my Twitter.
A Quantum of Knowledge 