31 12 06 01:33Mo' swag; a baby shirt and a poster
There is some new gear up on the Atomic Fireballs store on Cafe Press; a baby T-shirt and a poster. Check out the new stuff and all our stuff at AF's Cafe Press store
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22 12 06 13:55"Chemophobia" or "The art of ignoring science"
One of the chilling shifts in freedoms that have slowly occurred over time is the effective destruction of home hobbyist scientists. One of the hardest hit has been the home chemist, for reasons that should be immediately to any reader... what would your first thought be if you found out your scruffy-looking and anti-social neighbor had dozens of not hundreds of pieces of laboratory glassware? Let's say you were watering your begonias at the border of your property and his, and you just happened to look in his open window and see what looks like the alcohol still from M.A.S.H. combined with a Borg cube. What would your first reaction be? Right. Either "drug lab" or "bomb lab". It would almost never occur to anyone that there might be a totally harmless reason why someone has multiple distillation apparatus in their possession. Especially when there is no actual NEED for chemical experimentation, such as experiments to make perfume or chewing gum, when commercial alternatives exist, sometimes at far higher quality and far lower cost than DIY.The chemophobia that's put a damper on home science has also invaded America's classrooms, where hands-on labs are being replaced by liability-proof teacher demonstrations with the explicit message Don't try this at home. A guide for teachers of grades 7 through 12 issued by the American Chemical Society in 2001 makes the prospect of an hour in the lab seem fraught with peril: "Every chemical, without exception, is hazardous. Did you know that oxygen is poisonous if inhaled at a concentration a bit greater than its natural concentration in the air?" More than half of the suggested experiments in a multimedia package for schools called "You Be the Chemist," created in 2004 by the Chemical Educational Foundation, are to be performed by the teacher alone, leaving students to blow up balloons (with safety goggles in place) or answer questions like "How many pretzels can you eat in a minute?"
"A lot of schools don't have chemistry labs anymore," explains CEF educational coordinator Laurel Brent. "We want to give kids lessons that tie in to their real-world experiences without having them deal with a lot of strange chemicals in bottles that have big long names."
WTF?!? ...read more
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16 12 06 19:19POVTree; geek out your holiday!
I was talking to my wife the other day about projects I am working on and, as often happens when I have to break down what I am working on in easily digested chunks for those less technically inclined than myself, my mind began to wander down another fairly unrelated path. Typically my last sentence starts to trail off and I look glazed and go "oooh... ooooooooooh..." as I rapidly ponder the concept, then I regain my focus and finish my conversation. The result of this "oooh" moment was the "POVTree", a Christmas-style tree-shaped persistence-of-vision state-of-the-art thoroughly-hypenated take on the modern aluminum pre-wired never-die (oooh, more hyphens!) Christmas tree. I explained this concept to my wife and she thought it sounds interesting. She says that about almost everything I am working on because I think she is afraid I would take all the time necessary to explain all the painstaking details to her, and I am pretty sure she would rather chew off her own foot than stay stuck in that trap. So, I filed my concept away for "develop before next year's Xmas".About 2 weeks later MAKE Magazine's RSS feed had a headline about some guys who made a POV Christmas tree! Oh well, this happens to me all the time; come up with a trivial geeky concept and somewhere between two days and two months someone posts video to YouTube of it working away. Hey, million geeks with a millon microcontrollers and all that. Quite often the person who actually developed the idea does a nicer job than I would have and I feel like a hole in the space-time continuum has been sealed, but this time... well, not only do I have some free time on my hands but the fine gentlemen who beat me to the punch on this missed only ONE absolutely critical detail, and the difference between what they did versus what I did virtually defines the whole look of what you can now call a tree. At the end of this article I will sum up the only significant change to the concept those gentlemen used in their project, and you can be the judge of how important it really is to your own efforts to build a POVTree. ...read more
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13 12 06 17:30Fucking great, we managed to kill another species.
Scientists are calling it a day for the Baiji dolphin. After searching for nearly six weeks along the dolphin's Yangtze River habitat and not coming up with one single dolphin they have announced that the species is totally or functionally extinct. Total extinction is clear enough... they are just fucking gone...but "functional extinction" deserves an explanation. The scientist says that even if they missed some they believe there are fewer than the required 20-25 dolphins to continue the species. This is in sharp contrast to the informal estimates of the 1980's where they guessed about 400 dolphins, and the last full official study in 1997 found only 13. Now they are just fucking gone....read more
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11 12 06 17:27Superhero Haikus
I have seen some superhero haikus before, but they were tame as hell and not all that funny. Too bad, because the concept is great! I throw down these for your amusement, and encourage you all to make your own (feel free to post them here)....read more
Don Stratton - Only one comment - § ¶
07 12 06 10:35Now pimping swag at Cafe Press!
I have been meaning to give Cafe Press a try for quite a while now, as they look like a pretty cool way of making custom short-run merchandise like shirts, posters, books and more. So, every stupid idea/joke/one-liner that ever occurs to me from now on will get turned into gear to be promoted through this site and sold off the Cafe Press store....read more
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