Remy's Awesome Thing of the Day

Mars - MRO HiRISE Images (2011.01.26) [1080p] (via djxatlanta)

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 19:47:50 -0500

Mars - MRO HiRISE Images (2011.01.26) [1080p] (via djxatlanta)

Woman Speaks First Words in 10 Years After Voice-Box Transplant

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:23:13 -0500

Woman Speaks First Words in 10 Years After Voice-Box Transplant:

Remember: we live in the future. A future where we can transplant larynxes and lungs and livers and hearts from person to person. That’s not too shabby, really.

Medical Engineering

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 06:00:06 -0500

Medical Engineering:

Most people, when diagnosed with a heart valve malformation, take whatever implant the doctor wants to give them. Tal Golesworthy, on the other hand, decided that he could do better, and designed his own. He received his implant in 2004, and since then, 23 others have benefited from his design.

Guo Gangtang

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:28:28 -0500

Guo Gangtang:

Guo Gangtag’s child was kidnapped in 1997. Since then, he’s been hunting through China, trying to find his missing son. He hasn’t succeeded- but his quest has returned 7 other missing children to their families.

One tragedy has prevented seven others.

Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:33:01 -0500

You probably don’t like brussel sprouts very much. Most people don’t. I don’t. They’re sulfurous and bitter, they’re usually served boiled or steamed, or worse, fresh out of the microwave. They represent everything that our inner child hates about being forced to eat vegetables.

Right up until you roast them. My wife and I fight over roasted brussels sprouts. We carefully count out an even share to ensure that nobody gets shorted. They become the highlight of a meal (we last had them as a side with lamb burgers, and the sprouts were still the most exciting thing on the plate!). I cannot overstate how exceedingly good roasted brussels sprouts are.

And the recipe is wonderfully simple. Preheat your oven to 425º. Toss sprouts in a bowl with oil, salt and pepper until coated. Place on a baking sheet and roast for 15 minutes. Turn them and roast for another 5 minutes. Keep doing that until they’re soft and the exterior leaves have gotten well browned (almost black). The best way to tell if they’re done is to taste them.

Roasting, by the way, is a great way to prepare pretty much any vegetable- mushrooms, peppers, broccoli, anything not leafy. It’s all good, but the transformation roasting works on brussels sprouts is essentially alchemy.

Anecdotes that probably aren't true, but should be

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:24:50 -0500

I heard online from a person who claimed to know the actor Ruben Blades who used to go drinking with Raul Julia in NYC in the 60s. Yes, I realize exactly how tenuous that sort of provenance is, but the anecdote joins the many that I’ve gathered over the years- stories that have no real evidence, but are plausible, and most important- awesome.

In any case, the anecdote:
Raul and Ruben were in a bar watching the moon landing. When Armstrong says, “This is one small step for a man, and one giant leap for mankind,” Raul leaps up on a table, and shouts out: “That’s it? That’s the best he can do? If I were there, I’d say, ‘I’m Raul Julia from Puerto Rico and I’m standing on the fucking moon!”

I can hear that in Julia’s voice. True or not, it might as well be true.

Hearing "The Latest Exo-Planet"

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 06:00:06 -0500

When I was young, the idea that we could identify planets orbiting distant stars was a “someday” sort of thing. “Someday, our telescopes will be good enough, our techniques will be refined enough, that we’ll be able to find other planets.” Back then, we only knew of the other planets and planet-like objects that orbited our Sun. We all assumed that there were other planets out there, but without proof, it was just an assumption.

Today, spotting exo-planets is old hat. It seems like not a week goes by when a new one isn’t discovered. At this point, the only headlines we hear are when we’ve discovered the latest in a long chain of “smallest, most Earth-like exo-planet yet!” The fact that we can get jaded about something as incredible as spotting something the size of a planet across a distance that makes the largest planet little more than a mote says something about how amazing our world is.

News Like This

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 12:59:17 -0500

News Like This:

Dubai police have confirmed they uncovered a gang of dealers who were selling electric stun gun kits, for up to £5,000, across the region. These were then being fitted inside the robot jockeys, which cost between £130-£200, that in recent years have largely replaced child jockeys, traditionally used in camel racing, due to humanitarian concerns. The electric shocks could be administered by remote control to encourage the camel to run faster.

You read that right- robotic camel jockeys have been illegally enhanced to make the camels perform better. There’s a sentence that would have been science fictional a decade ago, and incomprehensible a century ago.

Hearing "The Latest Exo-Planet"

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:48:00 -0500

Being Lazy

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 20:55:56 -0500

I didn’t write an awesome thing yesterday. I was feeling lazy. Sometimes, you just need to slack off. Which, BTW- I’m writing this at work. Ahhhhhhh…

Confirmation Bias

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:46:17 -0500

Confirmation Bias :

People do, and believe, incredibly stupid things. This is true of everyone, at various points. There are no exceptions. The question then becomes: why? The beautiful thing is that we can explain why, within certain limits, anyway. And because we can explain why, we can start to take steps to route around these flaws in our thinking.

Confirmation bias in one of many hard-wired features of our brains that leads us to do stupid things. At its core, it’s a very simple concept: human beings have a tendency to accept evidence that supports their preconceptions and ignore or dispute evidence that disagrees with them.

American Football is having its playoffs at the moment, which provides an interesting case for looking at confirmation bias at work. Every year, in at least a few key games, you’ll hear complaints that the refs won the game for the victors. A blown call or obviously biased spot made the pivotal play possible, and turned the tide of the game.

Now, it’s impossible to actually prove this one way or another. The rulebook leaves room for interpretation, the human eye is an imperfect measuring device, and so on. It’s impossible to quantify what actually constitutes a blown call, and it’d be doubly impossible to gather real statistics on the rate and frequency of blown calls. It’s that very lack of statistics that should make us wary of making quick judgments.

In any given game, the refs have to make a vast number of decisions; they have to watch the activities of 22 players, each with distinct jobs and restrictions, they have to track the ball, they have to make quick decisions about very complex events, relying on their senses and good judgement. Even if we assume that there’s a very low 1% error rate in a ref’s officiating, and each player only performs one action on every play, that means the ref will be wrong about something on nearly a quarter of the plays.

The reality is likely a greater frequency of errors. Why don’t we hear football fans decrying this? Because the mistakes are mostly randomly distributed and they usually don’t have a major impact on the outcome of the game. So they’re forgotten very quickly (or never even noticed). The incidents that we remember are the incidents where a blown call turns out to have a major impact- a rare occurrence.

That’s confirmation bias at work, in the form of “biased memory”. I’ve also seen discussions where people debate over one of these major calls- one person claims that it was blown, the other claims it was not. One or the other pores over the video replays and builds a convincing case for their side. One might expect that such a presentation would sway the debate in their favor, but quite the opposite usually happens- their opponent twists it around to support their case, or disregards it entirely. This is possibly a form of “biased interpretation” (on the part of either fan!) or a case of “biased search for information”- “cherry picking”. Perhaps the person found just the handful of frames that made their claim look legitimate, even though watching the video in context shows that they were incorrect.

These sorts of cognitive biases are part of being human. That kind of sucks, in a way- no matter how smart we get, we’ll always get suckered into doing stupid things because our brains just aren’t really good at making certain kinds of decisions. The awesome part, on the other hand, is that we can, if nothing else, be aware of these biases. We can think about thinking, and that means that, at least some of the time, we can avoid serious mistakes by being careful.

Genetic Hammers

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 13:56:58 -0500

Genetic Hammers:

“When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.” Evolution can be viewed as a search algorithm; it attempts to explore the space of “all possible organisms” without wasting time on organisms that aren’t very successful. But it can’t just start anywhere- for a new species to evolve, it must descend from an existing species. The result is that you’ll often see situations like this- the same chain of DNA that controls how a species of fish grows its gill covers determines how our fingers grow.

“You have a common nail that’s used for many different pieces of furniture. This esoteric fish with this esoteric anatomical system is showing us something very fundamental about the evolutionary tree: that there’s a common process at work among disparate types of organisms. It’s basically showing that the limb story is part of a much more general narrative, which is the story of outgrowths. There’s a common development toolkit for all the outgrowths that we know in the body; they’re all versions of one another in a developmental sense.”

Neon Signs Take a near vacuum of some noble gas. Ram electrons...

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 16:44:00 -0500

Neon Signs

Take a near vacuum of some noble gas. Ram electrons through it at ridiculously high voltages. The result? Light. Neon lights were among the first pliable lights- you could form a neon light to fit any shape. Today, LEDs serve that purpose, and they can have incredibly dramatic results, but there’s something so wonderfully arcane about neon lights. Neon lights, by the way, rarely use neon these days. They mostly use a combination of argon, mercury, and a phosphor coating on the glass. This is how the variety of possible colors are achieved. This particular neon sign hangs over the Pittsburgh landmark, “Wiener World”. During the warmer months (which I’m looking forward to!), they sell ice cream through a walk-up window. That, in turn, brings back childhood memories (in the Hudson Valley, my native land, walk-up ice cream parlors still thrive- Wiener World and the chain Rita’s are the only ones I know of in Pittsburgh).

Sourdough

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:34:37 -0500

A got some sourdough starter from a friend at work. For those who have never worked with sourdough before, your starter is basically a culture of yeast you keep in your fridge and feed from time to time. When you want bread, you take it out of the fridge, feed it a bunch, and let it ferment for a few days.

So why is it awesome?

Well, when you are letting it ferment, it produces goo. Disgusting, slimystringy, yeasty goo. It’s that cool kind of disgusting- the kind that gives you that childlike pleasure of making a mess. And when you’re playing with it, you can’t help but realize that it’s alive.

Which gives you an excuse to shout, “It’s ALIVE!” in the kitchen. It’s one of the rare cases where having something be alive and fermenting is a good thing.

Not only that, but it’s a perfect toy for a bad scientist. Yeast reproduce asexually, meaning all of the little yeast cells sitting in that culture are clones. You have at your disposal a vast clone army; most of the time you keep them in suspended animation, but on occasion you decant them and send them forth to do your bidding (make bread rise). You know that this time, your clone army is marching to its death, but you always keep a little in reserve- you always save a sample and put it back into suspended animation so that you can rebuild your clone army when it suits you.

I have a clone army in my fridge.

The Past Decade was Pretty Good

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 06:00:06 -0500

The Past Decade was Pretty Good:

When we look back at the past decade, it’s easy to spot all the things that were wrong. From the War on Terror to problems in the banking sector, it does raise the question: did anything good happen in the past decade?

Charlie Stross tackles that question, and provides a quick summary of a handful of the improvements in the world- from controlling diseases to changes in the global economy, for billions of people, the world is far better today than it was merely a decade ago.

Carl Sagan’s boundless optimism was its own special...

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:51:09 -0500

Carl Sagan’s boundless optimism was its own special wonder. This video captures that wonderfully.
Earth - The Pale Blue Dot (via theloftproductionsUS)

You Aren't In Control

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 06:00:07 -0500

You Aren't In Control:

Who decides whether or not you sign up to be an organ donor? You? Or the person who designs the form? Who decides which option you purchase when choosing between a set? You? Or the person who slipped the ringer in to weight the options?

We are not the masters of our own souls; our brains have biologically wired biases that we can counter only when we know we’re looking at them.

I’m always fascinated by how our brains don’t work.

Motocross Dinosaurs

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 13:02:29 -0500

Motocross Dinosaurs:

“Uh-huh,” the owner said. “Or maybe you figure humans shoot each other all the time, but if someone turns up ripped in half the cops are gonna start lookin’ for dinosaurs.” Tark carefully pounded the counter. “There used to be a time,” he said, “when gun dealers would actually sell people guns! A time … called America. I miss that time.” “I don’t sell to foreign nationals.”

When Murder Moves In

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:27:48 -0500

I don’t mean that literally, obviously. When I say “murder”, I mean “a murder of crows”. Not only is that one of the best names for a group of animals (followed closely by “an unkindness of ravens”), but it’s one of those sights that can be incredibly dramatic in the right conditions.

For a time, I lived in Troy, NY. A cute little victorian ‘burg. During the winter, it became home to a murder of crows. And I don’t mean a dozen or so birds, like have taken to congregating in the local grocery store’s parking lot near me (and which prompted this post). If that’s a murder, the group of crows that showed up in Troy were more properly called “an apocalypse of crows”.

You almost didn’t think it was winter, because the trees weren’t bare- they were covered with crows. When they took to the air, their caws shook the brownstones, and the trees sighted with relief. They became a cloud. Victorian architecture and gigantic flocks of crows is so very Edgar Allen Poe.

It wasn’t all Lenore and the Conquerer Worm, though. Birds poop when and where they feel like. That many birds painted the sidewalks white. It was somewhat disgusting, and the city was called upon to “Do Something!” Well, they tried everything, but once crows pick a place to roost, they only move on when they feel like it.

When win and fail can't be distinguished

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 06:00:07 -0500

When win and fail can't be distinguished:

This young lady is having so much damn fun, I can’t help but think that this is awesome. Step one to success: enjoy whatever it is you’re doing, and you’ll be better than 90% of the folks that are already doing it.