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General Interest
I like cold pizza left overs, but sometimes the cheese can taste like cardboard. This technique should take care of that.
(via Ben Brooks
Julio Diaz was recently mugged getting off the subway one night.
He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.
"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says.
As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."
The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, "like what's going on here?" Diaz says. "He asked me, 'Why are you doing this?'"
Diaz replied: "If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome.
This is what my parents taught me through their actions. Growing up in Sri Lanka and Pakistan our family was robbed a number of times. My parents always said that whoever was desperate enough to break into our house probably needed what they took more than we did. They were never angry, just grateful that no one was harmed.
Instead of letting themselves become victims to the situation my parents used the situation to develop greater compassion and understanding. There is still so much I have to learn from my parents.
Julio Diaz's actions remind of what Ghandi said:
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Our criminal justice system is schizophrenic. It confuses the concepts of rehabilitation and punishment. They are not the same thing. Punishment is justice in the form of "an eye for an eye"; you did something to me, I'll do something to you. It is the easy thing to do. It is what our protective instincts want. We send individuals to prison to punish them and sugar coat it by saying they are being rehabilitated.
Prison is the second best educational institute1 a criminal can attend to hone their craft. Our current penal system does little to truly rehabilitate and help people. Its primary function is to punish.
If we want to truly help people we need to develop a more compassionate approach. Prisons will always be necessary. What we need is to take rehabilitation seriously. Leave the punishment aspect behind and instead focus on helping people change.
I wager this approach would be far cheaper in the long run to society.
- The best place to learn the lucrative art of white collar crime is Wall Street. ↩
This comic from XKCD is especially appropriate given my earlier post on Tom Lehrer. One of Lehrer's most famous songs is a satirical savaging Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist who developed the Saturn V rocket for the US after World War II. Here is Lehrer's song:
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
You Need a Budget is an excellent piece of budgeting software that I highly recommend. Today they are having a one day sale. Get it while its hot.
A few years back I watched Sergio Leone's masterpiece The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I have been meaning to watch the rest of the Dollar trilogy, so last night I rented A Fistful of Dollars from the iTunes movie store. Twenty minutes in iTunes crashed and took my movie rental with it. iTunes only has email support, so I have to wait at least 24 hours before the Apple pixies can restore my download. The poor iTunes support is jarring considering Apple's support is usually excellent. It is only fitting as iTunes has become the one application I now dread opening.
Twenty minutes into the movie and I was shocked at how closely it followed Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Yojimbo. The plot is identical; even the individual shot are framed in the same way. A quick trip to Wikipedia confirmed that Leone indeed ripped off remade Yojimbo.
I am looking forward to finishing A Fistful of Dollars when Apple lets me. I already know how it ends, but it is a story worth sitting through again. And Ennio Morricone's iconic score is alone worth the price of admission.
UPDATE: Apple has refunded my rental. I am going to try to download the movie again.
Octopi are fascinating creatures.
But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin.
(via Justin Blanton)
Great reporting by Naomi Wolf on the motivations of the occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters and the resulting violent crackdown:
The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process.
No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
[...] Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.
The XKCD comic from this past week really put things in perspective for me. The disparity in the US between the wealthy and poor is staggering; this kind of inequality is what leads to class warfare.
This video from Open University covers Zeno's paradox, the grandfather paradox, the Chinese room, Hilbert's infinite hotel, the twin paradox, and Schrödinger's cat.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zVaFjSxAZs
A great line from the twin paradox segment:
Time might fly when you are having fun, but when clocks fly they run more slowly in relativity.
This is one of my favourite TED talks. John Bohannon completely blew my mind. In the space of eleven minutes using dancers he talks about laser cooling, super fluids, slow light, and cellular biology. This talk, especially the first half, is a synthesis of all the things I have come to believe about science communication. Incredible choreography and timing.
John also runs the popular Dance your PH.d contest I entered a couple years back. My favourite line from the talk:
I think that bad Powerpoint presentations are a serious threat to the global economy.
My only criticism is that during the second half, when he is making his point about Powerpoint and arts funding, the dancers were distracting. The attention should have been solely on John and what he was saying, not the lazy boy the dancers formed. I think it would have been more powerful to have the dancers leave the stage and then rush back in for the finale. The absence of the dancers would have fit nicely with his point about what would happen if arts funding is cut. Still, this is a very minor quibble. I loved this talk and will be watching it over and over again.
(via Madhur Anand)
Randall Munroe has put together this incredible visualization of money and what things cost. Starting with the cost of a Starbucks coffee ($2) it works its way through the economic system until the entire economic production of humanity ($2,396,950,000,000,000) is accounted for. From Randall:
Six things I learned researching this chart:
- The world's most expensive thing by weight is probably the Treskilling Yellow postage stamp.
- The US's 400 richest people have a greater combined net worth than the poorest 50% of the country.
- The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System is arguably the most expensive public works project in the history of mankind.
- We spend roughly the same amount on cancer treatment as we do on cigarettes. I'm not sure what lesson to take from that.
- Given their annual marketing budget, Coca-Cola could afford to literally buy the world a Coke. However, singing lessons for every person on Earth would be prohibitively expensive.
This chart puts our entire financial system into perspective.
I have often hear people say that science kills wonder. By dissecting nature through a rational process we lose the magic, myth, and story behind it all. Robin Ince, host of the BBC Radio program The Infinite Monkey Cage gives an entertaining TED talk that argues against this point of view. Feynman eloquently conveys this idea in this video, and Carl Sagan was the master when it comes to sharing the beauty science brings to the world.
For me, the question I have been trying to answer is who am I? Poetry, art, photography, and my conversations with others provide me with insights into myself. But so does science. As a physicist I study and try to discover the rules that govern nature. These rules are often encoded in mathematics that is intimidating for most. Yet these rules contain a beauty and elegance that rivals the greatest verses of any poet. I believe that physics is a poem that nature has written about how the universe works.
No matter how big we think the universe is, it is bigger. The stars we see in the sky, some of which would take thousands of years to reach riding a beam of light, are our closest neighbours. The same force that causes an apple to fall to the Earth also keeps the Earth in orbit around the Sun and is what collapses a star into a black hole. The carbon atoms that make up our bodies were once forged in the heart of a star. Studying physics is a humbling experience.
Science has only increased my capacity for wonder. I view science on equal footing with poetry, art, music and dance. If you don't see the wonder in nature it is because you are not looking hard enough.
This is why I love Futurama. In less than two minutes they cite Lorentz invariance, refraction, and Schrödinger's cat. It should come as no surprise how science savvy this show is; the writing staff is stacked with scientists and David Cohen, one of the co-developers, has degrees in physics and computer science. From this 2007 Wired piece:
Futurama was geek-friendly to begin with: Episodes are built around sci-fi staples like parallel universes, spaceship battles, and time travel. But look more closely and you'll spot fleeting jokes that are geekier than a Slashdot comments thread, gags about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, particle physics, and the P=NP problem.
There is also this excellent interview by SEED magazine with the writers of the show.
A nice post that goes into some more detail on the aforementioned Futurama video.
I am attending the 3d annual Canadian Science Policy Conference in Ottawa, ON this week. It has been a different experience compared to what I normally deal with. At one point, I even ended up being involved in a panel discussion.
I have also run into a number of people who I have not seen in years. The first day of the conference has been good, and I am looking forward to the next two days worth of sessions.
Tomorrow I'll be speaking at TEDxUW. If you cannot make it in person, you can watch the event live online. My talk is at 11:45 AM ET. Preparing for this talk has been an interesting personal journey. I am looking forward to the event. The TEDxUW team has done an outstanding job.
Who would have known that Bill Nye is a fellow Lindy Hopper!