hackmore.net

Osama bin Laden's DNA

Thu, 12 May 2011 23:10:18 +0000

John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, said the DNA evidence provided a match with "99.9 per cent confidence". That would require the comparison of DNA from the body with that of people known to be related to bin Laden. Bin Laden had no full siblings, but more than 50 half-siblings and up to 24 children.

Using DNA from many half-siblings could produce a DNA match of greater than 90 per cent confidence, but it would be difficult to get as high as 99.9 per cent without a closer relative says Rhonda Roby, a forensic geneticist at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, Fort Worth. Roby, who led the team using DNA evidence to identify the remains of people killed in the 9/11 attacks in 2001, says that the statistical analysis based on DNA from half-siblings is more complex and less reliable than analysis based on DNA from a closer relative like a parent or child.

Words for keyboard symbols

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:19:03 +0000

! : Common: bang; pling; excl; shriek; exclamation mark. Rare: factorial; exclam; mash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey; wham; eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier, control.

# : Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch; hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; square, pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; splat.

@ : Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl; [whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage; commercial at.

Sometimes used in the hacker community. More available in the Jargon File.

Concerning Nature

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:08:49 +0000

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

Neuro-chemistry and Moral Behavior

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 21:41:32 +0000

From an article at the guardian concerning the book Enhancing Human Capacities:

Drugs that affect our moral thinking and behaviour already exist, but we tend not to think of them in that way. [Prozac] lowers aggression and bitterness against environment and so could be said to make people more agreeable. Or Oxytocin, the so-called love hormone ... increases feelings of social bonding and empathy while reducing anxiety ...

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:22:39 +0000

A nice article in Mother Jones sums up the evidence.

Scientific evidence is highly susceptible to misinterpretation. Giving ideologues scientific data that's relevant to their beliefs is like unleashing them in the motivated-reasoning equivalent of a candy store.

Why we run

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 16:39:38 +0000

Astounding video where a man literally runs down a kudu, chasing it for 8 hours until it drops from exhaustion. There is also an episode of This American Life that discusses this phenomenon. I haven't listened to it yet. The wikipedia article on persistence hunting offers more illumination. Once again: a tip of the hat to tywkiwdbi for finding this.

Long Pepper

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 07:24:23 +0000

Long pepper (Piper longum), sometimes called Indian or Indonesian long pepper, is a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit, which is usually dried and used as a spice and seasoning. Long pepper has a similar, but hotter, taste to its close relative Piper nigrum - from which black, green and white pepper are obtained. [...] The Romans knew of both and often referred to either as just piper; Pliny the Elder erroneously believed dried black pepper and long pepper came from the same plant. [...] Today, long pepper is a rare ingredient in European cuisines, but it can still be found in Indian vegetable pickles, some North African spice mixtures, and in Indonesian and Malaysian cooking. It is readily available at Indian grocery stores, where it is usually labeled pippali.

More at wikipedia.

Man Survives Sticking his Head into an Operating Particle Accelerator

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:32:39 +0000

From Today I Found Out:

Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski, a Russian scientist who has the distinction of being the only person to ever stick their head in a running particle accelerator. Shockingly, he also managed to survive the ordeal and all things considered, come out without too much damage. Bugorski was a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino. Specifically he worked with the Soviet particle accelerator the synchrotron U-70. On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment. As he was leaning over the piece of equipment he stuck his head through the part of the accelerator that the proton beam was running through. Supposedly, he saw a flash that was “brighter than a thousand suns” at this point. Interestingly, he did not feel any pain when this happened.

Ray Kurzweil Cannot See the Future

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 18:04:01 +0000

Kurzweil also stands by his claim that computer displays built into eyeglasses would project images into users' eyes because some such systems do exist, and says, "The prediction did not say that all displays would be this way or that it would be the majority, or even common." Similarly, he defends his claim that translation software would be "commonly used" to allow people speaking different languages to communicate by phone by pointing to smartphone apps that emerged at the end of 2009. He allows that one could quibble about how "common" their use is.

"So far, I haven't seen Kurzweil straight-up admit that he was wrong. I think he would benefit from doing so on some of these points," says the blog post by Anissimov, who seems to admire the man but thinks futurists should be accountable for their statements.

Kurzweil's reply asserts that he is all for futurist accountability, "but such reviews need to be free of bias, fair, and not subject to selection bias and myopic interpretations of both the words used and the current reality." Still, it is hard to square his objection to "myopic," literal interpretations with his lawyerly defenses of his predictions that hinge on their precise wording and creative interpretations of the meaning of everyday words.

More at IEEE Spectrum.

Crazy ideas kill

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 02:22:25 +0000

Everyone seems to think that those wacky cultists who made the film What the #$*! Do We Know!? are harmless. Unfortunately it seems that they are wrong. A couple who belong to the Ramtha's School of Enlightenment (the cult that produced the aforementioned movie) shot and killed a police officer. Apparently they were concerned about the 2012 phenomenon and they planned to live on a farm in the bush after the apocalypse. When officers came to evict them from the farm they turned violent.

BMW Emergency Stop Assistant

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 22:27:36 +0000

BMW is testing technology to allow cars to stop themselves safely in the event that the driver falls unconscious. I have long been of the opinion that the approximately 35,000 people killed in traffic accidents each year is unacceptable. That casualty rate is equivalent to having a terrorist attack of the magnitude of the September 11th attacks (~2,752 deaths) each month. I commend BMW for this innovation and look forward to the day when our cars can drive us all home without fear for our safety.

Prenominal vs postnominal adjectives

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 22:09:05 +0000

Both language and perception. Two of my favorite topics:

[...] the prediction was simple: using color words after nouns should make colors far easier to learn, and should make kids far faster at learning them. To test this, we took a couple dozen two-year olds and gave them some quick training on color words. Either we trained them with prenominal sentences (the standard variety) or postnominal sentences (helpful, we hoped). In both cases, we would simply show them familiar objects and say encouraging things like “This is a blue crayon” or “This crayon is green.” Then we would test them again, with the same standard battery. We found that the kids who got the postnominal training improved significantly over their baseline test scores, whereas the ones who got the prenominal training still looked just as confused as ever. Given that previous studies hadn’t found much improvement after hundreds of explicit training trials, it was hard to believe that such a simple manipulation could make such a clear difference—and yet, it did!

More at the Scientific Americam Mind Matters Blog.

The Zanclean Flood

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 23:52:58 +0000

Periodically throughout history the Mediterranean Sea has been closed off from the Atlantic Ocean by the continued northward movement of the African Tectonic Plate into the Eurasian Tectonic Plate. When this happens the Mediterranean Sea slowly begins to evaporate. Over the course of a thousand years or so it dries out nearly completely.

This produces a huge desert that is 3-5 km below sea level. Possibly some incredibly salty lakes also. Near the bottom the air pressure would be about 150% of that at sea level and the adiabatically heated air would have reached 80°C (176 °F) in the summer. This set of circumstances is known as The Messinian Salinity Crisis.

About 5.3 million years ago this crisis came to an end when the waters of the Atlantic found their way into the empty basin through erosion. At first just a trickle which eroded a deeper channel, which brought more and more water until there was a 200 km wide waterfall pouring unbelievable volumes of water into the basin. This catastrophic flood is known as The Zanclean Flood. The channel cut by the flood still exists today in the form of The Strait of Gibraltar.

Nature by the Numbers

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 18:25:56 +0000

Presented without comment. The video is by Cristóbal Vila. The music is "Often a Bird" by Wim Mertens.

The Freedom of the City

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:33:41 +0000

Freedom of the City is an honor bestowed on esteemed members of the community by a number of commonwealth nations. The practice dates back to a Roman military privilege that allowed especially loyal or trustworthy military units to enter the city under arms. Of interest is The Freedom of the City of London which comes with some interesting apocryphal rights including:

The right to herd sheep over London bridge
The right to go about the City with a drawn sword
The right to be hung with a silken rope if ever convicted of a capital offence
Immunity to being press-ganged
The right to be married in St Paul's Cathedral
The right to be buried in the City
The right to be drunk and disorderly without fear of arrest.

The evidence that these rights were honored in the past is shaky, but they are interesting none the less.