Tomorrow, I’ll be on a plane for Norway, and I’ll be spending the weekend in urban Oslo. Wouldn’t it be nice if the World Humanist Congress could be held in Kongsvinger Forest?
(via National Geographic)
(Also on Sb)
This is a small piece of a larger — much larger — photo of a Vancouver street crowd. Go to the original image, though, which allows you zoom in and in and in — you’ll be able to see the faces in surprising detail of each of the little dots.
The Vancouver Canucks Fan Zone along Georgia St. for Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup Final was captured at 5:46 pm on June 15, 2011. It is made up of 216 photos (12 across by 18 down) stitched together, taken over a 15-minute span, and is not supposed to represent a single moment in time. The final hi-res file is 69,394 X 30,420 pixels or 2,110 megapixels.
I’ve stared at it for hours, though, and still haven’t managed to find Waldo.
(Also on Sb)
Start your day with a gallery of images of the Colossal Squid.
(via Offshore Fishing Videos and TONMO)
(Also on Sb)
My wife sent me this photo, and was intrigued. The water boatman sings through its penis, and sings very loudly — 105 decibels from an animal that’s only a few millimeters long (no word on the length of its penis). I have received subtle signals that I am…inadequate. Does anyone have any suggestions? Should I get an implant of one of those mini-iPods? Or perhaps even an iPod Touch?
(via National Geographic)
(Also on Sb)
A study in the Journal of the Royal Society of medicine has assessed the effectiveness of health care in 19 western countries and come up with a simple ranking system: a measure of the the number of lives saved relative to expenditures proportional to the GDP. One parameter, called the GDPHE, or GDP Health Expenditure was a measure of how much money the country was sinking into health care per citizen; by dividing this by the mortality rates, they got a measure of the effectiveness of the health care system.
This is a ranking system, and I have mostly a hyper-competitive American audience, so you all want to know whether you win or not, right? You want the data that shows that the US is #1! And here it is, the one result that shows us at the top of the ladder, our average health care as a function of GDP.
Look at that: we don’t just win, we win big, leaving our closest competitor, Germany, in the dust. We spend 125% of the money Germany does per person. Does it feel good, America? We are tossing bigger buckets of money into health care than anyone else.
But now for the number that really matters, the GDPHE ratio. How many lives are we saving with all that money? Here’s the answer. Look at the last column, which is the ratio of money spent to lives saved.
Oops. We’re…#17. We’re almost the worst — thanks, Portugal and Switzerland, for neglecting the medical needs of your citizenry more than we do.
Our health care is miserably inefficient, and we pour extravagant sums of cash into it, but you might ask whether it works at all. And the answer is a bit of good news, yes, it does. This study also compared death rates over time and came to the conclusion that, in the US, more than half a million people are alive today who would not have been with the medical care we offered 25 years ago. Medicine in the US is good, it’s just far more economically wasteful than it ought to be.
I’m still thinking I ought to retire to Ireland.
(Also on Sb)
I just learned that Sean M. Carroll is live-Blogging Curiosity, the new television program that asks whether gods exist. Hawking comes out strongly with a confident “NO”. But now they have this horrible, awful post-show panel where they bring in weasely theologians to sow confusion. Carroll is also on the panel, and seems to be the sole rational, godless voice.
If you aren’t watching it on TV, you’re in luck — you’ve escaped the blithering nonsense pouring out of John Haught’s mouth. Read Cosmic Variance instead.
This is a wonderful video debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument. What I really like about it is that it takes the tortured rationales of theologians like William Lane Craig, who love to babble mangled pseudoscience in their arguments, and shows with direct quotes from the physicists referenced that the Christian and Muslim apologists are full of crap.
(via Skepchick.)
(Also on FtB)
This is a wonderful video debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument. What I really like about it is that it takes the tortured rationales of theologians like William Lane Craig, who love to babble mangled pseudoscience in their arguments, and shows with direct quotes from the physicists referenced that the Christian and Muslim apologists are full of shit.
(via Skepchick.)
(Also on Sb)
Science fiction dreams may come true: a small, thin band of stable anti-matter has been discovered near Earth. It was predicted theoretically, but now emissions from the annihilation of these particles has been observed.
The existence of a significant flux of antiprotons confined to Earth’s magnetosphere has been considered in several theoretical works. These antiparticles are produced in nuclear interactions of energetic cosmic rays with the terrestrial atmosphere and accumulate in the geomagnetic field at altitudes of several hundred kilometers. A contribution from the decay of albedo antineutrons has been hypothesized in analogy to proton production by neutron decay, which constitutes the main source of trapped protons at energies above some tens of MeV. This Letter reports the discovery of an antiproton radiation belt around the Earth. The trapped antiproton energy spectrum in the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) region has been measured by the PAMELA experiment for the kinetic energy range 60-750 MeV. A measurement of the atmospheric sub-cutoff antiproton spectrum outside the radiation belts is also reported. PAMELA data show that the magnetospheric antiproton flux in the SAA exceeds the cosmic-ray antiproton flux by three orders of magnitude at the present solar minimum, and exceeds the sub-cutoff antiproton flux outside radiation belts by four orders of magnitude, constituting the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth.
I had to laugh my cynical, evil laugh at the BBC report on this discovery, though.
The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped “normal” matter.
The researchers say there may be enough to implement a scheme using antimatter to fuel future spacecraft.
Bwahahahahaha! Space travel? Foolish, optimistic journalists. You know the first use of these things, once the means to harvest and maintain them is found, will be anti-matter bombs.
(Also on FtB)
Science fiction dreams may come true: a small, thin band of stable anti-matter has been discovered near Earth. It was predicted theoretically, but now emissions from the annihilation of these particles has been observed.
The existence of a significant flux of antiprotons confined to Earth’s magnetosphere has been considered in several theoretical works. These antiparticles are produced in nuclear interactions of energetic cosmic rays with the terrestrial atmosphere and accumulate in the geomagnetic field at altitudes of several hundred kilometers. A contribution from the decay of albedo antineutrons has been hypothesized in analogy to proton production by neutron decay, which constitutes the main source of trapped protons at energies above some tens of MeV. This Letter reports the discovery of an antiproton radiation belt around the Earth. The trapped antiproton energy spectrum in the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) region has been measured by the PAMELA experiment for the kinetic energy range 60-750 MeV. A measurement of the atmospheric sub-cutoff antiproton spectrum outside the radiation belts is also reported. PAMELA data show that the magnetospheric antiproton flux in the SAA exceeds the cosmic-ray antiproton flux by three orders of magnitude at the present solar minimum, and exceeds the sub-cutoff antiproton flux outside radiation belts by four orders of magnitude, constituting the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth.
I had to laugh my cynical, evil laugh at the BBC report on this discovery, though.
The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped “normal” matter.
The researchers say there may be enough to implement a scheme using antimatter to fuel future spacecraft.
Bwahahahahaha! Space travel? Foolish, optimistic journalists. You know the first use of these things, once the means to harvest and maintain them is found, will be anti-matter bombs.
(Also on Sb)
