Those who have played or watched table tennis at a high level know that it requires great skill, speed, coordination, and excellent reflexes. In the video below, we see a robot named KUKA play against Timo Boll, a German champion of the game. I particularly liked the way it did the open-palm serve one-handed. (Via Rob Beschizza.)
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Blood borne tropical diseases like malaria, African sleeping sickness, schistosomiasis, and Chagas seriously harm millions of people. Early detection would help in treating them but traditional microscopes are expensive and scarce and not easily stored and maintained in remote areas.
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I don’t like snakes. Sri Lanka, being a tropical country has a fair share of snakes that are both poisonous and non-poisonous and so I have encountered them, though not too many because I always lived in urban areas and snake sightings are rare, though not unheard of. But despite having encountered quite a few of them in the wild in my lifetime, I have never overcome my desire to get the hell as far away from them as possible.
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To follow up my earlier posts on the debate (see here and here), after the two main talks, we had two further talks by each that allowed for some back and forth, beginning at around the 1:04 mark (with an intermission between 1:27 and 1:35) and where the speakers repeated and reinforced their arguments and tried to rebut the other. There was some repetition, especially on the part of Craig. I will not go through it in order but summarize the main points.
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In his opening remarks that I discussed yesterday, William Lane Craig made the standard opening move within the college debate framework for those speaking first and arguing the affirmative by framing the question in the most minimal way, thus making it harder to counter. He said that all he was seeking to show was that modern cosmology provided “significant evidence in support of premises in philosophical arguments for conclusions having theological significance”.
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I watched the debate Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig held on Friday, February 21, 2014 on the topic of god and cosmology. I thought it was a good one and I will spend a few posts exploring some of the issues for the benefit of those people without a physics background who may have been a little fogged by some of the technical issues that came up.
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The remote rocky outpost in the Pacific Ocean known as Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is the source of several mysteries that puzzle people to this day. One is how what began as a lush place with dense tropical forests became almost completely denuded of all its trees, transforming it into a dusty wasteland that is now home to about 5,000 residents.
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That journals can sometimes be fooled into publishing nonsense papers has been well established in some high-profile cases but these tended to be seen as isolated instances that were done deliberately, with the papers carefully constructed to prove a point.
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Via Maggie Koerth-Baker I learned something quite surprising, that there exists a type of bacteria called Pseudomonas syringae that causes disease in plants but can also help turn cold water rapidly into ice. And by rapidly, I mean really rapidly, in seconds. Watch what happens as the bacteria are inserted into a bottle of cold water.
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Carroll gives both short and much longer versions of his recollections of the debate and that the recorded version should be available online shortly. (Reader cafink was physically present and you can read his reflections here.)
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