Month: August 2006

Wood’s Hole is studying, among very many other things, the upper micron of the ocean.

Like most living things, microscopic marine plants need iron and other minerals to live and grow. On land, soil provides a ubiquitous source of minerals, but how do essential nutrients get into vast watery stretches of the open ocean?

The question has long mystified oceanographers. According to one theory, large swirling currents, called eddies, pump nutrients from the depths up toward the sunlit surface, giving phytoplankton the ingredients they need to flourish. But a larger source of iron may be dust storms, which blow huge quantities of mineral-rich soil particles (called Aeolian dust) out to sea, particularly from desert regions in Africa and Asia.

This image [click the image for larger pic] is an intense dust storm — a massive plume of dust from the Saharan Desert over the Atlantic Ocean. The plume extends more than 1,000 miles, covering a vast swath extending from the Cape Verde Islands (lower left), off the coast of Senegal, to the Canary Islands (top center) off the coast of Morocco.

Is video game addiction an actual medical condition? Dr. Maressa Orzack, founder of the Computer Addiction Services program and researcher at Harvard Medical School, claims it is. She believes the problem is growing rapidly.

Having treated all types of addictions for more than 15 years, Orzack says there’s little difference between drug use, excessive gambling and heavy game playing.

She believes that up to 40 percent of more than 6 million players of the mega-popular World of Warcraft are clinically addicted to the game.

TwitchGuru talks with one of the foremost experts in the controversial field of video game addiction. Get the lowdown.

via Tom’s Hardware

And here’s a reminder about something we discuss too little:

Think of dopamine as a motivation chemical. We don’t actually crave treats, gambling, sex, or drugs, or video games. We crave dopamine.

And here’s an interesting vignette about dopamine-driven behavior: The Coolidge Effect

And here’s a discussion about ‘outsourcing temptations’ and a bit of updating on the fallacy of willpower:

willpower is a zero-sum game…
you only have so much of it…

[and it gets worse], were you to redouble your efforts to plough through something by James Joyce, your cigarette habit might return, leaving you at risk of becoming the most cultured corpse in the morgue.

Families of Drug Addicts May Be Part of Their Problem

Once those closest to the problem can recognize that their moral superiority may be part of the cause, we might see an improvement in recovery rates.

more at Science Blog

My friend Gary posits the new supermarket merchandizing techniques:

The newest supermarket near my apartment has an automatic water mister to keep the produce fresh. Just before it goes on, you hear the sound of distant thunder and the smell of fresh rain.

When you approach the milk cases, you hear cows mooing and witness the scent of fresh hay.

When you approach the egg case, you hear hens cluck and cackle and the air is filled with the pleasing aroma of bacon and eggs frying.

The veggie department features the smell of fresh buttered corn.

But I don’t buy toilet paper there any more.

Gary H

Everyone knows that power is seductive, but is it power over others that we crave or power over our own actions and decisions?

Research shows people are more motivated to decrease their dependence on other people’s power than they are to increase their power over others.

In other words, we’re driven to increase our ‘personal power’ over ourselves, but not necessarily our ‘social power’ over others.

via British Psychological Society

“Spending time with the people we care about isn’t what we do after the important stuff is done.

It is the important stuff.”

says Ornish.

In this article from Motivation Articles, Essays, Tips and Advice, author Steven Covey revisits and reinvisions his Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, stating:

“I see seven unique human endowments or capabilities associated with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. One way to revisit The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is to identify the unique human capability or endowment associated with each habit.

The primary human endowments are

1. self-awareness or self-knowledge;
2. imagination and conscience;
3. volition or will power.

   And the secondary endowments are

4. an abundance mentality;
5. courage and consideration;
6. creativity; and
7. self-renewal.

These are all unique human endowments; animals don’t possess any of them. But, they are all on a continuum of low to high levels.

Associated with Habit 1:
Be Proactive is the endowment of self-knowledge or self-awareness, an ability to choose your response (response-ability)…

Associated with Habit 2:
Begin With the End In Mind is the endowment of imagination and conscience…

Associated with Habit 3:
Put First Things First is the endowment of willpower…

Associated with Habit 4:
Think Win-Win is the endowment of an abundance mentality. Why? Because your security comes from principles…

Associated with Habit 5:
Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood is the endowment of courage balanced with consideration…

Associated with Habit 6:
Synergize is the endowment of creativity…

Associated with Habit 7:
Sharpen the Saw is the unique endowment of continuous improvement or self-renewal to overcome entropy…”

via bizzBangbuzz

Excellent summary notes at Strange Attractor to help understand The Long Tail.

From minding the planet, a freaky report from a recent study by the venerable Wood’s Hole scientific teams:

And that could speed up global warming with ‘incalculable consequences’, says alarming new research: Global Warming Could Increase by 50%.

Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down.

Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere, including Britain, and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences, spinning out of control, a process that might end in the world becoming uninhabitable.

The alarming news comes in the midst of a heatwave gripping Britain and much of Europe and the United States.

“Entrepreneurial Proverbs”. There’s lots of good stuff to check out:

“Jump when you are more excited than afraid — lack of fear is irrational, and too much fear is debilitating. Make the jump into your business when you have considered the fear, and come out more excited than afraid.”

“Start with nothing, and have nothing for as long as possible — small budgets give big focus (probably another line I’m stealing from Jason Fried: it sounds like something he’d say…) Don’t go out and raise a ton of money right away. Instead, give yourself just enough to get going, and use the limits that imposes to motivate yourself.”

via trend junkie

Every business needs an in-house IT guy:

“Finding an IT guy/gal is kind of hard – but look around your community for that smart, bright, smiling, honest, well spoken geek. That’s probably someone you should have a look at.”

at Small Business Trends

Question:
What big idea of 2006 will be extinct in 2036?
Answer:
Modern teacher training

By 2036, the forms of teacher preparation that currently prevail in Western nations will have sunk into oblivion.

Why can’t the Western world produce talented, enthusiastic teachers?

Here is the response from the Provost of The Kings College in New York City, Peter Wood

via Robin Good

The next generation of the breathalyzer won’t just measure blood alchohol content, it will detect many types of disease as well. A laser-based technology for measuring the breath is being proposed as a viable alternative to blood tests.

via Noah Spivak’s Minding the Planet

Nicos Kazantzakis, from his book The Saviors of God Spiritual Exercises,

via future hi

The reason folk science so often gets it wrong is that we evolved in an environment radically different from the one in which we now live. Our senses are geared for perceiving objects of middling size–between, say, ants and mountains–not bacteria, molecules and atoms on one end of the scale and stars and galaxies on the other end. We live a scant three score and 10 years, far too short a time to witness evolution, continental drift or long-term environmental changes.

Causal inference in folk science is equally untrustworthy. We correctly surmise designed objects, such as stone tools, to be the product of an intelligent designer and thus naturally assume that all functional objects, such as eyes, must have also been intelligently designed. Lacking a cogent theory of how neural activity gives rise to consciousness, we imagine mental spirits floating within our heads. We lived in small bands of roaming hunter-gatherers that accumulated little wealth and had no experience of free markets and economic growth.

Folk science leads us to trust anecdotes as data, such as illnesses being cured by assorted nostrums based solely on single-case examples. Equally powerful are anecdotes involving preternatural beings, compelling us to make causal inferences linking these nonmaterial entities to all manner of material events, illness being the most personal. Because people often re-cover from sickness naturally, whatever was done just before recovery receives the credit, prayer being the most common.

via bird on the moon

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt…. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience til luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

— Thomas Jefferson, from a letter he sent in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act

CNN’s capitulation to populist ‘talk radio’ formats sacrifices Headline News from an important social utility into a fashionable rag.

Opinions are not our social fabric and packaging opinion is not a social contribution.

We require better.

There are groups of fear faced by human beings:

• fear of poverty,
• fear of criticism,
• fear of ill health,
• fear of loss of love,
• fear of old age and,
• fear of death.

It is not surprising that fear of poverty tops this heavy list:

“This fear paralyzes the faculty of reason,
destroys the faculty of imagination,
kills self-reliance,
undermines enthusiasm,
discourages initiative,
leads to uncertainty of purpose,
encourages procrastination and,
makes self-control an impossibility.”

Link from an honest declarative blogger that has, amongst the rest of us, been working with smart people until there’s nothing but a blog.

America is a nation of our friends and our pets are a sample of that great effort.

Please paws, [sp] pause.

Someone once said, “Kicking a dog is a footstep to hell.”

In case anyone asks you to explain what a liberal is, I am posting a better rant in its entirety from Stayin’ Alive, a Blog of Note, and often a refreshing ascerbic [sharp; piquant; pointed; acidic; stinging] read:

Faith of our Fathers

Liberalism began as a movement to affirm individual freedom against the hereditary caste system of European aristocracy.

The so-called Founding Fathers of the United States, quite naturally in the context of their times, saw government as the essential threat to liberty. They feared kings and earls, and so designed a government that would be weak and divided. Their rhetoric was universalist, but in fact they were of and for merchants and plantation owners, the rising economic elites of their times whose rivalry with the aristocracy defined European politics and who were the new ruling class in aristocracy-free America. That slaves were not free was troubling to some of them, and we ultimately fought a civil war over it. Economic inequality was not troubling to them. While obviously the poor enjoyed less liberty than the wealthy, their circumstances were responsible, not any identifiable oppressor. And there was always free land to the west for those who were impecunious but ambitious.

Then came the industrial revolution.

The yeoman farmer and entrepeneurial artisan became a proletarian. The immediate and obvious threat to the liberty of the masses was not government, but ever greater industrial corporations that made wage slaves of people and dictated their hours of work, their housing, the tasks they would do.

Mechanization of agriculture started to drive small farmers from the land. In the new class struggle of the industrial age, workers organized against capitalists using a rhetoric of freedom, asserting a political philosophy in which government would become the instrument of the common people against the rapacious class of owners.

Reformers moved to save capitalism against revolution by imposing some restraints on business corporations during the Reform Era early in the 20th Century, but a new version of liberalism emerged fully after the Great Depression proved that the game of capitalism required rules and a referee.

A new role for government was born.

Now, liberalism no longer saw government as the enemy, but as an essential ally. Only government could defend liberty against commanding private interests. This was a bargain the smart capitalists accepted, because they knew their survival depended on it.

By providing some protections for workers and the professional classes, a liberal government in the new sense could assure social peace. At the same time, it was obvious to most capitalists that the laissez faire philosophy, that prosperity was assured if the government stayed out of the economy, had failed.

And yet that rhetoric of “free markets” kept creeping back.

During the Cold War, “free enterprise” and “free markets” were supposed to be what distinguished our side from the evil commies. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, “neo-liberalism” promised to bring the blessings of free markets to the all the world, and conservatives, of course, had never really given up on laissez faire and the dream of unbridled capitalism.

But reality strikes back.

There is no such thing as a “free market.”

Nothing resembling a free market has ever existed, or ever can. It is a mythological and impossible beast.

Markets are social constructions. In complex, post-industrial society, they depend for their very existence on continual, sustained, government intervention.

Government creates money, the very lifeblood of markets, and sets its supply and cost by fiat.

Government enforces contracts, and at least enough transparency in business dealings to make them possible.

Government provides essential economic infrastructure that entrepreneurs will never create, because the structure of markets does not reward them or impedes their creation — things like roads, bridges, airports, civil order, educated workers.

Government regulates use of the commons, so that entrepreneurs upstream cannot, for example, utterly deprive those downstream of use of the river.

Government suppresses negative externalities that might destroy even the wealthy and their children, such as air and water pollution. I could go on.

The question is not whether markets are “free.” The question is how they are regulated, and on whose behalf.

Markets have nothing to do with freedom. The freedom a market gives to one, it takes from another. If I sell you a gun, we both may benefit, until you point it at me and take your money back, or you get it home and find it doesn’t work.

Liberty can never come from markets. It can only be defended by the community, acting through government institutions.

So let us stop using this false and misleading phrase, “free market”. There is no such thing as a free market. Anyone who utters those words is lying.

The Marketplace of Perceptions at Harvard Magazine asserts,

Like all revolutions in thought, this one began with anomalies, strange facts, odd observations that the prevailing wisdom could not explain. Casino gamblers, for instance, are willing to keep betting even while expecting to lose. People say they want to save for retirement, eat better, start exercising, quit smoking—and they mean it—but they do no such things.

The Caliphate: One nation, under Allah, with 1.5 billion Muslims

It’s a simple and seductive idea that analysts believe may someday allow the group to rival existing Islamic movements, topple the rulers of Middle Eastern nations, and undermine those seeking to reconcile democracy and Islam and build bridges between East and West.

“A few years ago people laughed at them,” says Zeyno Baran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the leading expert on Hizb ut-Tahrir. “But now that [Osama] bin Laden, [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi, and other Islamic groups are saying they want to recreate the Caliphate, people are taking them seriously.

Caliphate wiki: from the Arabic word ????? or Khal?fah which means “successor” or “representative”

In keeping up with the times, here’s a site about Muslim Heritage

Discover 1000 years of missing history and explore the fascinating Muslim contribution to present day Science, Technology, Arts and Civilisation.

What happens to our world when our schools fail?

So where am I going with this? I think that people find evolution hard to accept principally because it only makes sense when you have enough information, enough pieces of the puzzle, to put together the big picture. Our schools aren’t giving people enough of those pieces, so the fragments they do hear about just don’t make sense to them.

Coast.

Comfort.

California.

A 1,000 white sky.

Today, I would have curled sunward,
a revelry among the wooly clouds in blue;
But I wrapped toward a happy sky.

Ye who will not journey cook.

Gold is a more thing.

Cool is a more thing.

Northern California.

Differences in behaviour between the sexes must, in some way, be reflections of systematic differences between the brains of males and females. Such differences certainly exist, but drawing inferences from them is not as easy as it may appear. [The Economist science feature]

http://www.kiplinger.com/personalfinance/features/archives/2006/05/intro.html

Using reader inputs about what makes for a great place to live – cost of housing, cost of living – and adding in education, weather, cultural amenities, and transportation, Kiplinger’s came up with this list and profiles of the top 50 cities.

via Neat New Stuff

The Voyagers have been racing out of the solar system for 30 years.

In about 10 years, one of the two Voyagers will enter the outer edge of our sun.

Yet it will take 40,000 years before they reach interstellar space, our first journey into neighboring stars.

[larger pic after click]

“They’re a pair of old fridges out there…”, weighing about a ton and travelling about 40,000 miles per hour.

Between them, Voyager 1 and 2 explored all the giant planets of our outer solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; 48 of their moons; and the unique system of rings and magnetic fields…

Voyager information is captured from an extremely weak signal. The sensitivity of the tracking antenna around the world is truly amazing. A watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater.

While whipping around Jupiter, each Voyager used the enormous gravity field as a slingshot, slowing Jupiter by one foot over the next trillion years.

Accuracy of the navigation is equivalent to a 2300 mile golf putt.
Near Neptune, Voyager hit a 62 mile target after travelling over 4 billion miles.

Both Voyager spacecraft carry a greeting to any form of life, should that be encountered anywhere among one hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, and …

Update:
Voyager 1 has passed through the outer bubble of solar wind is now exploring a transition region known as the heliosheath. Voyager 2 has yet to pass through the solar wind termination zone.

Voyager reveals our heliosphere is bullet shaped and we are travelling in a different direction to the rest of the Milky Way.

The part of the interstellar magnetic field that comes closest to our system is not parallel to the spiraling arms of the galaxy. [report at Australia’s ABC]

The local interstellar medium is built up from material released from the stars of our galaxy. IBEX, wiki, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer is a NASA satellite that will make the first map of the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space. It is part of NASA’s Small Explorer program. The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission is scheduled to be launched in June 2008.