33 unshafted

The speed of drilling the two foot wide hole through very hard rock in Chile is due to this drill from Center Rock Inc. of Pennsylvania.

Each of several drill bits clustered in the canister have air hammers behind them. Very fast and powerful. Sizes range from 20” up to 120” in diameter. Company news piece here.

“When we saw that they were talking about Christmas, we immediately started looking at the technology they were using. That technology is fairly antiquated compared to what we had. We got hold of the right sources and contacts. … We felt we could drill it quicker.”

The moment the drill broke through, “I tell you, it was pretty exciting. There were a lot of grown men in tears.” [link]

rank ain’t experience

Wonderfully iconoclastic blog post on the purpose of games.

Games are good, points are good, but games ≠ points.

And living or dying is important. Games offer fail conditions as well as win conditions. They are able to deliver the high levels of emotional engagement they’re famed for because they’re also adept at delivering the lows of loss, humiliation and frustration. The world of user experience…

I think you’ll enjoy the read, for what it’s worth to non-gamers. Maybe.

Emotions and the waste of triggers, the clumsy commercial seduction that wastes shades of living.

Comments:

‘Gamification’ as it is now has more in common with Pavlov’s dog than actual meaningful interaction.

Play is what makes the game, not rewards.

…challenges for each other to foster engagement and motivation – and not graphical rewards for brainless, repetitive actions.

‘Pointsification’ in and of itself is not a game.

l’agent provocateur

A very very sad day revisited with forensics:

“The Cleveland Plain Dealer is reporting today on new forensic analysis by audio scientists Stuart Allen and Tom Owen on a recently discovered audio tape from the Kent State shootings.

The analysis suggests that four shots from a .38-caliber pistol were fired 70 seconds before the National Guard opened fire on a crowd of student protesters, killing four and wounding nine others.

The alleged shooter, student Terry Norman, was hired by the FBI to take photos of the protesters. It has been known for some time that he had a .38-caliber pistol on his person the day of the shootings, but he has always claimed that the gun was not fired during the protest, a claim that was backed up in sworn testimony from authorities at the time.”

didn’t do it but confessed

Get this:

In recent years, the use of DNA evidence has allowed experts to identify false confessions in unprecedented and disturbing numbers.

In the past two decades, researchers have documented some 250 instances of false confessions, many resulting in life sentences and at least four in wrongful executions.

We used to call it nerves. It’s much more deeply wired in our brain than that.

When the polygraph man left the room at 10:45 p.m., Sterling began to panic. If he stayed, he feared, the police wouldn’t stop—but asking to leave or for a lawyer, he thought, would be as good as admitting he was a murderer.

Why do people confess to crimes they didn’t commit?

alpha dominance is bunk

“The wolf researchers now studying in the wild say the alphas are simply the ones who can do whatever they want, but they don’t drag others down to maintain dominance.”

“A lot of what we believe about aggressive alpha dominance comes from old studies of wolves in captivity.” —Jennifer Arnold

Discipline-based approaches like those followed by Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan are popular but misguided, because they are based on faulty assumptions of wolf pack behavior.

In the wild, wolves are known to lead benevolently. Researchers have noted male wolf leaders sharing chicken with children and mates before eating.

Superb PBS film online: Through a Dog’s Eyes.

machine controller virus

Most of the headlines about Stuxnet are conjecture.

Virus Bulletin Conference provided the first detailed public analysis of the worm’s inner workings to an audience of some of the world’s top computer virus experts showing how the virus could cause infected hardware to run out of control.

Researchers uncovered an obscure date in the worm’s code, May 9, 1979, the date on which a prominent Iranian Jew, Habib Elghanian, was executed by the new Islamic government shortly after the revolution.

Thus the story that it’s military. Pretty slim evidence.

One guy reacts:

So the entire idea of the “Israel created this to attack Iran” idea is based on finding the date May 9, 1979 hidden in the code – and that because it’s the first day the current theocratic asshats running Iran beheaded the first Jew of their despotic regime? Really?

This is like playing Nostradamus. Pluck something vague, go hunting, and see what you can say.

For instance, in Eastern bloc countries, May 9 1945 is Victory Day. I’m sure some prominent politician somewhere also died on May 9, 1979. A google search for that date came back with 196,000 results just on the precise phrase “May 9, 1979”.

Ridiculous.

nothing beats good references

Get a look at one of Hunter Thompson’s letters requesting a job. The year was 1958. Seattle Weekly says it’s the greatest cover letter ever written.

Hint:

“I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.

“Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.

“I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.

“I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of.”

filed but ignored

“Dear, I think I’ll go out to be scorned today.”

“I believe – these gentlemen believe – that this planet is being visited by beings from another world, who, for whatever reason, have taken an interest in the nuclear arms race which began at the end of World War II,” said Hastings, noting that the last incident occurred as recently as 2003.

Talking in the succinct manner you’d expect from life-long military personnel, the airmen looked more like grandfathers than conspiracy theorists.

“This is real. It’s not science fiction. It’s not movie theater stuff,” Capt. Robert Salas told Discovery News.

YouTube coverage here
120 ex-servicemen in the group. Wha??

time for embed

Once, after connecting his nerves to an array of electrodes in 2002, he let his wife use her brainwaves to take control of his body.

It was the first time the nervous systems of two humans had communicated electronically.

“It was quite an intimate feeling,” he says.

This isn’t just for fun. He is certain that without upgrading, we humans will someday fall behind the advances of the robots we’re building — or worse.

someone who killed himself

“Terry’s other friends and I, grieving together, have agreed that we could not have changed his sadness, but I like to think I might have taught him the pleasure of sadness, something his ruthless merriment kept him from learning. We all might have explained that it is possible to be overcome with sorrow and still find meaning in that sorrow, reason enough to stay alive.”

do what you cannot do

No arms. No legs.
He swims across the Channel in 13 and a half hours.

“I did it, I’m happy, I’m so happy, I can’t believe it, it’s crazy,” says a celebrating Philippe Croizon.

He lost his limbs in an accident 16 years ago. In 2008, he could not even swim two lengths of a swimming pool. “Two solutions were offered to me [after the accident]: to die or decide to live.” He used a snorkel and prosthetic legs with flippers. The remainder of his upper arms stabilized him. Three dolphins joined him for some of the crossing. His French language website is here.

ghastly milliseconds

Macabre & marvelous.

The NYTimes has compiled a slideshow capturing the atomic bomb on film.

Peter Kuran compiled How To Photograph an Atomic Bomb.

The California Literary Review offers several additional photos.

“100 Suns” by Michael Light is profoundly stunning too.

Indeed, how do you photograph an atomic bomb? Under this atomic fireball —milliseconds after detonation— are tanks and trucks and jeeps planted for instant destruction.

Please notice the crescent-shaped shock wave already returning from the ground in a split of second. Pondering Potent Power … wot.


immunity kissing

Oooo sooo sexy.

“Kissing transmits germs from man to woman. After about six months of kissing she becomes immune to the bad stuff in the man’s body. By the time the baby is born, it is immune to the things the parents are immune to. Sperm just don’t cut it when it comes to transmitting immunity.”

If unkissers’ offspring did not more often die away would we all be unkissed?

precarious abounding

Koran-burning stunt. “Elite media gatekeepers have abandoned their moral mandate to stigmatize uncivil discourse. Many outlets reward it.” —Rick Perlstein


“Obama is losing his grip on the country, because he’s too sane for these times.” —George Packer


Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend freely on political causes strengthens an ‘economy of corruption‘ in Congress. Extraordinary that this court could think otherwise. —Lawrence Lessig


“I know if I rest, I’ll slide downhill fast. I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. I just carry on.” —Lee Kuan Yew, the man who made Singapore

on a common platform

The death-knell of all fanaticism, not published in the USA where free belief is law and media sells its flames, but by the Mumbai Mirror, Saturday, September 11, 2010.

It was on September 11 in 1893 that the world’s first Parliament of Religions was convened in Chicago and lasted for more than two weeks. On that day, a famous monk began his speech as ‘Sisters and Brothers of America’ and received a deafening standing ovation.

“Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair.

Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.

But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.”

Entire speech here. Parliaments of the World’s Religions here.

our knitwork network

Ladies and gentlemen: the wonderful, and let’s not forget weird, World of Fungi.

At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of Twitter’s servers.


The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age is shifting control from bureaucracy to democracy. Based in UK, a strong agenda to loosen government’s grip on data.

“We shall soon see who is more powerful in this country, the elected government or the civil service.”


Alice Miller, a psychoanalyst who repositioned the family as a locus of dysfunction with her theory that parental power and punishment lay at the root of nearly all human problems. Her first book The Drama of the Gifted Child sold millions. She believed that the pain inflicted on children – for their own good – was unconsciously re-enacting trauma that had been inflicted on the parent when they were children.

The cycle of trauma continues down the generations. We do not need to be told whether to be strict or permissive with our children. What we do need is to have respect for their needs, their feelings, and their individuality, as well as for our own.

How do you define the term ‘cruelty’ with respect to children?
I use it to refer to situations where children are not shown the appropriate respect, where they are humiliated, confused, betrayed, and sexually abused. While hardly anyone disagrees with me on these points, I frequently fail to convince people that beating children is in fact a severe case of cruelty.

…someday we will regard our children not as creatures to manipulate or to change but rather as messengers from a world we have long since forgotten, who can reveal to us more about the true secrets of life, and also our own lives, than our parents were ever able to.

 


“Religion is what the common people see as true, the wise people see as false, and the rulers see as useful.” —Seneca

Archeology Magazine offers a concise, comfortable essay on the history of Man’s Best Friend. Things you did not know about God, er, Dog.

Quite a different interview of Bill Gates at MIT’s Technology Review. Personal. Thorough. Strong. Not offered by mainstream rags. I don’t know what t0 call tabloids and rags and demographics mongering if major media stops printing, but it’s words equally condemning.

Tracking Macondo’s undersea plume, yes that oil in the Gulf of Mexico, is like the summer clouds above the ship, constantly moving, expanding, and contracting. On the oil trail, the ship’s Conductivity Temperature Depth device relays real-time data measuring fluorescence, beam attenuation, and oxygen levels.

The reason we have God is that we didn’t invent police. People just don’t like to take the law into their own hands.

“Everywhere you look around the world, you find examples of people altering their behavior because of concerns for supernatural consequences of their actions. They don’t do things that they consider bad because they think they’ll be punished for it.”


Paul Raeburn at Knight Science Tracker:

I find myself at something of a loss to track the work of John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I’ve praised him before for stories on physicians’ conflicts of interest, and I’m reduced now to doing more-or-less what I did then: Let Fauber’s stories speak for themselves.

This is first-rate stuff. Read it, learn from it, and see if you can’t attempt something like it yourself. We and our readers and listeners would all be better off if more of us did this sort of thing. It isn’t easy, but it’s gratifying.

The stories, in my view, are textbook cases of investigative reporting–and writing. I can’t think of any higher or more sophisticated thing to say than that these stories are done exactly the way that such stories should be done–and Fauber’s doing them better than almost anybody else.


crashing while chewing

I was wondering if this matter would gain traction:

Snacking at the wheel can affect vehicle control to a similar extent as using a hands-free phone, and is actually a causal factor in more crashes. So far, though, there has not been a controlled empirical study of this problem.

Source: “Crash dieting: The effects of eating and drinking on driving performance”
Accident Analysis & Prevention, Vol. 40, Issue 1, January 2008, Pages 142-148

pew numbers

Tech news here on Google’s auto-suggest feature. Algorithms analyze and rank popular views of various religions.

cramming sucks

Psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. NYTimes did not place this story on top of the front page??!!

Tips: Instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing. Spacing works: An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now improves recall.

“We walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”

medication prevalence trend

This stumps me. Half of us buying prescriptions hides many factors no chart can reveal.

September report from Centers for Disease Control:

  • The percentage of Americans who used at least one prescription drug in the past month increased from 44% in 1999-2000 to 48% in 2007-2008.
  • The percentage of persons who used two or more prescription drugs increased from 25% in 1999-2000 to 31% in 2007-2008.
  • The percentage of persons who used five or more prescription drugs increased from 6% in 1999-2000 to 11% in 2007-2008.

Methinks I’ll blame this on Bush too. Why not? Those years, his watch. Spending for prescription drugs was $234.1 billion in 2008, which was more than double what was spent in 1999.


big cheese mousetrap

Village Voice. Is it, was it always, real estate schemes?

“Scientology is supported, in fact, by a few thousand wealthy members. Some of these, like Tom Cruise, Nancy Cartwright, Craig Jensen (Diskeeper), Sky Dayton (Earthlink) and a few others are very wealthy and contribute millions.