(Courtesy of The Accordion Guy.)
What every health professional wants.
“Koko asked to meet her specialists. They crowded around her, and Koko, who plays favorites, asked one woman wearing red to come closer. The woman handed her a business card, which Koko promptly ate.”
When you write, you occasionally get mail that makes you want to tear your hair. But some of us are more liable to get this kind of stuff than others. And sometimes you’re fortunate enough to see a response to the inbound idiocy that is just noble.
“‘Enemies of our country?’ There’s all kinds of enemies of our country. If 250 years ago people had supported ‘my government right or wrong’ and intrusion into rights of privacy and punitive measures taken against those who speak out when they feel injustice is being done, this country would never have been founded in the first place. This country was founded, not by those who believe in lockstep obedience, but those with big mouths who sign their full names to protesting documents and were liberal minded enough to say, ‘This is wrong, something should be done, let’s do it.'”
You go, PAD!!
“The Transcendent Pig is a CD player that walks on three mechanical legs! It has a built-in alarm clock and can be used to deter muggers.”
…Or so says The Prior-Art-O-Matic at TheSurrealist.co.uk.
Also recommended: Dr. Unheimlich’s Disease Registry (“If you can’t achieve immortality by not dying, you can at least achieve it by dying of something original.”).
| Doctor Unheimlich has diagnosed me with Diane Duane’s Disease |
|
| Cause: | genetic mutation |
| Symptoms: | humming, occasional anger, gurgling |
| Cure: | trepanning |
Hmm. Symptoms sound about right. Cure seems a little harsh, though. Time for a second opinion.
See also on the same page: the “Dossier Sexupifier”, the “Infinite Teen Slang Dictionary”, and the “Advertising Slogan Generator.”
(Thanks, Harry!)
Shree Nayar, a professor of computer science and co-director of the Columbia Vision and Graphics Center, took high-resolution photographs of people that include their eyes and, in particular, the transparent part of the eye called the cornea. Then, with a postdoctoral researcher, Ko Nishino, he devised computer algorithms that analyze the images reflected in these natural mirrors, revealing a wealth of information.
The system can automatically recover wide-angle views of what people are looking at, including panoramic details to the left, right and even slightly behind them. It can also calculate where people are gazing – for instance, at a single smiling face in a crowd.
Next week when the book’s finished.
Virus “harnessed to kill cancers”
The virus lacks a gene viruses normally use to disguise themselves so they can sneak into the cell unnoticed.
Normal cells can recognise they are under attack by the modified virus and commit suicide to prevent it from replicating and infecting other cells.
Cancer cells are programmed differently and resist suicide at all costs.
This “selfishness” on the cancer’s behalf allows the engineered virus to replicate within the cancer cells and spread through the tumour tissue.
New scans of some of the original film shot on the Apollo 11 mission have been made available at the Project Apollo Image gallery. 
Images identified with the prefix AS11-40 are now seen for the first time in their clearest and most accurate presentation to date, and are a result of recent work by Johnson Space Center to digitally scan original Apollo film. The process involves removing each original film roll from a double-freezer, allowing it to thaw, then digitally scanning each frame using an Oxberry adapted HR-500 long roll film scanner.
Today Stephen Hawking dropped by the Seventeenth International Conference on Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, and had this to say:
The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing, and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics isasymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary, and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.
And here’s an easy version of that to hold the rest of us until his whole paper’s published somewhere.
…Here was one other moment that made me laugh, from the page showing abstracts for talks during the plenary session:
The last few years have seen the techniques of loop quantum gravity applied to a growing number of problems. They have been used to compute the entropy of various sorts of black holes, including those with non-minimally coupled matter, for which the entropy is not proportional to the area. Perhaps more importantly, loop quantum gravity has given us a clear {it picture} of the quantum geometry of the horizon, which accounts for the microscopic degrees of freedom responsible for black hole entropy. There are tantalizing connections to Hod’s work on quasinormal modes, but these remain mysterious. Combined with traditional ideas on quantum cosmology, loop quantum gravity has led to newinsights on how quantization can eliminate the singular behavior of geometry at the big bang – perhaps with testable consequences. Predictions of Lorentz symmetry violation may also be experimentally testable, but these remain controversial. Finally, the dynamics of the theory is being studied with the help of spin foam models. My talk will survey all this work with a bare minimum of technical details.
Yes, please, keep those to a minimum! (clutches head)
And further down the abstracts page — “cosmic censorship”?? What the heck is that? (sigh) One more thing to research…
How far in or out of synch are the guys Teresa Nielsen Hayden talks about here as regards our European colors, I wonder? And do we have our own version of this shadowy force?
…Damned if I’m going to wear what colors they tell me, though. It’s happened before that I’ve refused to buy anything new for a few years until the colors sorted themselves out into ones that (for example) didn’t turn me into a large walking stalk of asparagus. If it needs to happen again, well, so be it.
Find out. And have a kebab while you’re waiting.