Antarctica

Redditors and friends in Antarctica

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/aaq12/so_my_buddy_is_in_antarctica_doing_research_and/

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/aas0r/iama_antarctic_researcher_who_measures_ozone/

Shackleton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Shackleton

Documentary about people in Antarctica

Iceberg!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_B-15

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounters_at_the_End_of_the_World

www.galaxyzoo.org

It's a website where people can help classify the galaxies found by the Sloan Sky Survey. Crowd sourced astronomy seems like a great idea.

Cool Book on Evolutionary Optimization and Friends

Sean Luke, a CS professor at George Mason, has made available a free book on stochastic optimization algorithms called Essentials of Metaheuristics. It looks like a really good introduction to the subject, which is, of course, a damn cool subject.

Science festivals are extremely nifty

The NSF is setting aside $3 million for the creation of Science Festivals.

What if you perceived beauty on the subway?

An older Washington Post article discusses an experiment with a violinist and a subway terminal:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

Extremly nifty.

History as it happens!

Amanda is published in Graybeards with an article on her Korean experience. The UAH history department has blogged about it.

Tony Gwynn Retires! Long Play Tony Gwynn!

ESPN has a great article about Tony Gwynn, Junior and how he's come to play with the Padres. San Diego and Petco Park seem to have done him a lot of good. He's playing full time and his numbers are great (.300/.380 BA/OBP) and considerably up this year over his past career.

The Internet Culture Users Guide

I've thought for years about starting a class on internet culture, but I think this site may have already accomplished that goal: http://knowyourmeme.com

The beauty of a vibrator

Standing waves, created by matching the dimensions of a vibrating medium with the frequency of the vibration, are one of the easiest ways to demonstrate the connection between understanding science and creating beauty or art. They're the fundamental mechanism of any melodious musical instrument.

Once you grasp the concept, you can do other cool things as well, like creating a flaming music visualizer called a Rubens' tube.

It allows you to understand the mesmerizing patterns you can create just by shaking a steel plate with some powder on it.

Not so Nifty Link

Iran seems like a bad place to be at the moment. I've read reports of massacres.

Apparently, they're also sacking members of their national soccer team.

What goes up must come down

Going up:

Apparently, Intel employee and new Slashdot-celebrity (poor girl) Sarah Sharp is into open source rocketry. The stated point is to put a rocket into orbit. Most awesome.

Coming down:

A kid in Germany got hit in the hand a tiny meteor (which became a meteorite very shortly thereafter). He got a slight scar, but that's it.

Tank Man

It's been 20 years since the Tiananmen Square massacre and the taking of the iconic picture and footage of the man who stared down a column of tanks: Tank Man. PBS has a special on it.

As you're staring at the sun

My ridiculously powerful sneezes are often caused by stepping into a bright area from a dark area, usually caused by the sun. It turns out this is called the photic sneeze reflex.

It could be worse, I could sneeze every time I think about sex or when I'm full.

The Chemicals Between Us

In this video, Helen Fisher discusses her studies of the chemistry of love and lust. One interesting facet is that she warns that SSRI antidepressants tend to break the brain chemistry mechanisms for love.

Channelling Youtube

Two youtube channels here:

Lyrics for Video Games: Best one probably being Ducktales WITH Lyrics.

How It Should Have Ended: Best one I've seen is Ocean's 40.

Who Will Think of the Children? Nicholas Winton Will

In 1938 and '39, a man named Nicholas Winton saved many, many children's lives.

It doesn't get any niftier (though the circumstances decidedly weren't).

Searching for the NSX of programming languages

Programming.reddit.com had a discussion about an interesting analysis of how languages relate as far as speed versus code size. The analysis is based on data from The Computer Language Benchmarks Game, which takes submissions of programs in different languages to loosely compare the performances of the languages.

Both the blog article and the reddit discussion are worth reading. The reddit page includes posts by both the author of the article, gmarceau, and the one of the Benchmarks Game's maintainers, iguoy.

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those...

Who hasn't dreamed of making their own computer?

Well, Steve Chamberlin -- also a video game developer -- has gone ahead and done it.

See what having a girlfriend keeps you from doing?

Dan Ariely and Being Irrationally Predictable

A couple of videos:

Are we in control of our own decisions?

and

Our buggy moral code

Greece is the way we are feeling

Who wouldn't want to go to church that celebrates Easter by launching a barrage of fireworks at their neighbor?

Of Dice and Men

Apparently, for some board game players, dice-like random number generation is of vital importance. So important, that somebody built a dice rolling machine. Nifty, no?

Though, it turns out that dice aren't exactly random, whatever that means.

Open Source UAVs

Paparazzi is an open source autopilot (both hardware and software)

Engineering Nifty Link

Via Calvin,

Akin's laws of spacecraft design:

http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/old_site/academics/akins_laws.html

Copied verbatim in case they should disappear:

1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.

2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it's a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .

3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.

4. Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.

5. (Miller's Law) Three points determine a curve.

6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

7. At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.

8. In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.

9. Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.

10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.

11. Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.

12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.

13. Design is based on requirements. There's no justification for designing something one bit "better" than the requirements dictate.

14. (Edison's Law) "Better" is the enemy of "good".

15. (Shea's Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.

16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.

17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.

18. Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though.

19. The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you've screwed up.

20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.

21. (Larrabee's Law) Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap. Education is figuring out which half is which.

22. When in doubt, document. (Documentation requirements will reach a maximum shortly after the termination of a program.)

23. The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.

24. It's called a "Work Breakdown Structure" because the Work remaining will grow until you have a Breakdown, unless you enforce some Structure on it.

25. (Bowden's Law) Following a testing failure, it's always possible to refine the analysis to show that you really had negative margins all along.

26. (Montemerlo's Law) Don't do nuthin' dumb.

27. (Varsi's Law) Schedules only move in one direction.

28. (Ranger's Law) There ain't no such thing as a free launch.

29. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.

30. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.

31. (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.

32. (Atkin's Law of Demonstrations) When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don't show up.

33. Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there's no partial credit because most of the analysis was right...)

The First

Let's start this thing off with what is attempting to be a comprehensive encyclopaedia of life. The Encyclopedia of Life:

http://eol.org/

Initialization

I've discovered that the thing I miss most about having a blog is being able to share links with my friends. So I've created a blog specifically for it. Eventually, I hope to move to Slash as it's well suited to the task and I really like its moderation system. But for now, I'll just use blogger.

--N

Edit: "it's" changed to "its"