Best Throatsinging Demo Ever

I’ve never heard such an accessible, western demonstration of the basic concept. Ms. Hefele doesn’t bother with It has been the major factor of its popularity. cipla tadalafil You should buy Kamagra cialis generico in india at the cheapest prices. Though Rogaine Foam normally does not deter the underlying cause will levitra uk suffice the condition. Lifting Equipment Distributors As the demand for lifting works are increasing rapidly, the supply of lifting equipment 100mg viagra in Saudi Arabia. that anyway” target=”_blank”>traditional nomenclature or styles, she just shows you what she can do. Thanks to Rob Beschizza for the link!

The Science News Cycle

Mad props to Jorge Cham

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Armor gymnastics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hlIUrd7d1Q

Don’t answer the phone.

Courtesy + civility = emotional intelligence?

The problem with this video is that it restricts itself to business settings – in real life, it’s always difficult to ignore purposeful rudeness, whether you’re in a meeting or not. If someone is talking to you, and you do anything with a phone without first explaining why your phone is more important than what’s being said, you are being extremely discourteous.

My friend Pedro, who is on call at all times, invariably says, “Excuse me, hold on a moment, let me see if I have to take this call” and checks his screen – if the person calling is an important customer, he’ll say “I’m really sorry, but I have to take this call. I’ll make it as short as I can” and then after he gets off the phone he will apologize briefly but sincerely for the interruption.

These simple apologetics invariably waste less of Pedro’s time than his incoming call wasted of anyone else’s time, and cost him literally nothing. Nonetheless this small gesture of courtesy and respect, this trivial acknowledgement of an inconvenience, has a huge impact on how others see him and act towards him.

If you want others to treat you with courtesy and respect, you need to start by treating others that way. Answering your phone while another person is taking the time to talk or listen to you is purposeful rudeness. It’s ignorant and disrespectful, and it makes you look shallow and stupid.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson as a sacred cow?

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote an article about the way most modern people have debased science into a caricature of pre-renaissance religious dogmatism, simply substituting white lab coats for black cassocks.

…let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That’s the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet. But what almost everyone means when he or she says “science” is something different.

To most people, capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It is a thing engaged in by people wearing lab coats and/or doing fancy math that nobody else understands. The reason capital-S Science gives us airplanes and flu vaccines is not because it is an incremental engineering process but because scientists are really smart people.

In other words — and this is the key thing — when people say “science”, what they really mean is magic or truth.

The Intarnets are up in arms. Criticize capital-S science, or the inanity of assuming that science and religion are conflicting methods of solving the same problems? Oh please. Richard Feynman brilliantly plowed that furrow in 1956, and nobody’s really changed their opinion on the subject then or since. What’s important here is that somebody criticised Neil DeGrasse Tyson! Quelle horreur!

Go Baby Go

GoBabyGo is an ongoing project started in 2006 by pediatric researchers Cole Galloway and Sunil Agrawal. The basic concept, which has evolved significantly since the project’s inception, is to provide mobility to kids who have trouble moving on their own by modifying off-the-shelf toy racecars, empowering them to be part of the action at home, in the daycare center, and on the playground.

“Fun is key here—it unlocks brain development and exploratory drive for the child, and ignites active, engaged play from adults and peers. When your main goal is mobility and socialization of young children and their families, you can’t ask for better collaborators than Barbie and Mater.” –Cole Galloway

The team is also trying to develop kid-friendly exoskeletons to promote upper-body movement and harness systems to provide partial body-weight support and free the hands and feet for sports-type activities.

“There are no commercially available powered wheelchairs for children under three” – Galloway

To learn more about the research, or volunteer to help, contact Cole Galloway through the project page.

Public Service Announcement

As I am currently driving down the East Coast of America and I’ve given up blogging while driving, I previously scheduled the automatic appearance of this reminder that Ann Coulter is a Troll. Thank you.

Buttmoticons in literature

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NASA Asteroid Grand Challenge offers $35,000 payout

From topcoder.com:

Welcome to the Asteroid Grand Challenge Series sponsored by the NASA Tournament Lab! The Asteroid Grand Challenge Series will be comprised of a series of topcoder challenges to get more people from around the planet involved in finding all asteroid threats to human populations and figuring out what to do about them. In an increasingly connected world, NASA recognizes the value of the public as a partner in addressing some of the country’s most pressing challenges. Click here to learn more and participate in our debut challenge, Asteroid Data Hunter!

NPR has an article about the series here.

Museum of Old Techniques

The fine folks at Belgium’s Museum of Old Techniques in Grimsbergen have got some nice photo series online.

Here’s some bronze casting, a shoeing shed for gigantic draft horses, and a charming series of tiny bakehouses. Put your mouse over the picture if you want the slide show to stop so you can study one, move your mouse off to the side to resume.

This excellent one shows how an iron tyre is shrunk onto a wooden wheel. The same technique was used on ancient and medieval shield rims, Celtic chariots, and the quintessentially American Conestoga wagon.

They’re preserving some old mills, too – including at least one with an undershot wheel and a horse mill of uncertain function.

Hoyer’s blob

Heather pointed me to Andrew Hoyer’s web page, which is full of clever web programming tricks. I found the build log for the blob particularly interesting.



Hopefully Mr. Hoyer won’t mind my embedding his work here. Grab an eyeball and drag it around! The real version is much better because the icons aren’t overscale.

Science News for parents

Science News has a blog-styled view for parents, which links the only article I’ve ever seen containing the phrase “baby-head-scented spray“. I wonder if Babyhead is aware of this? Should he be looking for royalties?

Joseph Priestley

Joseph Priestly died 210 years ago today on February 6th, 1804. Mostly remembered today as the discoverer of oxygen, Priestley in his own day was a noted scientist, educator, political theorist, natural philosopher, dissenting clergyman and Christian apologist. Thomas Jefferson, who was active in the same fields, credited his own conversion to Unitarianism to Priestley’s 1782 book “History of the Corruptions of Christianity”.

Priestley’s scientific and philosophical career is replete with triumph and tragedy; brilliant discoveries and a stubborn refusal to give up mistaken ideas. He was derided as “the last defender of phlogiston” and burned out of his Birmingham house for denying “the divine right of kings” in the so-called Priestley Riots. Priestley made his inventions available to the public and received no money for any of them; the local Unitarian Universalist Church district is named in his honor.

Regex Crossword Puzzles

Apparently regular expression crossword puzzles are a thing.

This one looks fun.

Obama administration speaks volumes on Zero Tolerance

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder have released many, many megabytes of recommendations and guidelines for improving school disciplinary systems. They recommend that schools use policies based on evidence and aligned with a goal of education, instead of the current policies, which are based on post-Columbine hysteria and a goal of maximizing punishment.

The “zero tolerance” nightmare has always been highly discriminatory towards the poor. The more money you have, the more effectively you can protect your children from the anti-educational cruelty that is the basis of modern US school discipline. When you combine this with the disproportionate number of people of color at lower income levels, and recognize similar inequities in the criminal justice system, the reason the school-to-prison pipeline principally victimizes non-white students is clear. The fact that rich people (who are mostly white) can dodge the absurdly extreme consequences of typical childish behaviors better than poor people (who mostly aren’t white) means that zero-tolerance policies, intended to be equally sadistic and harmful towards all children, are in practice part of a legacy of racism and color-line discrimination anywhere there is a significant non-white population. I’m going to be politically incorrect and say it’s nice to see people coming together to fight these horrible policies, though, and not merely their racist application and effects. Zero tolerance has to go now; the fifteen years we’ve had it have already sown an ill harvest – that we’ll reap for decades, if not centuries – and it’s going to hurt people of every race and color.

Effective discipline is, and always will be, a necessity. But a routine school discipline infraction should land a student in a principal’s office – not in a police precinct. — Eric Holder, 2014-01-08

Go go go NAACP of Delaware!

Yesterday the Delaware NAACP’s Jea Street wrote an excellent, fire-breathing letter to Governor Jack Markell and Secretary of Education Mark Murphy, defending the Reach Academy and blasting the ongoing re-segregation of Delaware’s schools.

Delaware’s system is currently set up to provide blatantly unequal public education, segregated purely by wealth. And it’s not the good kind of unequal, which would consist of putting more resources where they can accomplish more, but instead Delaware’s Choice, Charter and Neighborhood Schools laws intentionally exaggerate pre-existing inequalities. The state is not using our tax dollars to break the cycle of poverty, but rather to provide marginally better facilities and instruction to the children of people who are relatively well off (and who in many cases quite frankly could afford private schools). Delaware’s infamous “zero tolerance in schools” policies also preferentially victimize the children of the poor.

Street and the NAACP have become involved because the majority of the poor in Delaware are people of color, and thus statistically speaking the system is rigged primarily against them, and because the Reach Academy primarily serves African-American children. Go get ’em Councilman Street!

Fluvial Geomorphology

Went to a lecture at the Stroud Water Research Center given by Melinda Daniels, their new fluvial geomorphologist. There was wine, cheese and coffee (but I opted for a couple Guinnesses at dinner instead).

Fluvial geomorphology is a term coined by Luna Leopold to describe science concerned specifically with the influence of flowing surface water on the physical shape of the earth, primarily through the mechanisms of erosion and deposition. It differs from hydrology and limnology in that it focuses on the landscape, although it also involves the study of precipitation and the flow of water as dynamic primary processes shaping the land.

The talk was pretty good; Dr. Daniels spoke directly to the needs and concerns of local landholders trying to improve the quality of streams and rivers on their properties, as well as providing an interesting and informative talk for the room at large. We enjoyed it.

Man, despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and many accomplishments, owes the fact of his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. –John Jeavons

Indefinite suspension for drawing a cartoon bomb.

In a bid to upstage Delaware as the most anti-child state in the USA, Greenville, South Carolina’s Hill Crest Middle School has suspended an autistic 13-year-old for drawing a picture of a bomb. News coverage here and here.

“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” —George W. Bush, speaking in Florence, South Carolina, Jan. 11, 2000.

Higher education’s obesity spiral

Tim Carmody gives his take at Snarkmarket.

Heather (my only reader) says that it’s unsurprising that University costs are so high; she claims that the accommodations and meals are better than at a hotel, what with the sushi bars and high-speed Internet and whatnot. She’s definitely got a point.

But it seems to me, even so, that we could easily afford give every child in America a complete tax-funded education – all the way to PhD level if they can hack it – for less than we spend on foreign military adventuring. And since we no longer bother to raise taxes to pay for our wars, obviously printing money has not been any barrier to spending in the Obama or Bush administrations. Money’s not really the problem for these people we’ve elected; it’s just a matter of what they want to spend our wealth on – in short, they’ve willingly chosen slaughter over education.

Empirical value of college education in the early 21st century

If you can’t get a job, what good is a degree; and if you can get a job, why do you need an expensive piece of paper?

Graduates have been complaining for years now (and although the sense of entitlement displayed in their complaints is kind of off-putting, it’s not like they don’t have a point.)

In certain fields a sheepskin still has value, but it seems certain that the value of experience is always higher.

Decreasing availability of work (no sign of that trend stopping – what kind of recovery is a jobless recovery anyway?) means employers can choose to hire only the most experienced and knowledgeable workers on the market, without having to pay especially high wages.

Zero Sanity, Zero Tolerance in Michigan

The ACLU’s got a petition to end zero tolerance in Michigan up, go sign it. I’ll wait.

By all accounts Kyle Thompson is a normal 14-year old kid who loves playing football and hanging out with his friends. His principal says he’d love to have an entire school filled with students like Kyle.

And yet, after a misunderstanding with his teacher, Kyle was led from school in handcuffs, was expelled from all state public schools for a year, and is now spending the year under house arrest.

Kyle’s teacher wanted to see a note he had written, and when she playfully tried to take it from him, he tried to hold on to it. Even though all the witness statements said that the teacher was joking around and Kyle didn’t act aggressively, the incident ended with Kyle under arrest. He’s now represented by a criminal defense attorney.

Kyle’s lucky enough to have parents willing and able to spend the big bucks it takes to pry your kid out of the zero tolerance trap. The kids from poorer families, well, they’re gettin a different education – they’re being trained to be the next generation of prison inmates and career criminals.