Tag: Science

Yesterday, Japanese scientists unveiled what’s believed to be the first video of a live Architeuthis.

That makes three posts in three years on this subject.

NASA is going to announce a “significant find on Mars” (via Digg) tomorrow at 1 PM EST. The rumor is that they’ve discovered flowing water on the surface of the planet.

A study has been done that shows that chocolate milk is at least as good as Gatorade at helping the body recover from exercise. Who am I to argue with science?

From CNN:

German astrophysicists have concluded a space body located in the outer reaches of the solar system has a diameter 435 miles (700 kilometers) larger than Pluto, the smallest planet.

I’m not even sure why we’re callling Pluto a planet anymore. In just the past few years several Pluto-like objects have been found. And now there’s one that’s even larger than Pluto.

I felt my first earthquake on Saturday. Jenn and I were sitting in the living room when I felt a jolt. I figured that someone in an adjacent apartment had dropped something really heavy. Or maybe someone had slammed a door really hard. Something like that. It wasn’t even enough for Jenn and I to say anything to each other.

Psychologists have found that meetings have a negative effect (via Slashdot) on people’s moods. Of course, this effect increases as the frequency and/or length of meetings increases. Never mind the fact that most meetings are a huge waste of time.

Researchers in Canada have discovered (via Slashdot) that the judgement someone makes in the first twentieth of a second of their visit to a website colors later judgements about the quality of the site. That’s a lot faster than I would have expected. But it confirms what I know from personal experience. If I’m presented with a noisy or slow page, I often hit the back button before it even finishes loading.

The next time you’re designing a site, remember this: People don’t have any incentive to figure out or wait for your site. They can almost always go somewhere else to get what they want.

Errol Morris:

I was hired by IBM to make a film for the year 2000. It was for an “in house” conference of IBM employees. Regrettably, the conference was cancelled, and the film was never finished.

In his latest Washington Post column, Charles Krauthammer, who is far from being a liberal Democrat infidel, explains why the “intelligent design” movement is a bad idea (via Crooks and Liars):

The relentless attempt to confuse [science and religion] by teaching warmed-over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions — arguably, the most important questions in life — that lie beyond the material.

I think this is a big point that many people are missing. At the very least, the “intelligent design” movement makes Christians look stupid because they apparently can’t distinguish between science and religion. But, even worse, I think it’s going to foster anti-religious feelings. People don’t like to have religion force-fed to them.

The Vatican has issued a stout defence of Charles Darwin, voicing strong criticism of Christian fundamentalists who reject his theory of evolution and interpret the biblical account of creation literally.

Right on (via Slashdot). (For real, this time.)