Creator of Thunderbirds dies

I do remember watching this show when I was very young. I strikes me now as it did then: strange.
The mouths of these puppets barely move, and their expressions rarely change - except to laugh.

Behold! The terror!

Before Philosophy

The most difficult form of bias to divorce yourself from is that unthinking tendency to make assumptions about other people based on your own subjective experience - a bias of perspective. We do this with people who are living among us, and in these cases one might not be so wide of the mark since we tend to share our lives with people of the same culture, education system, and history. But, when we try to understand the actions and beliefs of people who lived in the distant past we will fail miserably if we pay no mind to the gulf that divides us: the very way we think - our habits of thought - would be foreign to an Egyptian peasant living 5000 years ago, "before philosophy". 

That is the name of a book I bought for mere quarters at Afterwords, a second-hand bookstore located downtown St. John's, and I do believe I will write a book report of sorts on it (oh my, if my younger self could see me willingly using my free time to write book reports....) It is, as you can see from the subtitle, "a study of the primitive myths, beliefs, and speculations of Egypt and Mesopotamia".

some music from 2012

I have to admit that I no longer obsessively keep track of newly released music, but this year I have been trying. Here are a few that float my boat, in no particular order, except that Port of Morrow (The Shins) is probably my favourite:

What does a lab tech do? Part deux

So let's say you are due for a major surgery in a few days; one thing that physicians have to consider is the possibility of significant blood loss. In order to prepare for this scenario it is important to have a couple of units of blood on hand in case a transfusion is necessary. But it is not as simple as transfusing whatever blood is available, certain steps have to be taken to ensure that the blood given is safe.

Nature Docs

I've been right into nature documentaries lately. There is one line in particular, from an hour long show about lions, that made me see things in a way I hadn't really thought of before: it was noted that not all lions are the same to a herd of grazing animals. These animals spend their whole lives together on the same plains and savanna; a zebra comes to know one lion from another, a lion knows what elephant matriarch to steer well clear of, etc.

Anyway, here are a handful of my favourites from the past couple of weeks:

How to find an exoplanet

This is a cool little video describing the methods used to infer the presence of a planet outside of our solar system. These planets are called "exoplanets". The most interesting ones are those believed to orbit within the habitable zone, which is the area around the host star where conditions might sustain liquid water.

Favourite Sci-Fi Movies

 In no order other than the order I think of them:

Merry Chrimbus everyone!

Morality

This is another one of those areas of thought that I take great interest in. I don`t know to what end I ponder these things, other than that there seems to be a part of me that is not satisfied to let sleeping dogs lie - to accept a brute fact because not accepting it could mean mental exhaustion. And, admittedly, for questions involving meaning and morality, complete understanding may lie outside of the limits of the human mind. Yet, here is my take on the subject!

The Palace of Memory Pt. 2, or Will Ferrell jumping on a tiger

Also discussed in Joshua Foer's Moonwalking With Einstein was a technique used by memory athletes to memorize the order of a deck of cards. Here is a video from the USA Memory Championship finals:

 

Okay, not exactly riveting stuff, but it is interesting how they do it.

Mars news roundup!

Okay, well maybe two stories doesn't qualify as a "roundup"

SpaceX has plans to colonize Mars (but start saving your allowance because it will cost $500,000 dollars to be among the first 80,000 pioneers.)

Accompanying the founders of the new Mars colony would be large amounts of equipment, including machines to produce fertilizer, methane and oxygen from Mars' atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the planet's subsurface water ice.
The Red Planet pioneers would also take construction materials to build transparent domes, which when pressurized with Mars' atmospheric CO2 could grow Earth crops in Martian soil. As the Mars colony became more self sufficient, the big rocket would start to transport more people and fewer supplies and equipment.

 I'm sure there are some overly optimistic figures used in this article

This is what scientists gossip about at lunch

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has apparently made a discovery "for the history books," but we'll have to wait a few weeks to learn what the new Red Planet find may be, media reports suggest.
The discovery was made by Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, NPR reported today (Nov. 20). SAM is the rover's onboard chemistry lab, and it's capable of identifying organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it.

...

 The rover team won't be ready to announce just what SAM found for several weeks, NPR reported, as scientists want to check and double-check the results. Indeed, Grotzinger confirmed to SPACE.com that the news will come out at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which takes place Dec. 3-7 in San Francisco.

The Great Filter

I just came across this concept today and thought it was pretty interesting.

The idea arises from the Fermi Paradox which notes the absence of any contact or visible evidence of extra-terrestrial life despite predictions made by the Drake Equation that there should be at least ten thousand detectable civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy.

Nietzsche and Bad Conscience

It's a lazy mild Sunday in late November - a good time, I think, to quote someone else at length. For those who have never read any of Nietzsche's work, you may have formed a certain impression of him through movies and television; to my recollection anyway, Nietzsche is often portrayed as the go-to philosopher for depressed, brooding, and angst-ridden teenagers. I do not think this is a fair treatment, but then again one shouldn't be too surprised to see something addressed inaccurately at the movies. Anyway, while he certainly had some controversial and antiquated ideas, he also wrote with incredible insight on a vast number of subjects, and with a poets touch I might add. The following quote is from On the Genealogy of Morals, and it presents a theory for the origins of what Nietzsche calls "the bad conscience":

The Palace of Memory

This technique for improving memory recall apparently had its origins with Simonides in ancient Greece. One day in fifth-century-B.C. Simonides was attending a banquet, chatting and drinking and being merry, when he was summoned by two messengers to attend to urgent matters. Just as he left the banquet hall the roof collapsed. The bodies within were unrecognizable, so family members of the deceased were unable to identify their loved ones. Then Simonides closed his eyes and re-imagined the moments preceding the collapse; as legend has it, he was able to remember each person and where they were seated.

Novelty

I remember a trip to Labrador when I was very young - maybe five, maybe six years old. Certain images impress on me; the huge dam on the Trans-Labrador highway, the freezing cold water of the lake by my uncle's cabin, the toads around the shore. But, the thing the most impressed on me was the feeling of novelty - of being in a new place. Like the first time I saw the lights of St. John's when I was youngster; such a metropolis in my mind at that time.

But what does it all mean?

What is the meaning of life?
That old question; asked of sages and oracles and various other wise old men and women sitting inside of caves and upon mountain-tops. And maybe one of the most meaningless questions one can ask of someone else, because it is a question only you can answer.

You might want to hold off investing in property in the 10th dimension

A few years ago I read Brian Greene's book called The Elegant Universe, and then watched a few videos where he enthusiastically explains String Theory to us lay folk. Now, if you ever went beyond Greene you would have found a lot of physicists cautioning the rest of us not to hedge all our bets on these tiny strings as they are so tiny that they are unobservable with current technology, and may remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Well, today I came across a bit of news on a science blog which makes it a very real possibility that String Theory indeed may not be the answer to life, the universe, and everything. So, for now, we might have to fall back on the next best answer which is, of course, 42.

*insert R.E.M. song title here*

With the end of the world quickly approaching, and all eyes turned to John Cusack to help us escape our crumbling cities, I thought it would be interesting to learn something about other predictions made concerning all things doomsday.

What does a lab tech do?

Laboratory Technologists fly well under the radar. Thanks to shows like House, a lot of people don't know what we do, or even that we exist at all! A doctor in one of these medical dramas may process the patient's sample themselves, but this is not usually the case. So what does happen when a sample leaves the hands of the doctor or nurse?

Spinoza

Spinoza (1632-1677) is one of my favourite philosophers. His ideas are at once simple and complicated; understandable and obscure. It would be a task beyond my capabilities to fully describe these ideas - there are those who spend all their lives studying the works of Spinoza and still feel there is more to learn. Still, I'm going to try my hand at it here.

Pale Blue Dot

I take every chance I get to share this video:

I think this is a good perspective

Optimism

Again reading from the Mars trilogy, I came across a section where one of the characters was paraphrasing John Boone - the first person to step foot on Mars - in an effort to defend his own optimistic world view. Boone believed that there was a trend towards improvement in collective human society, and this is something I have thought myself when confronted with the not-unpopular belief that this 'human experiment' will all end in flames. Such an apocalyptic vision of the future is easy to understand; quickly browse the latest headlines to see why. Lets have a look:

Mars

I'm reading the Mars trilogy now, by Kim Stanley Robinson. The story starts with the first efforts to colonize Mars and then, through the passage of a couple hundred years and incredible advancements in terraforming, Mars becomes a planet with oceans, forests, and ecosystems.

People still blog, eh?

Good ol' Blogger, still in the mix.
I was reminded of my old blog last night, and so I brought it up and perused its contents. Some funny things, for sure, but I really didn't like much of it. This will be different; hopefully a more positive and constructive offering to the blogosphere (no, spell-check, not heliosphere.)

I'm not entirely sure what will come of this, or whether it will be something that I could just as easily do on facebook, but you never know until you try. So, consider this blog inaugurated.