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New glowing mushroom species named after Mozarts Requiem - San Francisco State University

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:35:46 -0700

New glowing mushroom species named after Mozart's Requiem

October 7, 2009 -- SF State Professor of Biology Dennis Desjardin has discovered seven new glow-in-the-dark mushroom species, increasing the number of known luminescent fungi species from 64 to 71. He has named two of the new species after movements in Mozart's Requiem -- Mycena luxaeterna (eternal light) and Mycena luxperpetua (perpetual light) -- names which reflect that the mushrooms glow 24 hours a day.

Interview: Justin From Twitters ShitMyDadSays | Maxim.com

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:35:26 -0700

An interview with Justin Halpern, the guy who writes down quotes from his 73 year old father and posts them on Twitter under the name @shitmydadsays. Very funny stuff!

Hiroshima, 64 years ago - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:29:24 -0700

Look at these. Seriously.

The Case for Optimism - BusinessWeek

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:36:33 -0700

A whole slew of articles and links to stories making "The Case for Optimism".

Worth a look. Especially in these tougher economic times, when many folks are less optimistic than normal.

Why Its Smart To Be Optimistic - BusinessWeek

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:33:33 -0700

A good article on optimism. Part of a whole series that Businessweek has done. Worth a read.

First discovery of lifes building block in comet made

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:11:36 -0700

From the page: "(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.

"Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet," said Dr. Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Our discovery supports the theory that some of life's ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts."

[...]

"The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare," said Dr. Carl Pilcher, Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute which co-funded the research.

Proteins are the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions. Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acids in a huge variety of arrangements to build millions of different proteins. "

EVE Online Market Data - EVE Markets

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:25:13 -0700

I continue to be fascinated by the complexity of the marketplace in the MMO game Eve-Online, which I've been playing for about 18 months.

While I quickly tire of running missions & shooting things in games, the market, with its more than 7000 items, spread across 5000 solar systems, and with 20-50 thousand players interacting with it at any given time, proves endlessly interesting to me. (It's so advanced that the game company hired a resident economist to help develop & maintain it, and he promptly started inviting other economists to come and study it, because it provided a great "economy in a bottle" to do research on and write academic papers about.)

I've had a long-time interest in economics (20 years or so), and continue to study it constantly. I have to say that I don't think I could find a better and more affordable way to learn about and actively experiment with market mechanics that I get for the $12-15/month that I pay to play EVE. The in-game money may be imaginary, but the market mechanics & economics behind it are real.

Not only is EVE-Online's in-game universe massive, but there are an endless stream of out-of-game tools & applications to help players. As a trader in the game, I use the http://eve-central.com/ site, which is compiled by user-submitted data from all over the galaxy to provide a view of what's going on, and where. It's sort of a 1st-order derivative of the actual EVE marketplace.

THIS site seems to be a 2nd-order derivative, taking the data from Eve-Central and performing more market analysis, trending information, etc. They also have breakdowns on the costs of individual items, the materials needed (& cost) to build those items (a recent interest of mine to find out what profit margins are on large-ticket items like big spaceships that my corporation manufactures for sale), and lots of other interesting stuff.

It looks like the EVE marketplace continues to have surprises and new things to discover, and will keep me entertained & learning for a long time to come. If you've got a head for economics, or are just curious, and find yourself tiring of just shooting at stuff and being shot at, then I highly recommend checking out the EVE-Online markets.

High-altitude winds: The greatest source of concentrated energy on Earth

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:28:55 -0700

From the page: "At any moment, the winds in high-altitude jet streams hold roughly 100 times more energy than all the electricity being consumed on Earth, according to a study by Stanford environmental and climate scientists Cristina Archer and Ken Caldeira.

To capture that energy, designers are dreaming up models of wind-turbine kites that fly so high, cruising airliners would have to steer around them. The tethered kites would float high enough for powerful jet streams to flow through their turbines more than 10 times faster than winds would flow near the ground.

[...]

Wind kites are not yet in use, but manufacturers predict that the cost of high-altitude wind power will range from 2 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour."

whomix - doctor who theme remixes

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:05:35 -0700

Hooray! I'm in heaven! Nearly 300 remixes of the Doctor Who Theme! :-D
(Legal download, too!)

Inhabitat & 15 Year Old Invents Algae-Powered Energy System

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:09:10 -0700

This is the kind of integrated systems thinking that I really like.

Though I do take exception with one phrase in the review. Why do people keep thinking we live in "a world of limited resources"? Maybe when they start to grasp that it's an infinite universe with more energy shining down & surging around us than we can every possibly use, they'll finally start to understand the Big Picture.

In any event, this 15-year-old certainly gets it, and I'm glad to see his work.

From the page: "Fernandez-Han's Versatile System consists of six subsystems: An anaerobic digester for sewage and food scraps, a bio-gas upgrader to turn gases from the digester into food for the algae, vented methane burning stoves, a CO2-capturing device, algae bioreactors to produce algae biomass and oxygen from sunlight, saltwater, and CO2, flush latrines, and the PlayPump, which uses energy derived from children playing to power the system.

According to Fernandez-Han, the modular system is targeted at developing countries that need self-contained sources of power and waste disposal. The budding inventor envisions African villages lit up by the Playpump's LEDs, with excess methane to sell for income, reduced air pollution - thanks to methane burning stoves, and increased affordability of goats, pigs, and fish due to the availability of algae as feed. A scaled-down version of the system for a small house or apartment could cost as little as $200."