Collider webcams

Who knew the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator would be so boring.

Head fake

How Prozac sent the science of depression in the wrong direction.

"In recent years, scientists have developed a novel theory of what falters in the depressed brain. Instead of seeing the disease as the result of a chemical imbalance, these researchers argue that the brain's cells are shrinking and dying."

Interesting stuff.

"If you just sit on your couch, then steroids aren't going to be very effective," he says. "Antidepressants are the same way: if you want the drug to work for you, then you have to work for the drug."

Richard Dawkins reads his hate mail

Religulous

I'm really looking forward to seeing this movie

The placebo effect

is real. More proof: Grape expectations, What wine can tell us about the nature of reality.

The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines.

The findings have been surprising - did you know that generic drugs can be less effective merely because they cost less?

Even though the cream had no analgesic properties - it was just a hand moisturizer - people given the pretend cream said the shocks were significantly less painful.

In other words,

Their predictions became self-fulfilling prophecies.

Water Bear: World's Toughest Animal

And they're only 1mm long. Tardigrade (Wikipedia)

Water bears are able to survive in extreme environments that would kill almost any other animal. They can survive temperatures close to absolute zero, temperatures as high as 151°C (303°F), 1,000 times more radiation than any animal, nearly a decade without water, and can also survive in a vacuum like that found in space.

Nature's Great Survivors: Water Bears

Nerd²

Finally, someone combines my love of Tesla coils with my love of vintage Mario. Did you know with fine control you can play music with arcs of electricity?

And speaking of Tesla coils, if you like Red Alert and dioramas you'll want to check this one out.

The Robot Tahoe Takes It

Champion Robot Car Declared

Carnegie Mellon's computer-laden Chevy Tahoe wins the Urban Challenge and takes home the $2 million prize.

Junior, Stanford's Passat, was second. In 2005 their robot Touareg, Stanley, was first in the off-road competition.

What a shot!

PhysOrg.com: 'Incredibly lucky' find yields important fish fossil

A drilling crew here in Alberta by chance hits a 96 million year old fossil buried more that a kilometer underground dead on. It gets brought up with the rock core nearly intact. More from the Edmonton Journal and Everything Dinosaur.

Why I'm big on both thorium and Thorium

I like thorium power (the nuclear energy concept) and Thorium Power (the company). Here's why:

Our world has an ever increasing desire for electricity. Nuclear power provides electricity with negligible air pollution. However, traditional uranium fission reactors leave us with awful radioactive waste, potential weapons material, and the potential for meltdown.

New age nuclear

Nuclear energy produces no greenhouse gases, but it has many drawbacks. Now a radical new technology based on thorium promises what uranium never delivered: abundant, safe and clean energy - and a way to burn up old radioactive waste.

• Replace uranium whole or in part with Thorium and you have a fraction of the waste and it only lasts 500 years instead of 10,000.
• The technology used by Thorium Power can actually consume the old radioactive waste we're spending so much dealing with today.
• Thorium power generation is safer, no possibility of a Chernobyl or even a Three Mile Island.
• Most of the existing reactors in the world can be adapted to use Thorium Power's technology.
• Thorium Power's technology is working now and has been independently verified by Westinghouse Electric.

Thorium Power believes there is a market for about four thorium-powered reactors each in Russia and United States just for plutonium disposal.

So if you have the heart for penny stocks, that's THPW. And check out the Energy from Thorium blog for some nice introductions to the technology (including its birth in the 50's as a plan for a nuclear powered airplane) and ongoing discussions.

Powered by Thorium

I've mentioned by "thorium stocks", and I'm referring to a company I'm going long on called Thorium Power (THPW). The latest Newsweek has an article that provides a good overview, Clean Nukes Go Public.

If reactors were using this fuel, even if it were reprocessed, it could never be used for weapons. This technology is the only way to achieve three goals—produce massive amounts of energy for the world, not emit greenhouse gases, and not spread nuclear weapons materials—without making one of them worse.

Yesterday another shareholder and I had a conference call with Peter Charles, Thorium's Director of Corporate Affairs. We first talked about the stock price drop. Peter thinks it probably had more to do with the merger making so many stocks became unrestricted than any naked shorting. We also talked about some international work and learned that Thorium President and CEO Seth Grae will be in India this month meeting with the government. That's great because India has committed to becoming a world leader in thorium power generation. Here's hoping "my" technology will play a role there.

Humble Pi

Innumerate Fundamentalists and π

I don't believe the bible is true in the sense it has the answers for my life, but I don't think that means it's entirely false either. I'm sure much of it relates to real historical events. Take 1 Kings 7.23 for example where a big bowl is being described:

He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it.

Now a high school student could tell you the math doesn't work. A circle 10x across can't have a circumference of 30x. But I don't think that matters. I have to give some leeway for inaccurate measurements of the time, and maybe there's some translation issues too. The point is I think it's close enough given the context.

But then enter the bible literalist who believes the bible is exact as written and the truth. Therefore Pi must be wrong.

Very easy. You are talking about the value of Pi. That is actually 3 not 3.14....... The digits after the decimal forms a geometric series and it will converge to the value zero. So, 3.14.....=3.00=3. Nobody still calculated the precise value of Pi. In future they will and apply advenced Mathematics to prove the value of Pi=3.

I mean, where do you start with this? Maybe the best way to handle them is to ask to see the label of their shirt. That cotton-poly blend will be a little warm in the fires of hell.

Basement: What are all those wires?

When people see this picture I hear "That's a lot of wires". They are:

• 5 x passive speakers (12 AWG pair)
• 1 x active subwoofer (co-ax)
• 2 x Ethernet (cat 5)
• 2 x phone (cat 5)
• 1 x control in (cat 5)
• 1 x control out (pair)
• 2 x spare to upstairs (cat 5)
• 2 x cable/sat in (co-ax)
• 1 x cable/sat out (co-ax)
• power on dedicated circuit

While the phone and control only need 4 wires, I used 8 wire cat 5 because, for some reason, at Rona it's cheaper. The spare cat 5 go to the top floor and could be used for audio, video, remote control, etc. The control out will be used for the room lights. Why get up?

Basement: Screen size

This weekend we'll be doing a test setup of the screen and projector. It's a 100" 16:9 wide screen and the main seats will be about 12' away giving a 33.7 degree viewing angle from the center seat. Yes, that's a one hundred inch screen. Too big? Nah. I tested this setup in a few different stores and I'm happy with the size. Also, when watching 4:3 "TV-sized" content the viewing size will be only about 82". The THX recommended 16:9 screen size for this seating distance is actually 107", so maybe it's even too small (ha ha).

10% of the brain myth

Popular myths, urban legends that people repeat as if they were true. Huge pet peeve of mine. Here's a couple with some links to check out if you find yourself believing the myth.

• False: We only use 10% of our brains source
• False: Bill Gates once said computers would never need more than 640KB memory, source 1, source 2

And swimming after eating won't give you cramps and swallowed gum does not stay for years in your stomach. Feel free to Google those if you have doubts.

Cloning cells, Suing swappers, Fixing fences

• Koreans Report Ease in Cloning for Stem Cells. Great news. But no surprise it's happening in Asia, people here in North America who are fighting stem cell research are seeing to that.
• Cdn. record labels lose appeal in swapping case. Good news. But the door is still open to lawsuits, it's just a smaller door and you have to jiggle the lock.
• Is my fence sinking? We've had some heavy rain and a couple fence posts look like they've dropped an inch or so. Should be easy to fix, I haven't trimmed the post tops yet so I'll just unscrew the 2x4s on the lower side and screw them in at a higher point. With a little help from my car jack, it should be a one man job.

But black holes are so cool...

... but I guess so are "dark-energy stars". According to some physicist, black holes don't exist. The weird space effects we thought they were causing are actually due to these dark-energy stars. Possibly.

It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist

Plastic magnets

I was talking with my engineering student brother about materials (metals mostly, but we dig polymers and composites too) and the topic of non-metal magnets came up. Anyway, this link is for him.

Smart air conditioning

The city or Toronto is using the cold waters of Lake Ontario as a natural air conditioner... Cool :)

Los Alamos Lab

My favorite science prof worked there years ago and it sounds like an interesting place. Too bad about the security problems though...

The Los Alamos national laboratory reports that they are missing two computer discs with sensitive weapons information. How embarrassing is that? Now we can't even find our own weapons of mass destruction. - Jay Leno