The road ahead
OVERNIGHT LINKS (and don’t go waiting for any updates, either)
ITEM: Headline of the week: “Spacetime May Have Fractal Properties on a Quantum Scale.”
ITEM: Economic common sense from … Germany?
ITEM: There is some justice in the world, after all: “Vindictive people make less money.”
ITEM: On the other hand, this explains a lot: “Expert financial advice cuts brain activity.”
ITEM: Just in case you were wondering, here’s how to become a ‘blimp’ pilot.
ITEM: Another idiot school, though this one was over in Britain: School sends parents letter complaining about poor class attendance of dead daughter.
The sun is blank. No sunspots.
ITEM: I happen to have the SciFi Saturday nigh movie, “Polar Storm”, on the TV. I think it’s setting a new record for scientific/technological errors per minute. UPDATE: Oh, it’s even more horrible than I could have imagined. I mean, the production, effects, and even acting are up to the usual SciFi Saturday standards. But I have never seen such an unremitting series of scientific and technological idiocies. On the other hand, I’ve never watched An Inconvenient Truth….
WEIRD ITEM: Obama preparing for UFO arrival.
ITEM: Remember all those cool time-lapse videos you’ve seen of plants growing and blossoming. Well, now you can make your own with this little gizmo. Ain’t technology wonderful?
ITEM: On the other hand, here’s a reminder on the unexpected gotchas of technology: serial killer “suspect” turns out to be woman who accidentally contaminated DNA swabs.
ITEM: Why we should think long and hard before attempting “bioengineering” or “terraforming” to solve “global warming”:
While some scientists and environmental groups object to their plan fearing harmful changes to the ecosystem, Planktos went ahead and dumped a hundred tons of iron dust mixed with seawater into international waters off the coast of the Argentina.
Expecting a plankton bloom and carbon credit riches to follow, their plans were literally eaten alive by a swarm of algae-loving shrimp. They did get their bloom, but it was not large, carbon dioxide capturing algae. Instead they promoted the large-scale bloom of haptophytes, a tiny algae common in the open ocean and extremely abundant in the fossil record. They are also the fellows responsible for the white foam you sometimes see on the edge of beaches.