Wednesday - June 29, 2005

Sunbathing On Titan

Take a look at the picture below. This was taken by the Cassini spacecraft as it circles Saturn’s largest moon. Researchers and scientists think it is a large “lake” because of the smooth formation of the “shoreline”. The lake is 235km by 75km, which is pretty good-sized. I took one look at it and instantly knew what it was .... a gigantic swimming pool. The deep end is upper left and the children’s wading area is in the lower right. If you look real closely you can see four white cabanas around the perimeter. On top of all that, it’s in the southern hemisphere. Case closed.

I only have two questions: (1) what SPF sun-factor do the inhabitants use while lounging and (2) just how freaking monstrous are the hemadrones who inhabit this planet that they need a swimming pool this huge?

A dark, lake-like feature on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has been imaged by the US-European Cassini spacecraft. Researchers have long speculated that Titan might harbour open bodies of liquid methane - and the 235km by 75km target is the best candidate to date.

But they are being cautious about interpreting the feature, which has what looks to be a smooth shoreline. The scientists say the object could simply be dark, solid deposits caught in a sinkhole of volcanic caldera.

“This feature is unique in our exploration of Titan so far,” said Dr Elizabeth Turtle, Cassini imaging team member at the University of Arizona, US. “Its perimeter is intriguingly reminiscent of the shorelines of lakes on Earth that are smoothed by water erosion and deposition,” she added.

The feature lies in Titan’s cloudiest region, towards the south pole, which is presumably the most likely site of recent methane rainfall. This, coupled with the shore-like smoothness of the feature’s perimeter makes it hard for scientists to resist speculation about what might be filling the lake, if it indeed is one.

Posted by The Skipper     on 06/29/2005 at 08:40 AM   
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   Tuesday - June 28, 2005

Le Challenge Atomique De Frogges

France is going to build a 10-billion-Euro nuclear fusion power plant. It will be the first of its kind in the world. Current nuclear power plants use nuclear fission. For those who slept through 10th grade physics class, nuclear fission involves taking a big hammer and banging it real hard on a bunch of uranium atoms so hard that it splits them into little,bitty tiny pieces. These pieces are quite angry at being split up like this so they throw off a lot of angry energy in the form of heat and ‘splosions. This is what makes atom bombs so darned nasty. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, is the opposite. In this method, you take the same big hammer and place two or more uranium atoms on an anvil and bang them hard enough to make them join together into one piece. Again, like your kids on vacation, these atoms strongly resent being forced together and give off a lot of angry energy. This is how the Sun operates .... which is where most of you parents wish you could toss your kids on these occasions.

Anyway, back to “Les Frogges”. These nincomboobs who still haven’t figured out how to use soap and water are going to create a miniature Sun .... here on Earth .... just across the “pond” .... are you scared yet? On top of that, the environmental nutjobs (aka, the “usual suspects") are saying the site where the fusion reactor will be built is right on top of a major fault zone! Where is Chicken Little when you need him? Dangnabbit, the US needs to get on the ball and catch up here. We need to build at least a hundred miniature Suns to show “Les Frogges” who is the real 600-pound gorilla here. Now, ain’t that a .... sun of a gun?

France will get to host the project to build a 10bn-euro (£6.6bn) nuclear fusion reactor, in the face of strong competition from Japan.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) will be the most expensive joint scientific project after the International Space Station.

The Iter programme was held up for over 18 months as parties tried to broker a deal between the two rivals.

Nuclear fusion taps energy from reactions like those that heat the Sun.

Nuclear fusion is seen as a cleaner approach to power production than nuclear fission and fossil fuels.

Officials from a six-party consortium signed the deal in Moscow on Tuesday, for the reactor’s location at the Cadarache site in southern France.

French President Jacques Chirac thanked member countries of the European Union, as well as Russia and China, who crucially lent their support to the French bid: “It is a big success for France, for Europe and for all the partners of Iter,” he said in a statement.

Posted by The Skipper     on 06/28/2005 at 08:32 AM   
Filed Under: • EUro-peons • Science-Technology •  
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   Tuesday - June 21, 2005

Turn ‘Em On, Switch ‘Em Off

Pardon me but I’ve still got the giggles after reading this news article which is the latest revelation from the world of scientific research ....

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) - New research indicates parts of the brain that govern fear and anxiety are switched off when a woman is having an orgasm but remain active if she is faking.

In the first study to map brain function during orgasm, scientists from the Netherlands also found that as a woman climaxes, an area of the brain governing emotional control is largely deactivated.

“The fact that there is no deactivation in faked orgasms means a basic part of a real orgasm is letting go. Women can imitate orgasm quite well, as we know, but there is nothing really happening in the brain,” said neuroscientist Gert Holstege, presenting his findings Monday to the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

In the study, Holstege and his colleagues at Groningen University recruited 11 men, 13 women and their partners.

The volunteers were injected with a dye that shows changes in brain function on a scan. For men, the scanner tracked activity at rest, during erection, during manual stimulation by their partner and during ejaculation brought on by the partner’s hand.

For women, the scanner measured brain activity at rest, while they faked an orgasm, while their partners stimulated their clitoris and while they experienced orgasm.

Holstege said he had trouble getting reliable results from the study on men because the scanner needs activities lasting at least two minutes and the men’s climaxes didn’t last that long. However, the scans did show activation of reward centers in the brain for men, but not for women.

Holstege said his results on women were more clear.

When women faked orgasm, the cortex, the part of the brain governing conscious action, lit up. It was not activated during a genuine orgasm.

Even the body movements made during a real orgasm were unconscious, Holstege said.

The most striking results were seen in the parts of the brain that shut down, or deactivated. Deactivation was visible in the amygdala, a part of the brain thought to be involved in the neurobiology of fear and anxiety.

“During orgasm, there was strong, enormous deactivation in the brain. During fake orgasm, there was no deactivation of the brain at all. None,” Holstege said.

Shutting down the brain during orgasm may ensure that obstacles such as fear and stress did not get in the way, Holstege proposed. “Deactivation of these very important parts of the brain might be the most important necessity for having an orgasm,” he said.

Donald Pfaff, professor of neurobiology and behavior at Rockefeller University in New York, said the interpretations were reasonable. “It makes poetic sense,” said Pfaff, who was not connected with the research.

Posted by The Skipper     on 06/21/2005 at 10:09 AM   
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   Wednesday - June 15, 2005

Two-Fer

_{Gary Varvel, Indianapolis Star}

Posted by The Skipper     on 06/15/2005 at 08:48 AM   
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   Sunday - June 05, 2005

Most Ridiculous Item Of The Day

Bald Chicken Needs No Plucking

Scientists have bred a controversial featherless chicken which they say is faster growing.

The birds, created at the Hebrew University in Israel, will not need to be plucked, saving money in processing plants.

While the researcher behind the breed concedes that they would not be suitable for cooler countries, he says that in hot climates, the birds would fare better.

Professor Avigdor Cahaner, who led the project, told the BBC: “This is not a genetically modified chicken - it comes from a natural breed whose characteristics have been known for 50 years.

Removing the plucking process would also reduce pollution, he said. The process, he claimed, produced large quantities of water contaminated with feathers and fat.

However, animal welfare groups warned that feathers were important to help protect the birds from parasites - and that the featherless chickens were likely to suffer sunburn. In addition, male chickens might not be able to mate, they argued.

Posted by The Skipper     on 06/05/2005 at 10:50 AM   
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   Wednesday - June 01, 2005

Call For Papers

Go ahead. Give it your best shot, people. Submit your paper today. You might even get published. Yes, this is for real (but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with it) ....

Call for Papers

Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets

Editors:
Olga Gershenson (University of Massachusetts-Amherst)
Barbara Penner (University College-London)

“You know what they say about men who hang around women’s lavatories. They’re asking to have their illusions shattered.”
- Georgina to Albert, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

We invite contributions for the edited collection “Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets”.

Public toilets are amenities with a functional, even a civic, purpose. Yet they also act as the unconscious of public spaces. They can be a haven: a place to regain composure, to ‘check one’s face,’ or to have a private chat. But they are also sexually-charged and transgressive spaces that shelter illicit sexual practices and act as a cultural repository for taboos and fantasies.

This collection will work from the premise that public toilets, far from being banal or simply functional, are highly charged spaces, shaped by notions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division. Indeed, public toilets are among the very few openly segregated spaces in contemporary Western culture, and the physical differences between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘ladies’ remains central to (and is further naturalized by) their design. As such, they provide a fertile ground for critical work interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology can be formed in public space and inscribed through design.

We welcome papers which explore the cultural meanings, histories, and ideologies of the public toilet as a gendered space. Any subject is appropriate: toilet design and signage, toilet humour and euphemisms, personal narratives and legal cases, as well as art sited in public toilets. We invite submissions in the format of traditional academic papers of no more than 7000 words (including footnotes).

We also welcome the submissions of design and art projects that expose the gendered nature of the ‘functional’ toilet spaces and objects.

Papers may be submitted to:

Posted by Drew458     on 06/01/2005 at 06:02 PM   
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   Tuesday - May 31, 2005

Mathematicus Giganticus

googolplex

A googolplex is the number 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰, that is, 1 followed by a googol zeroes. The term googol was coined by the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner. Googolplex was coined by Kasner to define an especially large number by extension from his nephew’s idea.

A googol is greater than the number of particles in the known universe, which has been variously estimated from 10⁷² up to 10⁸⁷. Since this is less than the number of zeroes in a googolplex, it would not be possible to write down or store a googolplex in decimal notation, even if all the matter in the known universe were converted into paper and ink or disk drives.

Thinking of this another way, consider printing the digits of a googolplex in unreadable, 1-point font. Tex 1pt font is .3514598mm per digit, which means it would take about 3.5 * 10⁹⁶ meters to write in one point font. The known universe is estimated at 7.4 * 10²⁶ meters in diameter, which means the distance to write the digits would be about 4.7 * 10⁶⁹ times the diameter of the known universe.

-- courtesy of Answers.com

Your task for today is to figure out which of the following is closer to a googolplex:

• The US Federal budget deficit
• The combined salaries of all players in the NBA
• Bill Gates’ spare change
• The number of kilos of cocaine consumed annually in Hollywood
• The number of biased reports by the MSM on a daily basis

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/31/2005 at 02:18 PM   
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   Wednesday - May 25, 2005

Advance Warning For Sarah Connor

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT) have invented an army of robots that can think for themselves ....

The Robot Army That Thinks For Itself
21 May 2005

Swarms of independently-minded collaborative robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction - they may soon be patrolling national borders and exploring space

James McLurkin has a novel party trick - he can coax 20 small autonomous wheeled robots to form herds, disperse again, wheel in neat circles, sing a harmonic rendition of the theme from Star Wars, and automatically recharge from a power station.

McLurkin, a postgraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to design robots that will work together and make collective decisions. If he succeeds, swarms of robots could one day be put to work in the home, in space and by the military. “A swarm or a team can collaborate to overcome what a single robot might not be able to do,” explains Paolo Gaudiano, who works on swarms at Icosystem in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Soon teams of up to 40 robots could be employed as border security guards and outside airports.

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/25/2005 at 12:44 PM   
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   Thursday - May 19, 2005

Coppin’ A Feel?

All of our female readers here may be in deep trouble real soon. According to Wired News, a team of horny geeks in Singapore have perfected the techniques neccessary to implement the “Touchy Internet”, which allows you to “reach out and touch someone” over the internet.

Fortunately, these geeks are a little confused and are testing the device on .... chickens. Don’t go off thinking you’re safe yet, ladies. Sooner or later these nerds will finally go through puberty and then .... watch out!

Researchers have developed a cybernetic system to allow physical interaction over the internet. The system allows touching and feeling of animals or other humans in real time, but it’s first being tried out on—chickens.

Built by a wacky group of researchers at the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore, the Touchy Internet works as follows:

You walk into your office, where a hollow, chicken-shaped doll sits on a mechanical positioning table close to your computer.

The doll whirs to life as soon as you switch on the system, duplicating the motion of a real chicken in the backyard whose movements are being captured by a webcam.

Fondling the doll translates into touching the real fowl.

Touch sensors attached to the doll convey tactile information to a nearby PC through radio signals. The data is sent over the internet to a remote computer near the chicken; the remote computer triggers tiny vibration motors in a lightweight haptic jacket worn by the fowl.

The chicken feels your touch in the exact same place where the replica was stroked.

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/19/2005 at 08:14 AM   
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   Saturday - May 14, 2005

Tough Love

If you thought human sexual reproduction was a strange, twisted, dirty, sloppy, messy way to keep the species going, then you need to take a look at the Palolo Worm of Samoa (pictured below), which wins this week’s prize for most bizaare sex act ....

The palolo worm makes its home, according to Anja Schulze of the Smithsonian Marine Station, in the shallow reef, where it uses its sizeable jaws to dig itself a burrow in the limestone substrate. Most of the year it lives quietly, feeding on algae and microorganisms, small crustaceans, and even its own young.

As the time approaches for it to spawn—which in Samoa usually happens in October or early November—the palolo worm undergoes an extraordinary transformation. The organs in its posterior end, except those involved in reproduction, begin to degenerate.

Eventually these rear segments become little more than sacks engorged with either sperm or eggs. At exactly the right moment, Fauchald said, “the rear end starts some very heavy muscle contractions and eventually breaks off.”

The liberated segments then start spiraling toward the surface. They float for up to an hour until the outer casings split open, spilling out their contents. Sperm fertilizes the floating eggs in a vast reproductive frenzy that happens just once a year and lasts only for a few hours.

But successful fertilization is not guaranteed. “There are several complicating factors,” Fauchald said. “You must have an adequate sperm concentration. There must be enough mucous present to keep everything together, so that the spawning mass is not fragmented or washed apart. A storm would be a big problem.” So would large quantities of predatory fish.

Hardcore palolo connoisseurs grab the wriggling green-and-blue worms and swallow them raw on the spot. Most scoop them up in clumps and dump them into buckets.

The next day there’s a celebration—a kind of Thanksgiving feast, Samoan style. The worms are fried in oil or baked into a loaf with coconut milk and onions. A new daily special shows up on local restaurant menus: palolo worm on toast. It’s considered quite a delicacy.

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/14/2005 at 08:01 AM   
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   Friday - May 13, 2005

Your Congress at Work

Not satisfied with working on judicial nominations, terror networks and other pressing matters, your congress critters voted to subpoena the makers of the Wizzinator to answer for their product.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A life-like prosthetic penis called the Whizzinator and other products promising to help illegal drug users pass urine tests provoked U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday to take legal action with subpoenas of manufacturers.

Now I don’t like to hire druggies (sorry OCM) any more than the next guy, but outlawing a fake weiner? 

NSFW picture below the fold

Posted by Drew458     on 05/13/2005 at 08:51 AM   
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   Thursday - May 12, 2005

You Must Remember This

.... A kiss is just a kiss .. a sigh is just a sigh. Great song. Great movie. Today’s topic is “memories”. It turns out that recent research shows that women pregnant with boys have better memory than those carrying girls ....

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 10 (Reuters) - Mothers pregnant with boys may be less forgetful than those carrying girls, Canadian researchers said on Tuesday.

The researchers said they found evidence that women who gave birth to boys consistently outperformed moms of girls in tests that specifically taxed memory in areas of listening, computational and visualization skills.

“When we set out to look at the effects of pregnancy on cognition, we weren’t thinking of the sex of the fetus, so we were shocked by our results,” said study leader Neil Watson, a Simon Fraser University psychology professor.

You task is to discuss why this phenomenon occurs. Can it be that men have better memory capacity than women, even to the point of affecting those females nearest them? Or is it that women just naturally develop better memory when a man is around so they can remember all the major f**k-ups we men are bound to cause?

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/12/2005 at 04:55 AM   
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   Wednesday - May 04, 2005

There Is Hope For Liberals After All

Medical scientists today announced they are working to figure out why some Liberals suddenly wake up one day and start making sense and joining the Conservative family. Research is ongoing to determine why this sudden shift in thinking occurs. Read the story for more ....

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/04/2005 at 11:23 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Science-Technology •  
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   Sunday - May 01, 2005

Paging John Connor

Skynet - Phase I is now complete. Keep an eye out for ”CyberBug” in your local airspace. You are being watched continuously now. Try not to pick your nose ....

If a kite appears to be following you in La Plata, Md., it very well may be. The Charles County Sheriff’s Office recently monitored a gathering of motorcycle riders by launching a remote-control aerial camera to watch for emergencies or troublemakers.

An official said yesterday the battery-powered spy plane was launched as a test run and that he’s not sure whether the agency will buy the craft — but the results were good.

Question: What kind of society needs to be under constant surveillance from eye-in-the-sky cameras, traffic cameras, security cameras, shopping mall cameras, etc., etc.?

Answer: A society that allows themselves to be monitored continuously for activity that is considered “dangerous” by the state or “criminal” by law enforcement, employers and shopkeepers.

Memo to all you “potentially dangerous criminals” out there: Don’t say I didn’t warn you ....

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/01/2005 at 04:42 AM   
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

1. Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
2. Stay involved with government on every level and don't let those bastards get away with a thing
3. Use every legal means to defend yourself in the event of real internal trouble, and, most importantly:
4. Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere

It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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