Categories
General

Another fun web test

Go here to try it yourself

The states I’ve not been to can be lumped into three groups. 1) Hawaii, 2) New England (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut), 3) The deep south (Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina). I’ve also not been to Idaho, but I hope to rectify that this summer.

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Categories
General

Orwell was only 20 years off

If you think the ban on smoking in Minneapolis is bad, the French are taking it to a whole other dimension……that dimension being time.


Edit: I guess we’re not much better.

Categories
Astrobiology

Its the sample size stupid

Mass extinction comes every 62 million years, UC physicists discover

I think this is BS. It strikes me as being very similar to the Elliott Wave and Kondratieff Waves in economics.

In the case of economic waves, the wave theorists basically mapped the ups and downs of the economy going back hundres of years and from that deduced laws of nature that said the economy will go up and down in regular interverals. The problem is that so much changes in every cycle that it becomes meaningless trying to find a pattern. Remember that thing about how the Democrats would win if the Redskins won their home game before the presidential election? The Redskins did it 12 times in a row so there must be something to it right? Well the Redskins won and John Kerry isn’t president. In 2008 they will find a new fun fact about something which has held true for 100 years (like, in years where the olympics are held in a non European country, the Republicans win if the Americans win both women’s basketball and men’s shot put).

Back to economic waves….trying to pick out a grand pattern over 400 years is a joke. The economy isn’t anything like it was 40 years ago, let alone 400. Everything is different: technology, demographics, culture, religions, transportation. Everything.

The same strikes me as true with this extinction study. Multicellular life really hit its stride about 500m years ago with the Cambrian explosion. If the scientists are right, that only makes for 10 major extinction events since the Cambrian. Of the major extinction events, we have a good idea about some (KT) and not so good idea about others (PT).

10 is way too small a number to pry any sort of trend out of. The best you can say is that it happened multiple times, not that it happens like clockwork. Each event could be different and the factors which caused past events might not exist anymore. Example: asteroid collissions are much more rare now than in the early days of the solar system, and we can detect them before hand now. Volcanism has probably died down considerably over the last 500ma. Increased diversity has made life more stable and less vulnerable to crashes by key groups.

Maybe the key to the cycle is looking at odd numbered eons with significant polar glaciation, without asteroid impacts in the previous 10ma, before the Redskins win a home field game.

Categories
General

Its a privilege, not a right……. Right.

From Business Week:

I know many Americans find it inconceivable that somebody could live 10 years without a car. It’s a credit to Germany’s public transportation system that it’s possible. But still, I wanted to drive, so this is what I had to do:

  • Go to an optician and get an eye test.
  • Spend Saturday taking a first-aid course.
  • Attach proof that I had done this, plus passport-size photo, to the official application form.
  • Take a number at the city office that accepts the form and wait to be called.
  • Pay $68, the first of many, many fees.
  • Wait six weeks for the form to be processed. Enroll at a driver’s school.
  • Sit on folding chairs in a crowded room with about 50 other pupils — bored German teenagers and bored older foreigners. And do it seven days in a row for three hours per day.

And then there’s the written test. It has 30 questions, selected randomly from a pool of more than 1,000, so I had to memorize everything. What if I was asked the meaning of a scarlet rectangular sign with a white border? (It designates a parking lot with lights that are turned off in the course of the night.) I have yet to meet a German who knows this, yet my ignorance could doom me to a lifetime of public transportation.

Categories
Academia

Humanities vs Science Part II

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/odd_academic_habits/

In high school, I remember being told all sorts of things about what we were expected to do in college. It all turned out to be BS.

With regards to presentations, I’ve noticed a very sharp divide in my professors between those who use powerpoint and thier age. If your above 45, you tend not to use it. Everyone under 45 does.