Tech
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Thursday rapid fire
- In camera photo tricks that get you around Photoshop
- Business 2.0 magazine fails to back things up with disastrous consequeces
- Getting fat can mean that men are committed to a relationship, among many other things
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A cool flash embedder
The best Flash embedder I’ve seen actually. It’s called SWFObject.
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Science and truth
Via this episode of BloggingHeads, I came across an interesting article about the philosophy of science, specifically that of Thomas Kuhn. Money Quotes:
Scientists, as Kuhn describes them, are deeply conservative. Once indoctrinated into a paradigm, they generally devote themselves to solving “puzzles,” problems whose solutions reinforce and extend the scope of the paradigm rather than challenging it. Kuhn calls this “mopping up.” But there are always anomalies, phenomena that the paradigm cannot account for or that directly contradict it. Anomalies are often ignored. But if they accumulate, they may trigger a revolution (also called a paradigm shift, although not originally by Kuhn), in which scientists abandon the old paradigm for a new one.
Denying the view of science as a continual building process, Kuhn asserts that a revolution is a destructive as well as a creative event. The proposer of a new paradigm stands on the shoulders of giants and then bashes them over the head.
In other words, science advances funeral by funeral.
On the first day of my Advanced Macroeconomics class in 1994 the professor (I forget his name, I think that was the last class he taught before he retired) said that we should think of the truth as “the consensus of informed opinion”.
In other words, for practical purposes, the truth is the state of the art, as of right now, and we should expect it to change over time.
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Interesting developments on carbon emissions
It would seem that there has been some progress in developing an actually useful way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Essentially it’s a giant vacuum that sucks the CO2 out of the air. It gets around several problems, most notably geography (the devices can be anywhere). While there is energy expended in the proccess, the main guy has the interesting observation
The real issue, says Lackner, is not the energy consumed but the CO2 emitted. He estimates that for every ton of CO2 he captures, he’ll generate another 0.4 ton. But because this process will take place at a plant, where emissions are concentrated relative to air, it will be easily captured.
Pair it up with nuclear power and you’ve got an even bigger net decrease.
One item not mentioned in the article is that it is possible to start this on a small scale without any public/government consensus on the topic. Any meaningful consensus, particularly an international one would most likely be ineffective, slow, corrupt in implementation and captured by special interests from the start.
The above remedy is able to be done by quite a few people with little public input and delay. The Sierra Club, Richard Branson, Wal-Mart, whoever, could just set them up as much as they wanted. It doesn’t get around the free-rider problem, but it does allow private virtue to be accomplished.
For the record, I’m still a skeptic on global warming, but the technology is fascinating.
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Snipers and robot armies
After reading these two articles (here and here) about new forms of sniper scopes, I have to wonder, why aren’t robot armies in the field right now? Granted, all of the shooting must somehow involve a human, but I would imagine that remote operator could be anywhere. We’ve had unmanned aerial vehicles for years now, and those fly, which would seem to be much more complicated and expensive.
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Random links
- Remove the web developer and the web gets developed
- Term of the day “Fever Swamp – A political website or mindset that is prone to wild accusations and is especially susceptible to conspiracy theories.”
- An excellent post on conspiracy theories
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The funniest thing I’ve read today
From this Popular Mechanics article on flying cars
Recently, NASA scientists discovered that most people love to play video games but hate to die in fiery airplane crashes
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Cool article in Popular Mechanics
About the Army’s Land Warrior System. It’s very cool.
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Sunday round up
- A nice graph of the internet
- If I believed in conspiracy theories, I’d believe in this one “I found Saddam’s WMD Bunkers“. The reason that no one in government is following up on them is that the US invasion forced the weapons into Syria, and the Bush administration didn’t act on the information quickly. The Democrats don’t want to move on it because it proves the main cause for the invasion. It’s a bit too cinematic to be believed, but quite interesting.
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Tuesday round up
- Popular mechanics and 100 mpg cars
- Couple Fights for Baby ‘Metallica’ Name
In Sweden, parents must get the names of their children approved by the tax authority, which is in charge of the population registry and issues personal identification numbers, similar to Social Security numbers in the United States.
- Billy Joe Shaver seems to have shot someone.