Posts from — May 2010

This is a cool little science project. All you need are some rust filings and a card with a magnetic stripe on it. Probably not a card you expect to re-use.

Check out the picture in the original article. Neat.

(From “Use rust particles to reveal the data on your credit-card’s magstripe“, via Boing Boing.)

So Valve releases Steam for the Mac. Steam is like an iTunes Store for video games. That is, video games that work on a traditional computer, not on your iPod/iPhone/iPad. Of which the iTunes Store has tens of thousands. Steam is a big deal for Windows computers, and now that they have come to the Mac, Valve giving you access to your games on OS X even if you originally bought them for Windows. Classy. Browsing their store, they don’t have a lot for the Mac right now, but there were a few on sale that tempted me, until I remembered that I had stockpiled a bunch of games to play to while away endless hours here. And I have barely touched them. So I guess I’m good on games for the next few years.

Except for Wii games. And DS games. And iPhone/iPad games.

Anyway, I have to go play these games now or else I wasted the money. It’s like work.

There is so much news to process as things fall apart. I feel like I could spend the whole day reading and by the end of the day events will have rendered half the facts obsolete. Here in Iraq, I spend an hour and a half to two hours teaching math on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and I feel exhausted by the end of those days. I have no idea, none, how I managed to hang on through the same class for six weeks, teaching six days a week, not three last November and December. That whole time seems like a blur to me, and it was some of my busiest time during my “day job” as well.

Well, at least John Ellis has time to read and ask the right questions. He is consistently very good on the financialization crisis. My news reader’s gutter of “to read” articles is consistently of links from his blog.

(From “Social Cohesion“, via Ellisblog!.)

This is a really interesting fact, combined with some speculation. Apparently very intense magnetic fields, focused inside the brain, can cause visual hallucinations of glowing orbs and lines. The speculation is that at least part of the time, when people think they are seeing “ball lightning” they are actually standing close enough to a magnetic field induced by lightning to stimulate the same hallucination.

I assume this works by inducing current between synapses when the magnetic field moves. The experience would be unique to each person since it depends both on the precise orientation of the field, and the unique way each person’s brain is wired. So this technology could never be used to cause mass, shared hallucinatory perception. Presumably.

By the way, the Wikipedia article linked above describes creating a synthetic form of ball lightning using a microwave. Anybody got a spare microwave?

(From “Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Magnetically-Induced Hallucinations Explain Ball Lightning, Say Physicists“, via Slashdot.)

Some worthwhile thoughts on the European bail-out. Well done, violent protestors!

Read the whole thing. Obviously I don’t have access to news about the finanical system other than what is publicly available, so I have to wonder how the basic market signals about debt and borrowers were misread by so many, for so long. It seems like the system is so full of noise (bad data) that assessing the true value of anything is impossible. Good luck to those who make their living placing bets.

(From “Simple thoughts on Europe“, via Marginal Revolution.)

I haven’t been sleeping well so I was almost relieved when I got back to my CHU after teaching math for two hours at the end of the day to find that the Internet had gone down and I wouldn’t have to make a post. Then of course nature kicked in and I had to fiddle with it until it started working again.

The math class had an interesting problem on some of the homework I had assigned. I knew how to figure it out using a brute force-like approach but I stumbled for a good ten or fifteen minutes trying to figure out an elegant way to explain the problem: something simple enough to be understood while providing a good foundation for future reasoning, rather than a simple trick based on memorization or a pseudo-formula magic incantation. The problem was “If it takes 5 men working 4 days to load 5000 tons, how long does it take 8 men to load 10,000 tons?”

Well, the elegant way is to figure it takes one man four days to load 1000 tons, or “1000 tons per man per 4 days” which is trivially rewritten as “250 tons per man per day.” Now, you multiply the whole thing by 8 men: 2000 tons per day. Then 10,000 tons divided by 2000 tons/day is (10,000 tons/2000 tons) * 1 day, or 5 days. It looks a lot better written out because you can see the units build up and then cancel out, which is how you know you have the right answer. The units in this case are: tons, days, and men.

Scrabble on the iPad has become a part of the morning ritual along with the illy café from the moka pot. Sometimes games take days, other times we decide that we have wrecked the board with too many tightly played words and start over. Sometimes we forget whose turn it is and only realize after the next person goes.

The game has a terrible built in dictionary, accepting words like, NE, QI, QUOD, ENVIRO, ZINE and AE. But we aren’t playing seriously so it is tolerated. The official Scrabble dictionary is only about 660k, and this is a licensed version, so I don’t see why they couldn’t include that.

They need to add the ability to store multiple in-progress games, and a customizable dictionary. Worth the $9.99 price, though.

I have a few chores to take care of tonight. I’ll simply leave this hilarious anecdote from Christopher Hitchens about Margaret Thatcher as excerpted by the neo-neocon:

(From “Political change: Hitchens encounters Margaret Thatcher as dominatrix“, via neocon.)

The Instapundit notes where the US is falling behind Russia, India, and now Japan.

India. Russia.

We could have had this here, too. Perhaps we can power our future cars with rainbows and unicorns, since we are about to experience 30 years of irrational panic about off-shore drilling. On the other hand, spending some time up close and personal with Mother Nature in her untamed state has a way of whetting people’s appetite for risk.

(From “Japan Activates the Monju Fast-Breeder Reactor…“, via Instapundit.)

Why I don’t do Facebook:

So I don’t know if this is true from personal observation, like I said, I don’t do Facebook, but I could have guessed at exactly the types of brain dead behaviors he describes. Been there, hated it.

(From “Facebook is Dying – Social is Not (by @baekdal) #opinion“, via Marginal Revolution.)