Wednesday, January 08, 2003

[Colin Glassey] The Year in Ideas The New York Times Year in Ideas was the best thing since sliced bread. I had a blast reading up on new ideas from the previous year. Here is my pick from their list: The Ambulance-Homicide Theory. This theory suggests that homicide rates have declined in the United States only because of advances in emergancy medical technology. Which would explain why cities now have lower murder rates than rural areas. Climate Jumping. More evidence that when climates change, they do it suddenly, not gradually. What fun. Global Warming is our friend, right? Cooling Athletes from the Inside Out. Here is the key insight: putting hot people into cool rooms is actually the wrong thing to do. The cool temperatures will cause the blood vessels near the surface to constrict, heat is trapped and the core body temperature spikes. This can kill you. Some smart doctors at Stanford have a solution. Early-Detection Revisionism. There is good evidence that early detection of some cancers is a wash. Yes it can save a few lives but many cancers which are detected early are harmless. Overall death rates for people whoes cancer was detected early vs. detected because the person was feeling ill prove to be nearly the same. Blind People Can Draw. It was proved this year that blind people draw in the same basic way as artists who can see. In other words, perspective, foreshortening, and the vanishing point are hard-wired into our brains when we try to construct a mental image of the world. The 239 MPG Car. VW built a demonstration car which gets 239 miles per gallon of gas. Wow. Really. Beckham's Soccer Kick. Serious analysis went into figuring out how it was possible for David Beckham's kick to both go over the wall of Greek defenders and then drop into the goal for a score. Its about as complex as how bumble bees can fly. Initial analysis says it can't happen, but there they are, buzzing around. Agrawal's Prime Number proof (he came up with a means of proving if a number was prime or not). The algorithm fits neatly on a single sheet of paper and uses polynomial math. Japan's cultural power. Japan is the Pokemon Hegemon. Seriously, Japan is making in-roads into the youth culture of the world, so long dominated by the United States. Starting with SquareSoft's Final Fantasy 10+ years ago, then Nintendo's Pokemon, and now Yu-Gi-Oh, Japanese games and Anime is all over the place. I have to admit, Miyazaki is a genius. Both Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away are monumental works of art. I also think Pokemon Gold/Silver is one of greatest games ever created. Yu-Gi-Oh is a decent game as well. The Remote Controlled Rat. Scary new brain science allows scientists to control a rat with a very simple control system of electrodes in the rats brain. Yes, you can stimulate the pleasure center in a rat's brain. Yes, there is no reason why you couldn't do the same thing to people. Welcome to the new world of remote controlled people. Robot Warfare. Unmaned planes (robotic warplanes) killed people last year. Soon we will have unmaned ground vehicals that are armed. In the future, the United States will be able to fight a war when almost no one from our side gets killed. Does this worry you? As far as I'm concerned, its going to happen, the only question is, will the U.S. use this power for good or evil? The First Scramjet. An Australian team, working on a shoestring, have created the first working scramjet. Scramjets offer the possibility of much faster speed than any other known technology. 5:52:00 PM     [Colin Glassey] SUVs Dangerous to Drive for All Good article here in AlterNet by Stephanie Mencimer, reviewing the book High and Mighty by New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher. Bottom line: SUVs are bad vehicals by all standards. They are poorly put together. They are way overpriced (hugely profitable for Detroit). They handle poorly in bad weather or on rough roads. They tend to roll over and kill their passengers. And worst of all, they are much more likely to kill the occupants of cars they hit. Bradsher says monsters like the four-ton Chevy Tahoe kills 122 people for every 1 million models on the road; by comparison, the Honda Accord only kills 21. Injuries in SUV-related accidents are likewise more severe. So, those of you who own these SUVs, you are making the road much more dangerous for everyone else, you are polluting the air more than other drivers, you are giving more money to Saudi Arabia than other drivers. Thanks. 5:30:46 PM     [Colin Glassey] Star Trek : Nemesis Saw the latest Star Trek movie today. I liked it. The move to computer generated ships has certainly freed up the script writers to do some things that were never done before (crashing one starship into another is one example). The movie also was much more intelligent in how it handled the ship to ship combat. The writers have actually played some Star Trek games based on their handling of shield strengths and ship orientation. As a Star Trek movie, it was very good, as a science fiction film it was still only barely in the range of a decent Babylon 5 episode. Problems: The enemy ship was bigger, faster, had more weapons and had a perfectly undetectable cloaking system. What has the Federation advanced weapons research team been doing for the last 15 years? Playing footsie with the Betazoid women? The Federation is the economic powerhouse of the galaxy (outside of the Borg) and much stronger than the Romulans. Obviously the Federation is an analog for the United States. So why is it the Romulans have a ship which is a better warship than the best ship in the Federation fleet? OK, the Romulans poured all their resources into this one super ship, just like the Japanese put a great deal into their super battle ships the Yamato and the Musashi. This should mean that while the Romulans have one Scimitar class ship, the Federation has lots of Enterprise class ships. The best chance for the Enterprise is to join up with other Federation ships and hope that massive numbers will help defeat the enemy super ship. This is talked about in the movie, but when battle is joined, the rest of the Federation fleet is never mentioned again (well, they are in a "rift" which stops communication but still, rational strategy has most of the Federation ships converging on a single location). Another problem is the way Commander Troi is able to spot the enemy ship telepathicly. This was silly. The enemy ship is zooming around in space all around the Enterprise. It certainly can't be spotted better by Deanna Troi than by scattered phaser fire (which is well done in the film). Still, these are minor nits. Overall this was the best Star Trek film since Star Trek 4 (The Voyage Home) back in 1986. 4:58:46 PM

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