I was reminded of this by this:
A Swedish company has been fined 25,000 kronor ($3,000) after a malfunctioning robot attacked and almost killed one of its workers at a factory north of Stockholm.
Thinking he had cut off the power supply, the man approached the robot with no sense of trepidation.
But the robot suddenly came to life and grabbed a tight hold of the victim’s head. The man succeeded in defending himself but not before suffering serious injuries.
The New York Times advises getting used to living without air conditioning. Next week no doubt we’ll read advice on how to live (so to speak) without pacemakers and dialysis. I’m already getting used to living without the Times.
I considered and discarded half a dozen jokes for this story, but nothing could possibly be funnier than the headline: New service lets Jews tweet a prayer to God.
Freeman Dyson rarely disappoints:
Every time a major impact occurs on Europa, a vast quantity of water is splashed from the ocean into the space around Jupiter. Some of the water evaporates, and some condenses into snow. Creatures living in the water far enough from the impact have a chance of being splashed intact into space and quickly freeze-dried. Therefore, an easy way to look for evidence of life in Europa’s ocean is to look for freeze-dried fish in the ring of space debris orbiting Jupiter. Sending a spacecraft to visit and survey Jupiter’s ring would be far less expensive than sending a submarine to visit and survey Europa’s ocean. Even if we did not find freeze-dried fish in Jupiter’s ring, we might find other surprises — freeze-dried seaweed, or a freeze-dried sea monster.
Freeze-dried fish orbiting Jupiter is a fanciful notion, but nature in the biological realm has a tendency to be fanciful. Nature is usually more imaginative than we are. Nobody in Europe ever imagined a bird of paradise or a duck-billed platypus before it was discovered by explorers. [E.A.]
From The Atlantic.
No, you didn’t misread the headline. From The Atlantic:
Just a decade ago, every one of these schemes was considered outlandish. Some still seem that way. But what sounded crankish only 10 years ago is now becoming mainstream thinking.
By now, even staunch environmentalists and eminent scientists with long records of climate-change concern are discussing geo-engineering openly.
Spread powdered iron over the surface of the ocean, and in very little time a massive bloom of plankton will grow, [oceanographer John Martin] predicted. “Give me half a tanker of iron,” Martin said, “and I’ll give you the next Ice Age.”
Another scheme involves spewing sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to scatter sunlight; still another proposes pumping carbon underground or into the oceans. [Coal mining in reverse?] All of them pose far greater risk to you and me than a negligible risk of insignificant temperature increase, and by golly, they’re going to execute one or perhaps several of them with some software mogul’s grant money!
The scariest thing about geo-engineering, as it happens, is also the thing that makes it such a game-changer in the global-warming debate: it’s incredibly cheap. Many scientists, in fact, prefer not to mention just how cheap it is. Nearly everyone I spoke to agreed that the worst-case scenario would be the rise of what David Victor, a Stanford law professor, calls a “Greenfinger”—a rich madman, as obsessed with the environment as James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger was with gold. There are now 38 people in the world with $10 billion or more in private assets, according to the latest Forbes list; theoretically, one of these people could reverse climate change all alone. “I don’t think we really want to empower the Richard Bransons of the world to try solutions like this,” says Jay Michaelson, an environmental-law expert, who predicted many of these debates 10 years ago.
Enjoy your next sandwich, folks.
‘I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.’
Somehow I missed this winningly titled article, Get a Life, Holden Caulfield.
These days, teenagers seem more interested in getting into Harvard than in flunking out of Pencey Prep. Young people, with their compulsive text-messaging and hyperactive pop culture metabolism, are more enchanted by wide-eyed, quidditch-playing Harry Potter of Hogwarts than by the smirking manager of Pencey’s fencing team (who was lame enough to lose the team’s equipment on the subway, after all). Today’s pop culture heroes, it seems, are the nerds who conquer the world — like Harry — not the beautiful losers who reject it.
Every now and again, something I read in the newspaper really perks me up. But the best line was the last:
Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ”
One wonders whether pharmacutical improvements will be treated as basic hygiene in the near future; listless moodiness might soon be equivalent to offensive odor. The future is looking bright!
I visited a farm or two as a child, and was allowed to run in the corn field and harass the chickens. A generation ago, this would have been true of many, perhaps most Americans. Thank goodness that we know better now!
To enforce these rules, retail buyers have sent forth armies of food-safety auditors, many of them trained in indoor processing plants, to inspect fields.
“They’re used to working inside the factory walls,” said Ken Kimes, owner of New Natives farms in Aptos (Santa Cruz County) and a board member of the Community Alliance With Family Farmers, a California group. “If they’re not prepared for the farm landscape, it can come as quite a shock to them. Some of this stuff that they want, you just can’t actually do.”
Auditors have told Kimes that no children younger than 5 can be allowed on his farm for fear of diapers. He has been asked to issue identification badges to all visitors.
Not only do the rules conflict with organic and environmental standards; many are simply unscientific. Surprisingly little is known about how E. coli is transmitted from cow to table.
Have they gotten ’round to banning smoking near farms? Just think of the effect of third-hand smoke on your stomach lining!
From Saletan’s Human Nature blog on Slate:
If you haven’t heard about the study, maybe that’s because you get your news from television, National Public Radio, the Associated Press, or the New York Times, which have ignored it. Why would they ignore it? Because the study suggests the answer is yes. It’s OK to report that racial differences in cancer outcomes are caused by poverty and discrimination. It’s not OK to report that they’re inherited.
I’m surprised this study made it to publication; probably the size and therefore expense of the study is what pushed it through, but I imagine that there was a fight about this behind closed doors. Science isn’t what’s advertised, my friends. Conclusions are drawn first, then studies are funded to find supporting evidence. If no such evidence is found, more studies are funded. We’re all dupes.
Not long ago, the Angry Scientist posted an appreciation of Fred Saberhagen’s fiction. (It was because of his recommendation that I picked up Empire of the East for $1.50 at a second-hand store.) Saberhagen is most impressive when re-treading old ground. Men have been visited in prison by spirits to be granted a boon and a mission in literature countless times (including in the Bible), but Saberhagen’s telling is the most pure and most enjoyable I’ve seen. Vainglorious ladies find their comeuppance as often as plain girls spin tales, but the Satrap’s daughter’s is among the most delicious yet. Larry Niven praised Empire of the East as better than Tolkien’s books; I didn’t find it so, but a scene-by-scene rewrite of Lord of the Rings by Saberhagen might be more fun than the original.
