By day I work for a company that has just reached its tenth year of existence. Everybody knows the traditional first-year anniversary gift is paper, the third-year anniversary gift is bananas, and the fiftieth-year anniversary is gold. But I was until recently unaware that the tenth-year anniversary is tin or aluminum. As a ten-year aluminum gift, my company has given me an aluminum water bottle. This is awesome, because I’ve been wanting one for kind of a while now, but the only ones I could find are like twenty or thirty dollars. Well, now I don’t have to look and I don’t have to spend any money.

I tried it out this last weekend by taking it to rehearsal. Ohmygod it’s the best. Seriously. The feeling of environmental friendliness is so inviting, and the health benefits make me even more powerful and ninja-like than ever before.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Bil at 10:59 pm under Pop Culture, The Arts, The Science, Environmentality
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I’ve discovered a fantastic blog called Lucid Movement (http://www.lucidmovement.com). It’s basically an archive of clips of things breaking, bouncing, exploding, wafting, etc. filmed with high-speed cameras. It’s excellent. Here is a taste of what you’ll get over there:

I can watch this stuff for hours.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Bil at 11:25 pm under Pop Culture, Politics, The Science
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For the second time in my life, my Massachusetts driver’s license was questioned by an overly-cautious clerk. This one has a happy ending, though, and I got what I was after. The shades of green and blue wavy lines on my driver’s license are for security, and are of course mathematically complex. But they make my ID look like a passport to Dreamland.

And I think it’s pretty cool. It’s one reason I’ve been such a slacker about getting myself an Illinois license. Illinois still has the boring white background. Also, I paid $90 for my Mass ID and I’m not so quick to dump it just because I don’t live there anymore. But mostly I just like the colorful wavy lines.

Filed by Bil at 10:49 pm under The Arts, The Science
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Okay, this is very cool.

NASA Unveils New Hi-Def Map of Antarctica

Perhaps not everybody would find this worth the effort, but hey – if “Marie Osmond’s Merry Christmas” is available on Blu-Ray, then clearly we are not using our most advanced technology for purposes of good.

I’m actually quite intrigued by Antarctica. There’s something about a place so cold and blustery that it can’t sustain life AND YET IT DOES that just…I don’t know…reminds me of home. (My home at the south pole, that is.) Or maybe it just reminds me of Super Mario Brothers 3. Whatever.

There’s adventure there. You know there is. Come with me! Let’s go fight snow monsters and save the Ice Princess!

Filed by Bil at 10:44 pm under The Science
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There are few times when I curse living in a big city. I’ll admit, I am not 100% city slicker. I do love me some outdoorsiness. I particularly enjoy seeing stars at night, which, in Chicago proper, is pretty much out of the question. Most of the time there is a glow that radiates up from beyond the buildings around me, and makes the sky itself impossible to see. All I see is the glow. Most of the time I tell myself it’s okay, it’s the price I pay for living in a place where at least some of the fine establishments stay open till the wee small hours. I mean, it’s not okay, but there are bigger problems to face right now.

But every now and again I see an article like this one from the 16th of November, describing the awesome comet and/or meteor shower that I WAS NOT ABLE TO SEE because I live under a giant cloud of smog and second-hand smoke.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Bil at 10:37 pm under Damn Hippies, The Science
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I recently read an article by Isaac Asimov, written in 1964 and published in a World Book Encyclopedia. He told in scientific terms how life on this planet probably started. After I read it, it was like a light turned on in my head.

A long time ago, when the Earth was very different than it is today (i.e., no plants, no animals, no Starbucks, lots of hydrogen and nitrogen in the atmosphere, etc.), the oceans were much more volatile and both liquids and gasses on this planet were much thinner. The sun’s rays could penetrate the atmosphere much more powerfully, and UV rays would get through to everything. At some point, the oceans’ water was less like the water it is today and more like ammonia, with all the hydrogen and whatnot, which is a fair argument since hydrogen is the most abundant substance in the universe.

Back in the 1950’s, some scientists ran a series of tests in which they concentrated UV rays on liquid mixtures that they theorized the oceans were probably like. The UV rays typically caused the atoms to get very excited, and larger molecules formed. They found in several of the compounds (which were most akin to ammonia) that the concentrated UV rays caused the creation of amino acids, which are the basic building blocks of proteins, which are key to providing energy for things like, oh, you know, self-reproduction.

So, the theory goes that back on ancient Earth, the sun’s UV rays eventually created amino acids in the ocean, which after a while formed into proteins, and sooner or later cells began to reproduce themselves (ta-da! Life!), and gradually became more and more complex, which has gotten us to where we are today.

Asimov said it more elegantly.

Nevertheless, I find it to be a very, very good explanation of how life actually started, and it was verified by multiple experiments trying to do exactly that. Once I read this, I knew I had science on my side.

Before reading on, I would like to steer you towards my friend Ben’s blog, where he has posted an interesting article on the natures of science and religion (it is the article dated June 16, 2007).
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Bil at 9:08 pm under Religion, The Science
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Virtual human puts doctors inside their patients

Let me preface this by saying that the preceding news article is actually very good news. I worry that what I will say next may give the impression that I am against this “virtual human” as an amazing tool for medical science.

There has been a very interesting discussion going on that I am happy to call attention to yet again, because I think it has the potential to go on and on and on and it’s very cool to me. (It’s an older article from this website and all its following comments.) We have been talking about art and its meanings and manifestations, and somewhere in there is a brief tangent about semantics.

I consider myself a laid-back person, but for some reason I’m a stickler for semantics. I think it’s important that we all know what we’re talking about and express our ideas properly so that others listening may be on the same page. With all our tools of communication nowadays, our language(s) is(are) evolving faster than the ecosystem after a nuclear powerplant meltdown on the Galapagos Islands. In other words, really fast. So whenever I see something, especially a news article, make a linguistic mistake, my first reaction is panic and outrage. I don’t always make sense myself, so I am forgiving of others, but still…grrr.
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Bil at 3:57 pm under The Arts, The Science
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