Scott Adams of “Dilbert” fame, became afflicted with Spasmodic Dysphonia about 18 months ago. This means for some inexplicale reason he completely lost his voice. At that time there was a zero recovery rate from this, no one in known history has ever fully regained their voice. Until now.
Read this amazing story on his blog and leave him a happy comment, he has no idea how long his voice will remain.
NPR has a great audio segment on the randomness of the coin toss. They also interview statistician Persi Diaconis who asked Harvard University engineers to build him a mechanical coin flipper (seen below) that can always make the perfect coin flip. It appears that the randomness in a coin toss is introduced by sloppy humans.
They also bring up the issue of American Football games that are started with a coin flip. Listen to the segment in Real or Windows Media formats.
In a salute to the king of online video hosts recently selling out to Goog for 1.65B dollars, Slate is hosting a video history of Youtube.
It’s 9 Youtube clips, some controversial like Stephen Colbert’s roasting of President Bush, others are runaway hits like the two leggy Israeli girls lipsyncing to the Pixie’s. Check it out.
OmniNerd has a good synopsis and links to a study on the mental processing of color described in Nature.com’s “Even black-and-white bananas look yellow“.
Basically it’s in regards to people perceive color differently from person to person and may be based on how their brain processes the color by sometimes associating it with a common object.
Follow the interesting tale of a U.S. library researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary play detective decades ago in tracking down the antedate and etymology for the word ‘Nachos’.
As the largest city influenced by Tex-Mex trends, San Antonio might possibly yield a clue to nacho…
…how could anyone who has looked at and eaten nachos see any relationship between one of these and the adjective flat-nosed?…
[found via geekpress]
Two scientists, George Smoot and John Mather, have been selected to receive the 2006 Nobel for Physics for their detection and analysis of evidence that gives us a ‘shapshot’ of the universe approx 380,000 years after the big bang. The big bang occurred over 13 Billion years ago.
They leveraged NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite to detect cosmic microwave background that is widely believed to be a remnant of the Big Bang.
Wired has a funny and only vaguely helpful article on how to disarm an atomic bomb. At a high level the steps include:
And if you’re interested, we have ‘How to Make an Atomic Bomb” from The Journal of Irreproducible Results. You know it’s gonna be fun when Step 1 starts with
“First, obtain about 50 pounds (110 kg) of weapons grade Plutonium at your local supplier”
Wired has a neat article (‘Map Quest‘) on the processes used by companies to put together the digital maps used by in-car navigation devices, GPS’ and computers.
From the article: “It’s geeky data miners vs. old-school drivers in the pitched battle to provide digital driving directions to the likes of Google and Garmin. May the best map win.”
Traffic is the bane of all commuters. This article on OmniNerd by Brandon U. Hansen analyzes a year of data to determine if minor tweaks to departure times can significantly impact commute length – or if it is all out of the driver’s control. For a full year he kept track of the departure and arrival times both to and from work & home, the results are very interesting.