Transparency means nothing without justice – Government transparency is necessary, but not sufficient. If police violence is recorded and publicized, and nobody cares, it doesn't matter. This is in come sense emblematic of the coup in western propaganda. You don't need to control the media as the Soviets did or the Chinese do, if your population is comfortable enough not to care what's happening out there to someone else, and if their voting patterns are firmly tied to other issues (especially social issues like abortion), the idea of a democratic revolt becomes fairly abstract. I think this where a lot of the government's fear of economic recessions comes from. When people are out of work, or even hungry, suddenly they become a lot more excitable. (tagged: transparencylawpolicepoliticstechnologyinternet )
Condensing steam without water – Concentrating solar thermal power stations are ultimately designed to run a steam turbine, just like a gas-fired power plant. That means they need water (to turn into steam). Problematically, most such plants use water as a condensing coolant (70% of Caltech's water usage is as coolant for our 14MW worth of gas-fired power)… which is going to be hard to come by in the desert, where CSP will be built. Thankfully, there's a way to recondense steam without using a water coolant – but it does require a huge cooling tower. Not so great in Pasadena, but probably fine in the Mojave, next to acres and acres of mirrors. (tagged: solarenergytechnologysustainabilitygreenelectricitywater )
Rousing a Latent Defense Mechanism to Fight HIV – It turns out there is a gene in humans that produces a protein which inhibits infection by HIV, but it has a mutation – a premature stop codon – which prevents it from being effectively synthesized. This mutation doesn't exist in most Old World monkeys (and that's apparently why they can't get HIV). Undoing the mutation allows the protein to be synthesized, and grants HIV immunity to human cells. I imagine that undoing bad mutations like this, and our inability to synthesize vitamin C, might be the first place we see human germ-line engineering outside of disease avoidance (preventing e.g. cystic fibrosis). Really, these mutations are hard to distinguish from genetic diseases – they're just diseases that we, as a species, have learned to live with. (tagged: geneticengineeringhivaidsbiologyscienceresearchplosmedicine )
Anna in the Middle East – Anna Baltzer is a Jewish American who got a Fulbright fellowship to live in the West Bank in 2005, and document the experiences of Palestinians. She's been giving presentations about it ever since. Some parts of her presentation are available via YouTube too. From the 15 minutes I watched she seemed like a level headed critic. She's speaking in Boulder and Denver in May. (tagged: israelpalestinepoliticsfulbrightpeacewar )
Twitter + Stimulus = Humans are Gullible – A wonderful demonstration of the power of the confirmatory bias. Twitter is the perfect platform for the injection of random falsehoods. Too short for citations. Instantaneous distribution. Make sure your followers are predisposed to agree with what you say, and you can get them to believe just about anything – within that constraint. Too bad the author seems to think this only applies to conservatives. (tagged: politicstwitterstatisticspropaganda )
Government Data and the Case for Not Running Me Over2010/07/24 A good short note on how open (but still semi-broken) government data can help make all kinds of policy discussions more substantive. And how much better it would all be if it weren't so borken. As applied to the question of who pays for roads (everyone, it turns out, including cyclists).
Boulder is a city "wired for biking" - The Denver Post2010/07/21 Well thankfully I'm not the *only* person who has noticed how nice it is to bike here! Boulder has a whopping 10% modeshare for bikes (commuting), and a 46% increase in bikes downtown over the last 2 years. Please please please let this be a runaway process.
Xeromag | Polyamory?2010/07/21 A decent devil's advocate type description of what "polyamory" means. Lots of continuum variables...
Boulder Green Streets2010/07/19 Boulder is experimenting with temporary de-motorization of some streets, semi-Ciclovia style, and half a block from my house!
Icelander’s Campaign Is a Joke, Until He’s Elected2010/06/26 Go Iceland! Strange things happen in countries the size of cities. And even if you don't agree with this particular iteration, we need more experiments. More long tail governmental experiments. What we've got today just doesn't cut it.
The Real Science Gap2010/06/26 A much broader and more data driven historical look at how gradschool, and the system of science in the US, got so broken. Freakishly published only a couple of weeks ago. I had no idea it existed when I wrote my essay.
Tuna’s End2010/06/25 We will eat them all. Every. Last. One.
Don't Become a Scientist!2010/06/24 Jonathan Katz, a professor at Wash U., advises us not to become scientists. Not because science is evil or untrue, but because the system we have constructed for doing science, at and beyond the graduate level, is fundamentally broken.
