A Random Crawl

Check this out: Laptops: A Blessing or a Curse? (Via 43 Folders.)

This is a real problem for me. I always have my laptop with me and I am constantly creating things to do with it. This blog is a great example. Recently, I was in Lisbon and the logic board in my laptop decided to call it quits. By the time I returned and got it sorted out, I was without my laptop for 3 weeks. At first I went through withdrawal and then I got use to not constantly working with it. I cannot say that I was more productive but I definitely did other things.

So…what is the solution. Well the comments so far to the original article are not that helpful. One suggestion is buy a screen making your laptop more like a desktop or just buy a desktop. I having been thinking about both options for awhile but have not been willing to spend the money. A free solution is to put your laptop somewhere that you don’t have easy access to it so that you are not tempted to soy write this blog.

Netflix Community Blog: Instant watching on Mac, Firefox, and more

BBC NEWS | Technology | Paper battery offers future power: "Flexible paper batteries could meet the energy demands of the next generation of gadgets, says a team of researchers. They have produced a sample slightly larger than a postage stamp that can release about 2.3 volts, enough to illuminate a small light."

Simple, elegant, cool use of physics. Wow! Enough said.

Indians predated Newton ‘discovery’ by 250 years: "A little known school of scholars in southwest India discovered one of the founding principles of modern mathematics hundreds of years before Newton according to new research"

Most of the comments focus on the fact that yet another white male’s accomplishments are being questioned. However, what is of interest to me, which is not discussed in the article, is what other conceptual achievements Kerala school innovated. The fact that there was the potential of cultural transmission of mathematical ideas makes me wonder about the universality of the concepts. There is a sense of wonder associated with the idea that multiple individuals from distinct cultural contexts innovated the same mathematical concepts. The universal feel to such a statement makes religions interest in mathematical and scientific pursuits comprehensible. In a way, this is not about Newton’s achievements but rather about the mystery of universality.

Baby Einstein DVDs Don’t Work | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source: Baby Einstein DVDs Don’t Work A research team at the University of Washington has determined that babies watching television for an hour a day learned less vocabulary than babies that watched no television. What do you think?

Rick Klein, Golf Pro, ‘True, but they develop witty comebacks and zingers a lot earlier.’

Cynthia Haggarty, Mail Sorter, ‘I’m happy to teach my baby personally, but are these researchers aware that everything I know also comes from TV?’

Paul Lamphert, Systems Analyst, ‘This is great news. Finally a proven method to get my baby to shut the hell up."

Freeman Dyson: “As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate. Their purpose is to imagine what might happen rather than to describe what will happen. I will be telling stories that challenge the prevailing dogmas of today. The prevailing dogmas may be right, but they still need to be challenged. I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies. Since I am heretic, I am accustomed to being in the minority. If I could persuade everyone to agree with me, I would not be a heretic.”

What is the job of a scientist? One metaphor depicts a scientist as a warrior doing battle with mother nature, forcing her to give up her secrets. Another depicts a scientist as a painter constructing a portrait of mother nature using shades of evidence. What is common to the metaphors of science, perhaps only implicitly, is that the product of science is understanding. A scientist is a seeker, a creator, a discover, and a reasoner. But if this is the case then perhaps the product of science is not just understanding but rather a means of understanding. I would argue that the means of understanding offered by science is as much a social contribution as the particular understandings that this means produces. In this way, I resonate with Freeman Dyson’s call for heretics. That is, his call for those who question in a way to produce new understandings. Perhaps, just perhaps, science is just a process of understanding generation, and thus, to abandon this process for the mundane contentment of an understanding is to cease being a scientist.

The Passage – Book – Justin Cronin – New York Times: “‘I’m sure in some year-end meetings, someone has to account for them, and someone loses a job,’ said Amy Schiffman, vice president of books and literary properties at the Gersh Agency. ‘But every year the studios keep clamoring for more, now more than ever. There are a lot of Harry Potter wannabes in development, trying to get to be movies. The conventional wisdom of the studios now is, you risk more, you make more.’”

Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, these recent successful series have chummed the waters of hollywood. Inciting a feeding frenzy which devours even the old boot tossed by the lucky new millionaire. Perhaps I am jealous of those receiving the freedom of real money for what might be more fodder for the literary rubbish heap, but I cannot help being fascinated by the industry of entertainment. One day, perhaps, I will pen a tale that will impact the lives of entertainment executives but leave the masses wanting for a catharsis. Well…perhaps not.

Fruits, Veggies Don’t Stop Cancer Return: "CHICAGO—Hopes that a diet low in fat and chock-full of fruits and vegetables could prevent the return of breast cancer were dashed Tuesday by a large, seven-year experiment in more than 3,000 women."

(Via washingtonpost.com – Health.)

The article describes a study conducted over 7 years with 3,000+ breast cancer survivors. What the study found was that the proportion of women who passed away or whose cancer returned was not influenced by the fact that they ate an extra dose of veggies. However, the article does note that the important part of healthy living if not veggies might actually be weight.

These days healthy living has become a cure-all. Don’t get me wrong, eating healthy and exercising is an important part of a good-productive life but when it becomes THE focus for all health issues it becomes a tautology (To live healthy is to be healthy). Even worse it can be misleading and in some cases an unfair accusation.

When I was undergoing radiation therapy, after having endured 6 months of chemotherapy, I met with a nutritionalist as part of my treatment. She was big on the veggies, so much so, that she implied that the fact I had cancer was because of my nutrition. I think her true motivation was green. Eating less meat is more eco savy.

Perhaps it is because I do science for a living that I was actually insulted more by the simplicity of her causal explanation then by the assertion that the cause of my cancer was under my control. So, like any good researcher I went to find the facts. From the research I did back then (should go dig up the links) I found that only in a few cancers was there evidence that nutrition MIGHT play a role. In truth, the molecular story behind how veggies are converted into cancer repellent is rather weak and unsubstantiated.

Of course when being treat for cancer it is important to eat well enough to keep your body running and capable of handling the treatments. But here calories are just, if not more, important then veggies.

Yes, yes by all means eat your veggies but don’t mistake that with health.

I found this neat little donationware on the AppleBlog. It seems to be an easy two dimensional way of categorizing your music which provides a nice way of creating coalesced shuffles.

Read more here or check out here

The purpose of this blog is to record my web travels. I am a die hard procrastinator so I spend a lot of wasting time crawling through the web. On these crawls I often find stuff that might be of interest to my friends resulting in an emailed link or page. But, why should their work and life flows be interrupted by my procrastinations? From this murky question this blog was born. By blogging my crawls I can satisfy my need to pull friends into my wasting without assaulting their mailboxes. The crawls will seem randomly related  but they merely represent the varied interests of my procrastination habit. The most common themes will be Software for the Mac, Science and Health News, Interesting Photos, Anime, and in general geeky stuff.