Archive for the ‘Google Reader’ Category
Mild Soap and Water Is Better for Your Wounds than Peroxide or Alcohol [Health]
29
Jul
Graphic of the Day: Who Borrowed? Who Loaned?
28
Jul
A picture says a thousand words. From the NYT today:
In particular, who racked up $6.1 trillion in debt?
For more graphs, see here and here.
Update 9:20am 7/29: Reader CoRev excoriates me for using a graphic along FY lines (well a lot of spending is baked in, so Presidents usually are more responsible for the FYs that the NY Times allocated). Well, since we have a set of magical instruments called the Internet, and Excel, we can easily see that there is little change using quarterly data, and timing the cumulations more tightly.
Figure 0: Cumulative changes in publicly held debt, by Presidential administrations, in millions of $, NSA. Source: Treasury via FREDII (series FYGFDPUN), and directly from Treasury for 2011Q1.
I don't see a drastic revision to the stylized facts. Here is a corresponding graph normalized by GDP, which is more relevant.
Figure 1: Cumulative changes in publicly held debt, by Presidential administrations, in millions of $, NSA, normalized by GDP, in billions of $, SAAR, all through 2011Q1. Source: Treasury via FREDII (series FYGFDPUN), Band directly from Treasury for 2011Q1, BEA 2011Q2 advance release, and author's calculations.
Note that in this last graph, the "Clinton" block is below the zero line because publicly held debt was paid down during the Clinton Administration, in ppts of GDP terms. If we normalized by potential nominal GDP, the Obama block would look smaller. I also find of interest the debt accumulated during Reagan, GHW Bush, and Bush Administrations versus that during Clinton and Obama... (recalling Clinton paid down, as a share of GDP).
Citriodora House by Seeley Architects
28
Jul
Seeley Architects have designed the Citriodora House in the town of Anglesea, Australia.
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Citriodora House by Seeley Architects
‘Citriodora’ is a holiday retreat set amongst a stand of beautiful Lemon scented gums, near Australia’s famed Great Ocean Road in Anglesea, Victoria. It is one of a number of inspired beach houses that Seeley Architects have designed over the past 10 or so years in this small coastal holiday hamlet.
The name ‘Citriodora’ is derived from the botanical name of the beautiful trees that dominate the northern corner of the property.
Inspired by the affects of the coastal winds, the form of the roof gently rolls, mimicking the shape of the wind pruned coastal vegetation. There is both simplicity and complexity in this building with large negative spaces offering views to the sky, battened screens proving visual privacy to the neighbours and two massive concrete walls forming a prehistoric spine through the middle. A thermal heat soak for the interior that mediates the diurnal temperature variations within the house.
This beautiful dwelling has been designed to maximise the opportunities offered by the site, with a character that respects its locality and environment.
The layout of the house is centred around a raised east facing living platform capturing coastal views and connections into the treetops. It is reminiscent of an adult’s tree house.
The approach to this house is a gentle rise gently from the street. It is sited in the lee of a small hill and nestled closely between two neighbouring houses.
Upon entering the house, you are greeted by massive in-situ concrete walls that form the staircase spine and dominate the entry space. This floor is the teenager’s zone with a swathe of bunks, a TV nook and a pool table for the obligatory holiday competitions.
Rising upward into the kitchen – living area, one’s eye is taken by the breathtaking views along the coastal cliffs and Southern ocean. Separated from the living zone by a protected courtyard deck and a generous internal void, lays the master bedroom, study, bathroom and a guest bedroom. The ceiling that sweeps generous over the entire upper level is gently formed from plywood and is reminiscent of the hull of an upturned yacht.
Wrapping around the exterior of the house is sustainable grown timber boards, fixed with maritime bronze nails, resisting the harsh coastal conditions and gradually weathering to a soft driftwood grey, a reference to the Citriodora tree’s bark.
This elegantly simple house uses a minimal palette with an aesthetic pared back to the essentials. It will gradually develop a patina over time, further blending with the grey-green of the site vegetation and providing a positive response to its impressive loci.
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Visit the Seeley Architects website – here.
Photography by Zoe Economides, John Walker, and David Seeley
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Photos of the new Total Recall being filmed in Toronto
27
Jul
Although the new monster-budget remake of 1990's Total Recall has been filming in Toronto for almost two months, thus far the action has been mostly confined to the sound stage at Pinewood Studios on Commissioners Street in the Port Lands. Earlier this week, however, the production got a whole lot more public. With stars Colin Farrell and Jessica Biel in tow, film crews descended on Lake Shore Avenue East to shoot one of what will likely be a number of chase scenes in the $200 million movie, the most expensive to be shot in Toronto to date.
I'm not one to gawk at celebrities, but I've always been fascinated by behind-the-scenes shots of film productions, particularly those which promise to feature gratuitous special effects. While I have little difficulty suspending disbelief in the theatre, it remains intriguing to see what the filmmakers and editors have to work with, even if it's invariably less exciting than the final product.
The stretch of Lake Shore where the filming took place is back open today, but one suspects this isn't the last time that the Total Recall cast and crew make an appearance outside the studio. Check out the photos below, and if you have shots of the production, send them to the blogTO Flickr pool. Lead shot by syfractal.
Photo by dtstuff9
Photo by Max Quijano
Plutonium Is Hot Suspect in Pioneer Spacecraft Mystery
26
Jul
By Duncan Geere, Wired UK
A 30-year mystery as to why the Pioneer spacecraft have slowly been drifting off course is close to being explained — the latest analysis pins the blame on heat.
In 1980, an algorithm to study gravitational effects in the outer solar system was concocted by astronomer John Anderson, but it didn’t quite work. There was a discrepancy — small but noticeable — between the readings predicted by the algorithm and those actually observed from the Pioneer spacecrafts’ radio signal. The phenomenon was named the Pioneer Anomaly.
Physicists struggled to explain the discrepancy, proposing complex theories that even included a suggestion that gravity might behave differently at large distances from the Earth. However, the most recent analysis suggests a rather more mundane explanation — heat from the plutonium inside the spacecrafts’ generators.
If heat is radiating evenly in all directions from the spacecraft, then there will be no effect on its course, but if there’s a difference of as little as five percent between the front and the back then that could explain the difference between the predicted course and the course that’s actually been observed. The smoking gun is that the level of deceleration seems to be decreasing at an exponential rate, which tallies with the radioactive decay of the plutonium-238 that powers the two spacecraft.
It’s not completely out of the question that there might be another culprit, but it’s looking increasingly unlikely. NASA is performing its own investigation to compare to the data, but if that comes out with heat as the cause too, then the 30-year mystery may finally be over.
Image: NASA
Source: Wired.co.uk
Via: Discovery News
See Also:
- Space Probe Gets Halfway to Pluto in Record Time
- Reactor Drawings Make Nuclear History Beautiful
- Giant Crater Is Next Mars Rover Landing Site
- Understanding Japan’s Nuclear Crisis
- Neutrino Transformation Could Help Explain Mystery of Matter
- Chemists Inch Closer to Stable Superheavy Atoms
The Vizosphere
25
Jul
There are lots of people on Twitter who talk visualization. Moritz Stefaner had some fun with Gephi for a view of a whole lot of those people. He calls it the Vizosphere.
This map shows 1645 twitter accounts related to the topic of information visualization. The accounts were determined as follows: For a subjective selection of "seed accounts", the twitter API was queried for followers and friends. In order to be included into the map, a user account needed to have at least 5 links (i.e. follow or being followed) to one of these a
ccounts. The size of the network nodes indicates the number of followers within this network.
Check out the high-res version in the player below.
Cross-Species Gadget Tests Reveal Reason for Dolphin Tools
25
Jul
The dolphins of Australia’s Shark Bay, famed as Earth’s first marine tool-users, likely turned to gadgetry because echolocation couldn’t find the best fish, especially for hurried moms without time to hunt.
It was in 1984 that researchers first observed the dolphins fitting basket sponges over their beaks, then scraping through seafloor mud to disturb hidden fish. Research subsequently showed this behavior to be full-blown tool use, taught by mothers to their daughters and representing a profound difference in lifestyle between them and Shark Bay’s other bottlenoses.
A basic question remained unanswered, however: Though sponges clearly protected sensitive dolphin snouts from jagged pieces of rock and coral, why scrape seafloor at all? Why not rely on echolocation to pinpoint target prey?
In a study published July 20 in Public Library of Science ONE, biologists Eric Patterson and Janet Mann of Georgetown University set out to answer this question by mounting basket sponges on sticks and pushing them through Shark Bay seafloors, just as dolphins do.
Most fish scared from the muck were bottom-dwellers lacking swim bladders, the air-filled organs that help fish control their buoyancy. Compared to fish flesh, which interferes with acoustic signals just slightly more than water, air bladders stand out on sonar. Without them, bottom-dwelling fish are nearly invisible to echolocation. Hence the value of scraping through seafloors manually, and thus the need for a device that protects dolphin noses from scraping.
Hunting with sponges has allowed Shark Bay’s bottlenoses to fill an empty ecological niche, eating fish that other dolphins ignore, wrote Patterson and Mann. The findings also suggest why sponge foraging likely arose among Shark Bay’s females and has remained their province, taught by dolphin mothers to daughters rather than sons.
Whereas dolphin fathers are mostly absent, free to roam and chase prey in the open ocean, dolphin moms spend years with their calves. They need to put food on the figurative table but have little time to do it. Sponge foraging is convenient and nutritious, a family recipe for quick-but-delicious dinners passed on to daughters who will someday need it.
Image: Eric Patterson/PLoS ONE
See Also:
- To Talk With Aliens, Learn to Speak With Dolphins
- Chimps and Dolphins Share Cultural Similarities
- Whales Might Be as Much Like People as Apes Are
- Clever Critters: 8 Best Non-Human Tool Users
- Monkeys Are Gadget Junkies, Too
- Female Chimpanzees Drive the Culture
Citation: “The Ecological Conditions That Favor Tool Use and Innovation in Wild Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops sp.). By Eric Patterson & Janet Mann. PLoS ONE, July 20, 2011.
Black Hole Holds Universe’s Biggest Water Supply
25
Jul
By Mark Brown, Wired UK
Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever found in the universe. It’s 12 billion light years away, and holds at least 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the Earth’s oceans combined.
This quasar holds a black hole that’s 20 billion times more massive than the sun, and after gobbling down dust and gas it belches out as much energy as a thousand trillion suns. The water vapor is spread around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light years.
“The environment around this quasar is unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,†says Matt Bradford from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release.
“It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times,†adds Bradford in the release. As the light from this watery quasar took 12 billion years to reach Earth, the observations come from a time when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old.
The water reservoir was discovered by astronomers, led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology, and using the Z-Spec instrument at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii and the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA) in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.
Both instruments observe in the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, which lie between infrared and microwave wavelengths. Over the last two to three decades, this technique has allowed astronomers to find trace gases, including water vapor, in the earliest universe.
Astronomers are now building a new telescope that specializes in these wavelengths. The proposed 25-meter telescope is called CCAT (Cornell Caltech Atacama Telescope) and would be plopped on the Cerro Chajnantor lava dome, more than 5,600 meters above sea level.
By measuring the presence of water and other important trace gases, it would allow cosmic researchers to hunt out primordial galaxies and more accurately study their composition. CCAT should start construction in 2013 and be completed in 2017.
Image: ESA/V. Beckmann (NASA-GSFC)
Source: Wired.co.uk
See Also:
- Soggy Universe: Astronomers Find Most Distant Water Yet
- Saturn’s Most Habitable Moon Offers Ice, Water, Killer Views
- Spacecraft Flies Through Cosmic Snowstorm
- Hot Water Around Giant Carbon Star Creates Interstellar Mystery
- Saturn’s Icy Moon Might Have an Ocean
- Millions of Tons of Water Ice Found at Moon’s North Pole