BoomFlag

For my birthday I received what could only be described as a unique gift. It’s a “binary clock” that shows the time with LEDs arranged in columns of binary numbers. One reads the six columns from left to right to produce the digits in the hour, minute, and second.

The little instruction manual claims that “with a few minutes of practice” you can read the binary clock as well as a standard one. Laralee and I plugged it in and stared at it for a few minutes, mesmerized by the changing lights, but I can’t honestly say we came away from the exercise with the ability to tell time in binary.

We did, however, discuss what time it would be when the most LEDs were on. We couldn’t figure out when that would happen, although it’s clear that seven is an important component of that time since it requires three LEDs. There were also discussions of what times would produce interesting patterns like pyramids or checkerboards.

Definitely a clock for geeks.

Kyra got a haircut, and she thinks she looks terribly cute with the new style.

(She’s right, of course.)

“So, if I just hit this deletey thing, it’ll all go away, right?”

Many news sources are reporting today about the paper released by a group of sixty scientists (twenty of whom have a Nobel Prize in their living room) condemning the Bush administration’s treatment of scientific research.

Specifically, they claim the administration has “deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals” with regard to research on the environment, medicine, nuclear weaponry, and so on. They further contend that reports unfavorable to the administration policies were censored or discarded, that advisory committees were loaded with unqualified political appointees, and that the administration refused to seek independent confirmation of reports in line with their agenda.

Personally this comes as no great surprise, and only sharpens my feeling that Bush and his cronies are the worst thing this country needs right now. Of course other administrations have done similar things– suppressing information that happens to be contradictory to their policies or direction. But according to this report, our current administration has gone far beyond the “usual” levels and continues to subvert scientific progress when it feels threatened.

It’s already clear the administration distorted intelligence reports regarding Iraq in order to accomplish its agenda, so in a way this seems like “par for the course”… if it doesn’t agree with you, shut it down. When you’re at the top of the government totem pole, you have the power to do exactly that.

Where does it end? Is there no limit to the authority of Bush and his cronies? Can they hide, doctor, or otherwise discard anything that stands in their way?

Sigh.

Happy birthday to me!

Follow-up to the Poser Question:

Chancellor the Wise has pointed out to me that cylindrical tanker cars have more structural strength than rectangular boxcar shapes. I suppose efficiency of structure is more important than efficiency of volume, at least in this case…

Today’s Poser Question is this:

Why are tanker cars on trains, and tanker trucks, cylindrical? This shape is certainly less space-efficient than a box… why not use a boxcar-like shape instead, which would hold more liquid?

Taken from a funny (in a satirical sort of way) “anti-valentine’s day” site…

Every now and then my e-mail goes nuts. See the screenshot below, showing my mail program downloading messages at a furious pace. It’s not spam– at least, most of it isn’t spam– because it’s from a client sending out thousands of messages to people. Lucky me, as the server administrator I get all the bounce messages.

Thank goodness for mail filters. I never see any of these messages; they get dumped into a folder somewhere…

Sometimes it seems like being a researcher could be a lot of fun.

Take today’s announcement from a group of scientists at Princeton: they recently completed experiments that show the “packing density” of M&M candy is higher than that of similarly-sized spheres (in this case, small ball bearings).

Imagine, first, the guy who thought up this experiment. You can almost picture a group of white-coated guys lounging around the lab, just having finished their latest foray into nuclear physics or something, tossing down some M&M’s and Pepsi. One of them– probably the one drinking Bud instead of Pepsi– suddenly laughs and says, “You know, I wonder how many M&M’s would fit into this keg.”

From there the experiment is born, and they spend weeks filling containers with M&M’s and ball bearings, counting them, eating them (the M&M’s, not the ball bearings), and scratching everything down on graph paper. They know they’ll never get published if they describe such an experiment, so they decide to– get this– create a computer simulation of a keg filled with M&M’s.

Then, after they’ve finished all the experiments and computer runs, they need to somehow justify this whole project. So they come up with a justification; in the words of one article, “The scientists say their work is important to anyone involved in the study of particle packing.”

Thank goodness those particle-packing people will have this landmark new research!

Pass the M&M’s.