Fnord.

Grocery store run tonight, this was marked on the floor next to the checkout as they renovate the place. It’s right behind the automated checkout “I am not a shoplifter” station:

There it is, all clear. Having been a radiation worker myself, I have a good idea of the actual safety and regulatory requirements for an actual x-ray generator, so I have to guess this is an error, but the mind boggles. Terahertz-based package scanners? RFID anti-shoplifting? The mind boggles. Hit the comments and post your idea. Bonus points for aliens, mind control and the Trilaterals.

I raved about Hong Kong previously, but a couple of days ago Thomas Friedman wrote a much better essay on the NYT about returning to the US from Hong Kong:

It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

 My quote was much less eloquent:

Yeah, the phone booths have WiFi; the US has become a second-world nation in many ways.

Friedman goes on to inveigle the vast numbers of smart, ambitious people who went to Wall Street and similar where “Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real” instead of actual productive work such as science or engineering. I can personally attest to the brain drain from the national labs, where really really smart PhDs were recruited to do modeling and prediction. Unmatched pay (I refuse to sully perfectly good English by availing myself of euphemisms like “compensation.”) and working conditions, compared to places like FNAL where we had pest-infested doublewide trailers:

You’ve not had fun until you have a raccoon die under your trailer and rot there for a few months. Yum.

Anyway, Friedman nails it in how modern HK is compared to the USA, and how we’d best stop wasting our best minds on financial prestidigitation. Go have a read. 

I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Algeria this morning (following up on the excellent NYT article on nuclear proliferation; France used the Algerian desert as a test range) and discovered that Algiers has Tuaregs:

Which made me wonder if VW considered the name clash for their Touareg:

(Both pics are from Wikipedia and lead to their source pages.)

Odd name choice for an SUV, wouldn’t you think?

I’ve written before about sugar and obesity, but today I found a whopper of an article on previously-linked “In the Pipeline”. Get this:

The large amount of high-fructose corn syrup produced and used in the US and other industrialized countries makes this an issue with very large political, economic, and public health implications.
…
It’s going to take a while to make sure, but if things continue along this path, there could be reasons for a large change in the industrialized human diet.

He links to a paper on fructose vs glucose and the takeaway seems to be that fructose makes you feel less full, not more. The opposite effect from glucose.

Read the complete post for a much more detailed analysis, but the use of HFCS will, I hope, come under a great deal more scrutiny.

Years ago, one of my favorite quotations was from “The Book of Merlin,” by TH White. (Google now has the entire book online here.) I’m lazy, so this is abridged from a large paragraph:

We find that at present the human race is divided poltically into one wise man, nine knaves and ninety fools out of every hundred. . . the ninety fools plod off behind the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare.

Which brings me to another book. I’m not sure where I found the link, but I’ve been reading a book called ‘The Authoritarians‘ by academic Bob Altemeyer. It’s a free download in PDF format and represents an entire careers’ worth of research on authoritarians. Outlook, motivation, transmission of ideas, and a great deal more. He does a nice job of balancing opinion with solid data and surveys, so no matter your leanings its a fascinating and worthwhile read.

For example, I’ve been puzzled why candidate A keeps repeating statements provably false. Altemayer’s work explains that the target subgroup wants to believe and has no problems accepting conflicting statements from authority. So, basically, the Big Lie works due to mental shortcomings of the target audience.

Read it. Along with, perhaps, Cialdini’s “Persuasion.” Then join me in fearing for the future of our country.

Even by my standards!

First off, the scary sphere:

Check out the plate details:

Yep, that says ‘North American Aviation, Missile Division.’ I have no idea.

Now, if this doesn’t say ‘Death Ray Sci-Fi,’ what does?

(Especially with the blue center and handle, tres cool.)

Last but not least:

Well, maybe it is least, we used to use these in our labs to watch temp and humidity. Min bid $50, ouch.

Anyway, you can browse their catalog online, kinda cool. 

I was going to post these as a normal album on the photos page, but for some reason they’re crashing bins, my album software of choice. I’ve filed a bug, but for now I’ll use the Wordpress album feature. Enjoy!

Update 5/24/08: Bug fixed, courtesy of those lovely Debian developers. Album posted here.

(With apologies to Bart Howard)

Yep, NASA is running a promo for their return to the Moon, where your name goes onto a computer chip. Nearly free for them, good PR, and kinda cool at the same time. Our entire family will be aboard, though this is the first they’ll hear of it.

Actually, you get a cool PDF with images and logos, nice piece of work:

Go here to sign yourself up!

Via Science in the News (good newsletter, by the way) a depressing article in the Times Online entitled ‘Sexist Culture Drives Women Out of Science.’

(The picture is Marie Curie, who knew all about science and sexism. Picture from Wikipedia.)

Here’s a long quote:

The majority choose their children and alternative careers instead of struggling with the hurdles of a macho “lab coat culture” with long hours, old boys’ networks and the risk of sexual harassment.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist at the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York and the lead author of the study, said the research had revealed a world with values seemingly stuck in the 1970s.

She said: “It has been a bit like a time warp. This predatory or condescending culture [towards women] was more common across the workplace 20 to 30 years ago but has somehow survived in an engineering, science and technology context.

“It is the hidden brain drain. We have this amazing, talented pool of women who have left the industry. It is highly destructive to our society and economy.”

I can testify to its existence, having seen the toll on friends and family alike. How’s this for pathetic?

The study, to be published in the Harvard Business Review on Thursday, found that while women made up 41% of newly qualified technical staff, more than half dropped out by the time they reached their late thirties.

Nearly two-thirds of all women surveyed said they had been victims of sexual harassment in the workplace. A similar number objected to the “lab coat culture”, in which researchers laboured over experiments, “tethered to the microscope”, for up to 12 hours a day.

More than half dropped out? Damn but we suck.

Ever wondered how the tiny quartz crystals in your watch, computer, TV, remote control, microwave, car key, etc are made? New Zealand manufacturer Rakon has a a very nice presentation of the entire process here, in either slideshow or single-page format. (The pictures are better in the slideshow)Very cool!  The first picture is of a multi-blade slurry saw, and the second is of the x-ray machine used to check crystal orientation… I knew that diffraction would show up here somewhere.