The 10 Geek laws

The awesome GeekDad blog has a list of 10 Geek laws, or axioms, akin to Poe's law.

These laws aren't like the natural laws, which describe the universe in elegantly concise equations. Rather, these laws capture ideas essential to the lives of present-day humans (i.e., Geeks) in tiny nuggets of wisdom.

My favourite is:

"4. Somers [sic] and McCarthy’s Law: There is no dangerous unscientific theory so preposterous that no celebrity will espouse and advocate it."

Click through for the other nine.

When dowsing wands attack!

When dowsers said they could detect underground water with their rods, or wands or magical fairy pendulums we said "no you can't." But most people didn't listen.

In fact, most dowsers are genuinely convinced they really can detect water, or gold, or whatever they want. If only they understood how confirmation bias worked...

But that's a story for another day.

Usually I live and let live. Most of the time dowsers aren't hurting anyone very much... unless you consider taking advantage of a trust hurtful. However, this is outrageous.

A UK company is making millions selling dowsing 'bomb detection wands' to the Iraqi military, who are abandoning proven methods.

Just think about that. People are going to be blown to pieces because a group of ignorant, money grubbing, credulous dowsers in the UK either 1) can't be bothered educating themselves about basic science, or 2) understand that they're selling fraudulent products, and don't care that they will result in violent painful maiming and death.

I'm irate, and you should be too.

Should Claire be worried?

In a moment of introspection this morning, I noticed I was doing something odd, and thought I'd share it with you.

I have to take medication every morning (no, it's not anti-insanity pills), and I've got a memory like a ... well... a thing with a really bad memory. Problem is, I forget take my pill regularly, well that's not accurate, more like randomly, but on a regular basis... lets say regulandomly.

Anyway, due to my regulandomly pill forgetting I set a daily reminder on my iPhone. Now, and here we get to the possibly worrying bit, every morning at 7:05 my iPhone chimes and a message pops up. I've begun responding to my iPhone by saying something like "sound advice Mr iPhone", or "thankyou iPhone."

So... am I talking to my phone? Or since I set the reminder, am I merely having a one-way conversation with myself in the past? Or should I possibly start taking the anti-insanity pills as well?

So obvious now...

In what might become a trend... or not, you'll have to wait and see... here's some geek news. Well, not news per se, since it's from 2003, but in a way it's kind of timeless.

Anyway, getting on with it, have you ever played Sim City? Go on. I won't tell anyone... yes, I knew you had. Anyway, why did this never occur to us?

What's that, it did occur to you? Oh, well, then you're a little weird. But in the same direction as the Penny Arcade boys. And that's a compliment. See what I did there, it looked like I was insulting you, but it was actually a compliment. Witty, witty stuff.

OMG Want!

Playing Dungeons and Dragons on the new MS surface? Yes please!

If only they'd improve the speed of the dice rolls... or improve the dice physics for that matter... or let you roll real dice on the MS surface!

Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Visual Story TAs on Vimeo.

Why the apocalypse won't suck: boobs.

This is the kind of research that makes the future, even the darkest scariest bits of our potential the future, brighter. A bra that converts to a gas mask! ... or more accurately, two gas masks.

Think of the implications people! Not only will we survive thanks to this invention but our quality of life will be significantly improved when we’re most at need. During the most dispiriting first days, when the sky is a reddish brown and fallout rains down, we will be cheered by our wives, girl friends and SOs bra-less boobs.

Inspiring work people. Inspiring.

At this point some of you are probably thinking “he’s kinda’ an ass”, or “if there was an apocalypse I wouldn’t give him MY gasmask bra”. So I’d like to say this: women are much more than their boobs, they are our equals in every way. I just really like boobs. I think this audio essay by Tim Minchin sums it up better than I ever could.

Why Stardust is awesome

NASA has just revealed that the Stardust spacecraft has found glycine in the tail of a comet!

"But Ken", you say, "so what?"

Well, I'll tell you what! Glycine is a fundamental building block of life, which is a fancy way of saying that glycine is one of the 20 amino acids that ALL of our cells are built from. Finding glycine in space adds further weight to the panspermia theory that I was on about recently.

Breifly, panspermia is the theory that life on earth was "seeded from space". Panspermia argues that either life, or the building blocks of life, were transported to earth from somewhere else by some mechanism.

Before we could consider the panspermia theory to be plausible (which is the lowest level of theory) we'd need to know two things:

1. that stuff can be transported from planet to planet (either within or between solar systems), and
   
2. that life or the building blocks of life exist elsewhere.

Now, point one is cool, we already know that it's happened in our very own solar system: we've found Meteorites from Mars on Earth... well, we don't know it in any absolutist positivist sense, but you know what I mean, there are multiple converging lines of evidence and a Martian origin is the strongest theory explaining their origins.

Moving on, the discovery of glycene in a comet in our own solar system is strong evidence for point two. I say strong evidence because there's already some evidence of amino acids in space, although it's somwehat equivocal (i.e., not 100 % convincing, could be caused by other things).

So, Stardust discoverd glycene in a comets tail, and life might have come from the void between stars. Stardust is awesome.

Q.E.D

P.S. Ha, I get it! Stardust! D'you see why they named it that?