All posts by Tom Marcinko

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A few kind words about Michael Crichton

Because even I have a heart, let the record show that Discover lists The Top 5 “Crazy” Michael Crichton Ideas That Actually Came True.

  1. Talking gorillas (Congo)
  2. Self-replicating robots (Prey)
  3. Superbugs from space (The Andromeda Strain). OK, this sounds like a stretch, but: “…[W]e’ve also discovered that some [microorganism] strains become more virulent when sent into space. (Though fear not: They become far less deadly once they’ve made the journey home.)”
  4. Brain implants (The Terminal Man)
  5. Cloning dead (or even extinct) animals (that novel about dinos, the name of which escapes me):  Maybe overstating a bit, but: “[S]cientists have successfully cloned mice that have been dead and frozen for 16 years.”

Not all these ideas are exactly original to Crichton.  Still, take that, me.

[Tribute to the author by DML East Branch]

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Testing spray-on solar cells

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A microscopic sensor to detect toxins needs a power source.  Xiaomei Jiang and colleagues at the University of South Florida respond with an array of 20 polymer-based cells, each about the size of a 12-point lower-case letter O.

The polymer they selected has the same electrical properties as silicon wafers, but can be dissolved and printed onto flexible material. “I think these materials have a lot more potential than traditional silicon,” Jiang said. “They could be sprayed on any surface that is exposed to sunlight — a uniform, a car, a house.”

The next step is to test the array with the sensors. The team hopes to generate 15 volts by the end of the year.

[Sun Spray by littleblackcamera]

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This post on irony is really wonderful

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Christopher Moore said somewhere that irony isn’t just a literary device, but a basic property of the universe. [citation needed] If so, that might explain why some psychologists think human beings are hardwired with a sense of irony. Psychologist Penny M. Pexman of the University of Calgary in Alberta…

…trained kids to associate niceness with a smiling yellow duck and meanness with a snarling gray shark. Then they watched puppet shows, in which the puppets made both sarcastic and literal remarks. Rather than asking the kids to interpret the remarks, she tracked their eye gaze, to see whether they shifted their attention ever so slightly toward the shark or the duck after a particular remark….

If kids were indeed processing every sentence as literally true to begin with, then their eyes would reveal that. That is, they would look automatically at the duck on hearing “Well, that’s just great.” But they did not. When that sentence was used ironically, their eyes went immediately to the mean shark. The irony required no laborious cognitive crunching. They processed the insincerity as rapidly as they processed the basic meaning of the words.

[Image: carbonNYC]

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‘Flux transfer events’ connect Earth and Sun

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News to me:

Like giant, cosmic chutes between the Earth and sun, magnetic portals open up every eight minutes or so to connect our planet with its host star.

Once the portals open, loads of high-energy particles can travel the 93 million miles (150 million km) through the conduit during its brief opening, space scientists say.

Called a flux transfer event, or FTE, such cosmic connections not only exist but are possibly twice as common as anyone ever imagined, according to space scientists who attended the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Ala., last week.

“Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible,” said David Sibeck, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

There must be a use for these things, in fiction or real life…

[Image: NASA]

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Socialized banking: Modest proposals for the new economy

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Each U.S. taxpayer now owns a $1,785.71 ownership share in the banks of America, calculates New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman (check his math). So would it be too much to ask for an end to ATM (automatic teller machine) fees?  How about a moratorium on executive bonuses? A-and another thing:

Why not forbid any bank receiving taxpayer money to purchase naming rights to sports stadiums and arenas? Citigroup is handing the Mets something like $20 million a year to call their new stadium Citi Field. Surely, the Mets do not need Citigroup’s money — not to mention yours — to keep failing to make the playoffs.

(Corporations bought naming rights to days, months, and years in one of David Foster Wallace’s novels, if memory of the reviews serves.)

(My favorite proposal, from I forget which obviously unhinged left-wing blogger: Treat bank executives like customers who declare bankruptcy, and make them prove they’ve taken a basic course in finance.)

[Bank recruitment folder, Finsec]