Random Thoughts

xkcd has made its contribution to the Quanta Sutra field, founded earlier this year in A Unified Quantum Theory of Sexual Interaction.

This New York Times article is making the rounds in the Skeptical Community. Apparently, a major tool in the arsenal of Iraqi security forces is a high-priced, bomb divining rod. Seriously. The article reads like a satire of AltMed woonackery, except we are not talking about herbal remedies for the grumbly in your tumbly. We are talking about keeping innocent people from getting blown up.

The American military does not use the devices. “I don’t believe
there’s a magic wand that can detect explosives,” said Maj. Gen.
Richard J. Rowe Jr., who oversees Iraqi police training for the

The details of your personal life, such as grocery purchases, pizza topping preferences and Amazon wish lists, are collected every day ― by both websites and traditional retailers. Though
this data seems fairly innocuous, when it's put together it can tell whoever is gathering it a
whole lot about your health, finances and behavior; and that means it can easily be used against you.

Dr. Michael Birnhack of Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Law and Prof. Niva Elkin-Koren from the University of Haifa recently completed a comprehensive study on information privacy laws in Israel and found compelling reasons for lawmakers everywhere to take notice.

I figured that the first step in starting fresh somewhere is introducing myself. So, this is a post about my life. It was originally posted at my other blog, Observations of a Nerd, but it's just so good I had to re-post it here. So here's my life, in a blog post:

Most people would probably say they love shopping online. With the prices of online stores being so much cheaper than traditional retailers, what's not to love? According to recently released research, the increasing lack of product choices found online may be a good candidate.

A new study, published in Marketing Science, found that the traditional system of selling through retailers encourages longer – rather than shorter – product lines, which could dry up as manufacturers turn to direct sales online.

The reason is pretty simple. As more manufacturers go online and cut out the middle men and accompanying price increases, they tend to lose their incentive to diversify their products.

Gender is socially mediated, and constructed, as well as neurologically predisposed.  Innate qualities have to be qualities that do not depend on social interaction.  Consider the so called feral children known to history.  They are what people are like without social interaction or culture.  These children display natural predispositions to certain behaviors, with no cultural overlay.   Complex cultural behavior, dressing, eating with table manners, and much of what we call gender identity are unknown to them.

My daughter and I have been kicking around various ideas concerning the aging process with regard to apoptosis.  Biological processes being what they are, there probably is no one mechanism that triggers cellular aging and death; however we came up with some interesting ideas that could be tried experimentally, and in some cases already are under investigation.

It appears that no one around these parts goes trick-or-treating anymore. Apparently, it is too dangerous what with the costumes catching on fire, rampaging cars, child molesters, and razor blades in the Tootsie Rolls. I was lucky to survive my childhood.

Now is a good time to remind everyone about the LiveScience articles by Benjamin Radford of Skeptical Inquirer putting paid to the myths that child molesters are on the prowl for Halloween from 2007 and that sadists are filling candy with sharp, metallic objects from 2005.

With the World Series upon us, again, it is time to consider baseball's improbable events, like the four home run game (15)[1], the perfect game (18), and the unassisted triple play (15, maybe 16).

Alone in the annals of baseball improbability is The Streak.

THE STREAK
In 1941, Joe DiMaggio recorded a record 56-game hitting streak. It is widely regarded as the one baseball record that will never be broken. The great emergent property himself, Steven Jay Gould, considered The Streak to be the greatest record in sports history[2] due to it's statistical unlikelihood.

.... i was re-watching the Freakonomics TED Talks vid on the economics and ethnography of crack selling (see below) and struck by the description of crack as the perfect product for street gangs in the ghetto...mainly because it delivered:
-  an immediate, intense high
-  for 15 mins
-  intense craving for MORE, MORE, MORE (txs Billy Idol)

.....it struck me that in our increasingly always-on, "life in the fast lane, everything all the time..)...multi-smart-phone lives....the "energy" flows of the behaviors are pretty much the same....(physicists please chime in here)...