Look what I found on Quark Expedition website!

http://www.blogyourwaytoantarctica.com/blogs/view/257

In a nutshell, Quark is sponsoring a competition to send someone on an eco-cruise of Antarctica in order to blog for a week.  The Fossil Huntress apparently threw her hat in, and I think any of her readers here would agree that she'd do a kickass job of blogging from Antarctica.


But naturally, the competition is a bit more of a popularity contest than a merit-based blogging appointment; you have 300 words in which to pitch yourself, but nobody besides your friends has any incentive to visit your entry page.  (I'd wanted to enter myself, but then I remembered that I have no friends.)

House of Straw
Use six straws to create the classic house shape (a rectangular body with two straws forming the roof, all laying flat on the table). Bet that you can make four equal triangles by moving only three straws. Try it! To all but the most creatively freethinking, this is impossible. The trick is to go 3D—pick up the three straws that make the bottom and sides of the rectangle and replace them so that one end of each straw is rooted in a corner of the triangle with all three moved straws touching above the center of the original triangle, like a tent or teepee—four, equal triangles, each the size of the original roof.

Paper Match

True Math Genius
This trick will bring a smile to the face of even the most hardened math geek. First, lay matches on a table to form the equation I + II + III = IIII (crossed matches make the plus signs and parallel matches make the equals sign). Challenge your opponent to make this statement true by moving only one match and without messing with the sum after the equals sign. The trick is to pick up one match from the II, and lay it across the middle match in the III, making the full equation read:
I + I + I + I =IIII.

Two Glasses II

L'Oréal and New Scientist today announced the results of a poll revealing the most inspirational female scientists of all time. Nuclear physicist and chemist Marie Curie topped the poll which was created to celebrate 10 years of the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women In Science program, with around a quarter (25.1%) of the vote. 

Voted for by more than 800 members of the scientific community and visitors to http://www.NewScientist.com, the poll highlights the absence of modern role models on the list; Astrophysicist Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell (4.7%), responsible for the discovery of radiopulsars, and Jane Goodall, the primatologist (2.7 per cent) were the only scientists in the top ten to have research published in recent years, polled 4th and 10th, respectively. 

Are individuals, families and employers getting their money's worth from US healthcare?

You'd think not, given the media full court press by the Obama administration for a federal health care plan at a cost of trillions that will allegedly be paid for by 'savings' in current health care.    Like 'jobs saved', it isn't a number anyone can really track so it's up to individual belief - and likely political party registration.    The federal government wants to provide more services to more people.   And that may not be good health policy.

Someone's got issues with Web 2.0 - hell, with Web 1.0:

Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has to be the most jaw-dropping. He suggests that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed.

That basically guaranteed to finish killing off newspapers - having them drop out of online discussion. It's also an outright rejection of one of the major advantages of online publication - citations that take you straight to the original document.
And why does everything have to be all about newspapers anyway?

Research from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Canada says that 4 percent of worldwide deaths are directly attributable to alcohol consumption and the rise is mainly due to increases in the number of women and Europeans drinking.

Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD) is an unexpected death caused by a sudden loss of heart function (sudden cardiac arrest, SCA). Every year, 400,000 adults die of SCD, making it one of the largest causes of death in Europe. Sudden Cardiac Death begins with Sudden Cardiac Arrest, mostly caused by an arrhythmia called “ventricular fibrillation” (a rapid, chaotic, lethal rhythm of the heart). When this occurs, the heart will abruptly stop to pump blood. Consequently, the patient feels dizzy and faints. SCD occurs within minutes, if no resuscitation is immediately initiated.

Newton’s apple fell from the tree and after thumping the scientist on the head, fell benignly to the ground. If the same apple fell toward Einstein (and happened to have a little added atomic oomph), it could, according to special relativity, become infinitely massive, flattening not only the unfortunate Einstein as he sat bodhisattva-like beneath the tree, but also the Earth itself.

This doesn’t mean Newton was wrong—only, that his theories apply more accurately to things traveling at speeds that don’t approach the speed of light (from slow-moving atomic particles to city transit busses). The crucial postulate of Einstein’s theory is the idea that the speed of light is measured to be exactly the same no matter the motion of the observer.

Many people will write columns, fiction, games, et cetera for the joy of doing it.  But that leads me to an important distinction between writing versus publishing.  Writers-- good and bad-- will write for free.  History tells us that.  But a good editor won't, and publishing great works requires great editors.

In all the Web2.0 talk of removing barriers between creators and audience, the role of 'publisher' is often considered a dark ages legacy, fit to be abolished.  But the role of editor rarely is invoked, and I think that's a mistake.  Yes, the editor is the bane to writers, but they are a hidden blessing to readers.  

Most conspiracy theories wouldn't gain much traction without unhinged academics:

"The most destructive people linked to conspiracy theories and denialism are those with academic appointments - and those who can manipulate their backgrounds to appear as if they have had academic appointments."

Why? Probably because they write are fluently and prolifically than the guy you meet at 2pm in the bar who can't stop going on about all of those people on Hillary Clinton's hit list. (Hey, if you're in the bar at 2pm, you're asking for it.)

A baffling report says health workers fail to understand the importance of sex for Tanzanian children.   Yes, children.

Community health organizations working on AIDS prevention projects in Tanzania, frequently fail to understand how children in Tanzania deal with sex, says Miranda van Reeuwijk, who followed groups of children in Tanzania between 2004 and 2008.  

van Reeuwijk followed the children in order to help change this situation and says the children mainly view sex as something from which they can personally benefit, but frequently hide their relationships from parents and health workers. They are more scared of their strict parents than of HIV. 

I find it alarming that a number of people I know fall for many very common logical fallacies regarding false scientific claims. So often the word "science" is thrown into a sentence or a conversation or a book title to add legitimacy to a claim. Frequently, these claims use common logical fallacies such as:

1. Appeal to authority: where the person either claims to be an expert or cites an expert to bolster their claims


2. Appeal to tradition: where the person  calls upon some time honored tradition or urban legend

That DNA evidence that could exonerate you? You don't have a right to it, says the US Supreme Court.

Actually, not being a lawyer or constitutional scholar, I don't know what kinds of evidence you have a constitutional right to when you go on trial, so I'm not going to comment on the correctness of the decision. But legal scholarship aside, two things are obvious:

1) When we try someone for a crime, we want the best, most reliable evidence possible. It's probably reasonably safe to say that most people with at least some wisps of sanity would like our criminal justice system to convict the guilty and acquit the innocent.

On Wednesday, the Guardian (a newspaper that still has journalistic integrity) reported on a study (PDF of executive summary)by South Africa's Medical Research Council on rape and HIV.  The study found that 28% of men (sample size of 1738) admitted to having raped a woman or girl, and half of those reported committing multiple rapes.  They also found that 5% of men admitted to committing a rape in the past year.  Although women are the primary victims, 10% of males reported being raped by another man

Over at the Monkey Cage:

Fact: Academicians tend to be politically differentiated according to discipline, with those in the social sciences and humanities on the left, those in the natural sciences in the middle, and those in engineering and business on the right.

Argument: This is no coincidence. Students’ political attitudes are being shaped by their professors.


Counterargument: Agreed. It’s not a coincidence. But the operative force is self-selection, not socialization.

I haven't seen any surveys, but this characterization of political differentiation jives with what I've seen. Of course no discipline is homogeneous.

The University of Leicester’s School of Management wonders if more religious control of banks might have lessened the impact of the global financial crisis.
 
Buying into the notion that a 'sub-prime' housing market led to the latest global financial crisis, they say developing new practices which can address the issues that led the world to the brink of collapse are a vital part of recovery.

Professor Martin Parker, Director of Research for the Management School, thinks a banking system consistent with the principles of Islamic law (Sharia) may be a solution so the university is hosting a conference to consider potential lessons from the Islamic Banking and Finance sector. 

Girls are gathering online to remake action-oriented Japanese animation videos geared toward males - you know, because males are genetically engineered to like action cartoons with bounty hunter vampires who need to kill their half-brothers that run an evil clan - into romances, because girls are genetically engineered to like ... well, you get the point.   

Anime is a style of animation popularized in Japan, usually in material that contains action-filled plots with fantastic or futuristic themes. The style is used in manga, computer games and videos.

When a steep decline in the wool trade prompted an 18th century credit crunch, folks in Yorkshire took up a new (and dangerous) business venture - counterfeiting.

In the 18th century, coining was a treasonable offense and therefore punishable by death but in the 1760s and 1770s, a decline in the textile trade motivated hundreds of Yorkshire people from rural communities to risk the gallows by counterfeiting British and Spanish coins.