Where do babies come from?

It’s really a toss-up for most ridiculous Tom Coburn moment of his brief tenure in the U.S. Senate.

His warnings about rampant lesbianism in Oklahoma schools will always be the sentimental favorite, seeing as how it was the one that put him on the map.

But them came his enthusiastic support for breast implants, going so far as to offer his opinion that women with implants were healthier than women with their real babylons.

While those examples would be plenty for a man in just his fifth month in the Senate, Coburn’s latest entry makes a strong case for the top spot. From his “Revenge of the STDs” sex-ed lecture to Congressional staffers.

I find it unbelievable that this guy hasn’t been run out of office! I suppose it is just a sign of our very ignorant times. Is our national level of education diminishing? Or is the quality of our education in the U.S. decreasing? One of these two must be the case given the political climate in this country.

Ribbon

At Gel, Bruce Shapiro, artist in residence at the Science Museum of Minnesota, talked about his notion of “motion control” as an “emerging medium for artistic expression”…

…One of the machines he brought to demonstrate its artistic expression was Ribbon Dancer. The willowy one-armed robot performed a routine for us for a couple minutes to a classical piece of music. Near the end of the piece, the ribbon got hung up on the lower part of the apparatus while the arm kept going with the routine, tugging obliviously on the caught fabric. The crowd gasped. For a second there, we thought the arm was going to pull the whole thing over — not unlike the robot-like AT-AT that got tripped up by a Rebel harpoon on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back — but Bruce stepped in to stop the machine and free the ribbon. Despite the mistake, the crowd’s emotional reaction to the dancer’s potentially hazardous misstep demonstrated the potential for the acceptance of artistic expression by machines.

(And in a somewhat more disturbing demonstration of the dancer’s representation of life, when Bruce stopped it at the end of the routine and began to walk off the stage, it began to twitch awkwardly from some stray electrical signals, a death rattle of sorts…

It seems like Jimmy Wales is everywhere these days. They guy has been at every conference I have noticed in the last 3 months. Rock on Jimmy, rock on brother.

Herald Sun

“With a critical shortage of [IT] workers projected in the coming
years, it’s crucial that university computer science departments do all they can to attract top students to the field, a local IBM official said Tuesday.
At IBM University Day in Research Triangle Park on Tuesday, leading IBM officials and university professors from across the region gathered to discuss new ways of marketing computer careers to up-and-coming students”

And yet…

Forbes

“Late Wednesday, IBM said it will cut between 10,000 to 13,000 jobs…The research firm had estimated that every 1,000 people represents per-share savings of 3 cents to 4 cents for IBM, assuming no loss in revenue”

I dont think this campaign is working…

Pete over at /dev/null/ and I were talking today about how great it would be to get professionals from the High Tech industry in Minneapolis-St. Paul together for a monthly gathering. Think alt2600, but for professionals (as Pete put it). Currently, I am really missing the thriving social network in my field that I had access to in Chapel Hill and would love to be able to connect with folks here in my new home that are interested in the same space as myself. So, I’m putting out a call to all Minneapolis-St. Paul professionals in High Tech and am suggesting that we form a loosely organized group that would get together for beers, whatever, once a month or so. Even you button down Accenture guys are welcome. 🙂 Feel free to ping Pete, or myself on this topic and let’s see if we can get something launched in the next 30 days. This would surely be useful for people, like myself, who are involved in young tech ventures who need a social network. Most importantly, it sure would be nice to get the same level of intellectual stimulus evidenced in the college towns I have resided in the past. Post a comment if you are interested and let’s get this started.

Stopping Spam – Sciam

In 1978 the first spam e-mail–a plug from a marketing representative at Digital Equipment Corporation for the new Decsystem-20 computer–was dispatched to about 400 people on the Arpanet.

Those guys at DEC were so innovative.

Has it ever occurred to anyone other than me that RealPlayer is a total piece of crap? Surely not. Everything about this product sucks. The simple fact that it takes me longer to install the stupid thing than it does to download the 10MB of glut code is offensive to me. Then you must pay careful attention not to allow it upset the careful balance between Windows Media, Quicktime, and Itunes. This space is just plain retarded. Of all these crappy products, RealPlayer is the pinnacle of shit. All the devs for these products, especially Real Networks for not allowing me something as trivial as a scaled down toolbar UI without buying their crappy product, should be drug into the street and beaten. At this point there is only one program that requires me to use RealPlayer: This American Life. Elizabeth, please start providing a different format! How is it that this company is still in business? They should be embarrassed. I did notice that, at least, now you don’t have to dig about their website for 10 minutes with a magnifier to find the ‘free’ download link.

Solar sail completes first crucial test – NewScientist.com

A lightweight solar sail that could one day allow spacecraft to be propelled by the power of the Sun has passed its first crucial test.

The sail, made by NASA and Alliant Techsystems (ATK), was successfully deployed and its orientation controlled in the world’s largest vacuum chamber – which mimics the space environment – it was announced on Tuesday.

Science News online – Life on the scales

I was just now made aware of this ground breaking theory that is coming out of metabolic ecology. This is really fascinating stuff.

“Scientists have long known that most biological rates appear to bear a simple mathematical relationship to an animal’s size: They are proportional to the animal’s mass raised to a power that is a multiple of 1/4. These relationships are known as quarter-power scaling laws. For instance, an animal’s metabolic rate appears to be proportional to mass to the 3/4 power, and its heart rate is proportional to mass to the –1/4 power.

In subsequent decades, biologists have found that the 3/4-power law appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude.

“We’ve found that despite the incredible diversity of life, from a tomato plant to an amoeba to a salmon, once you correct for size and temperature, many of these rates and times are remarkably similar,” says Gillooly.

“Metabolic rate is, in our view, the fundamental biological rate,” Gillooly says. There is a universal biological clock, he says, “but it ticks in units of energy, not units of time.

Cred to Roland who has a nice summary of the two articles linked to here.

MSN

How would you like the U.S. government to send you a check that would pay for five years’ worth of gasoline?

Well, it can be arranged.

Not everyone is eligible, of course. But if you use a vehicle 100% for business and purchase it, new or used, from a select list of big-time gas-guzzlers, Uncle Sam is ready to help you out.

NY Times

ASA officials have loosened the standards for what constitutes an acceptable risk of damage from the kind of debris that led to the disintegration of the shuttle Columbia as it was returning from space two years ago, internal documents show.

The move has set off a debate within the agency about whether the changes are a reasonable reassessment of the hazards of flight or whether they jettison long-established rules to justify getting back to space quickly.

Experts who have seen the documents say they do not suggest that the shuttle Discovery – scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on May 22 – is unsafe, but a small but forceful minority say they worry that NASA is repeating a practice that contributed to the Columbia disaster: playing down risks to continue sending humans into space.

The documents were given to The New York Times by several NASA employees, who asked not to be named, saying they feared retribution.

Documents that had been revealed earlier showed that NASA was struggling to meet safety goals set by the independent board that investigated the Columbia accident. The new documents suggest that the agency is looking for ways to justify returning to flight even if it cannot fully meet those recommendations.