Space Logistics

MIT has an interesting looking software project to track Space Logistics between the Earth, Moon and Mars.  This reminds me of nothing so much as a genre of games that I used to love as a kid, but are sorely lacking from the panoply of first-person-shooters and MMORPGs.  Titles such as EOS on the C64, and Project Space Station spring to mind. 



EOS had nothing to do with flying around arcade-like, and everything to do with constructing space stations from a variety of modules, dividing them between commercial and research output.  I'm embarassed to say I spent hours with a calculator determining the optimum prices to set for the various products to match market movements.  Eventually you could develop more advanced technology, and send spacecraft eerily reminiscent of Discovery from Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 to the different planets.  As far as I could tell the end result seemed to be finding life on Europa, but that took hours of floppy disk swapping.



Project Space Station always seemed to end with having too little budgetary resources to maintain your space activities.  This was frustrating, but ironically probably made it the most realistic of the two.

Powered by ScribeFire.

via Boing Boing

Charting our health by the stars

Charting our health by the stars is a study conducted in Ontario to find correlations between Zodiacal signs and health, to illustrate how easy it can be for a study to produce false results.

Their conclusion:

“There is a danger in basing scientific decisions on the results of one study, particularly if the results were unanticipated or the association was one that we did not initially decide to examine,” says Austin. “But when several studies all arrive at similar conclusions, we reduce the risk of arriving at an incorrect outcome.”

I would note that most news stories about science are actually reports of one-time studies with surprising results. Is any wonder that the public can dismiss science as fickle 'first they said this, now they say that' flip-flopping given the nature of how it is reported. You're rarely going to see a breaking news flash that there is now large-scale scientific consensus on a particular topic. Instead, you're likely to hear that a single study shows Cocoa may improve brain blood flow, or something similarly biased towards small dietary changes saving your life. At least, when it isn't an out-and-out human interest story.

Zodiac study via Wired.

World's Oldest Person

It seems every couple months there is a cycle of stories about the world's oldest person passing away. I don't deign to disparage the morale crushing amount of research required to identify the world's oldest person. Perhaps these headlines should be "World's Oldest Person with Documentation Dies". At any rate, these stories must be the most egregious example of filling up a slow news day. I would think that the world's oldest person must be passing away every day, or every couple of days.

News organizations of the world, I ask you: Why limit yourself to reporting on the aged? You are missing out on the extremely gripping symmetrical tale of the world's youngest person being born. Breaking!

Liquid Calcium

I just saw a commercial for toothpaste which includes liquid calcium. Is this really going to improve your dental health? They've added milk to toothpaste and this is going to build stronger teeth? Why not just drink the milk, it would probably be more effective.