In Conversation

Mr. Spock will voice the role of Sentinel Prime a forebear of Optimus Prime whose rickety robotic body morphs into a mighty fire engine during the final battle between Autobots and Decepticons set in Chicago.

The 80-year-old Nimoy announced he was finished with acting after reprising his point-eared alter ego in J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot and his arc on Fox’s Fringe, which ended last year.

Nimoy is reportedly married to Bay’s cousin and has a soft spot for the shape-shifting robot series, having voiced the role of Galvatron in 1986’s animated film Transformers: The Movie.

The Listeners, Viewers, Fans, & Superfans

Viewer Aaron Merrill insists that he can’t review the show because of iTunes. Hey Aaron, review the show.

New Fan: Dan Sachs

Superfan Update: I’m about to hang out with Superfan Pete Snyder.

Nerds on Tech

Dickbar is Out

Jerry adds rare insight to a story.

Weird Science

Take Your Uncertainty & Shove It

Scientists in Spain have managed to produce measurements that are more precise than those predicted by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. They did this by exploring a new technique using interferometers.

Normally, the spin of each photon would rotate by a certain amount, thanks to its interactions with the magnetic field of the atoms. But the frequency of the photons was chosen so that the photons also interacted with each other when they were in the gas, so that the presence of one photon altered the way a second behaved. These interactions led to a measurement accuracy that grew in proportion to N3/2 – greater than Heisenberg’s limit.

Armchair Psychologists

Happy Times are Forgetful Times

from Cognition & Emotion:

Overall, this research suggests that positive mood has differential effects on cognitive control, impairing working memory

“Working memory, for example, is the ability to recall items in a conversation as you are having it,” Martin said. “This explains why you might not be able to remember a phone number you get at a party when you are having a good time.

“While working memory storage is decreased, being in a good mood is not all bad,” Martin said. “Being in a good mood has been shown to increase creative problem-solving skills and other aspects of thinking.”

Plants Make You More Mentally Acute

from The Journal of Environmental Psychology:

This research studied possible benefits of indoor plants on attention capacity in a controlled laboratory experiment.

► Indoor plants in an office can prevent fatigue during attention demanding work.

► Attention restoration does not depend on a defined “five-minute” break.

► Benefits of plants can occur in offices with window view to nature

Quit Your Job

GALLUP Poll:

American workers who are emotionally disconnected from their work and workplace — known as “actively disengaged” workers — rate their lives more poorly than do those who are unemployed.

Our Awesome Governments

Space Plane UPDATE

It took the amateur sleuths nearly a month to hunt down the first X-37B after it launched on its inaugural mission. That’s an eternity in sky-spotting time.

The second time around was easier. The U.S. space plane was discovered just four days after it blasted into orbit, earlier this month. Cape Town, South Africa’s Greg Roberts — “a pioneer in using telescopic video cameras to track spacecraft, chalking up exceptional results over the years,” according to Space.com — spotted this second secret spacecraft, just like he found the first.

The X-37B[…]is orbiting around the fat middle of the planet, traveling over the Middle East, Africa, and fair chunk of China. “It means they are giving up global coverage and predictable shadow lengths, but getting more frequent passes,” Weeden says. The orbit lends credence to the idea that the space plane is an orbiting spy.

So does the X-37B’s altitude. It’s flying pretty low — one of the rare orbiters traveling beneath the International Space Station. “The lower you are,” Weeden notes, “the higher resolution you can get in any imagery.”

Netherlands Radio Scanning

Follow Frequency Monitor Centre the Netherlands @FMCNL

Housekeeping!

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Nerd Rage

$30 Movie Rentals

Next month, major studios including Warner Bros., Sony, Universal, and 20th Century Fox will team up with DirecTV to launch something called Home Premiere, which will allow consumers to view films on-demand that had stopped playing in theaters just two months beforehand. For the privilege of seeing such films as Unknownand Just Go With It from the comfort of their own homes, viewers will be charged a mere $30 for a two- to three-day rental.

posted 31 March, 2011
by cordblomquist
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In Conversation. A talk show for nerds.

Episode 21. Unlistenable ghost Jerry. (Show notes.)

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Show Notes: Episode 21

This week, Cord and Jerry use their nerd power to solve global problems, globally.

This Week in Star Trek

Sulu Working to Save Japan

Takei, who served two terms on the diplomatic Japan-United States Friendship Committee (a position granted him by former President Bill Clinton) pleaded with listeners of the Stephanie Miller morning talk radio show to help in any way they can.

Takei suggests giving to the Red Cross at the organization’s website, or by texting 90999, which will automatically donate $10 to relief efforts. “Because it looks like a computer game, people can distance themselves from it. That’s why we have to emphasize, to plead with people for assistance,” Takei explained.

Shatner Turns 80 on March 22nd

He tells Britain’s Daily Express, “It’s monstrous. Horrible and terrible fall short of describing it.”

In Conversation Gives Back

Every week we like to give thanks to those of you who make this all worthwhile. The listeners, the viewers, the fans, and the super fans.

We have a new listener this week, thetransformers, who gave a sweet, sweet like on Tumblr.

And thanks again to loyal viewer, but not quite official fan, Aaron Merrill.

Hey everyone, review the show.

Nerds on Tech

Times Square Hoax Actually a Confusing Viral Marketing Campaign

How did we do it technically? Well, as you can see on the comments, 95% believed (and still believe) that it was all done in post production. However, all we really did was rent the screens and had our footage loop there for hours. The clips had visual sync points which allowed us to sync the iPhone version of the video. Once the sync was done, then it was a piece of cake from there. The actor was familiar with the timing of the “hacks”. We did hundreds of takes on each screen.

Your SSD Drive is Obsolete

With his colleagues at U-M and collaborators from Cornell University, Penn State University, and University of Wisconsin, Madison, Xiaoqing Pan, a professor in the U-M Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has designed a material system that spontaneously forms small nano-size spirals of the electric polarization at controllable intervals, which could provide natural budding sites for the polarization switching and thus reduce the power needed to flip each bit.

Ferroelectric materials have the potential to make memory devices with more storage capacity than magnetic hard drives and faster write speed and longer lifetimes than flash memory.

Microsoft Surprise Everyone with IE9

Ars Technica: “Internet Explorer 9 is a triumph. Not perfect, but still a first-rate product. Microsoft really has built a better browser here. It’s arguably the most modern browser on the market—for a few weeks, at any rate.”

Weird Science

Cloudy With a Chance of Methane Rain

Spring may bring methane showers to the deserts of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently saw a large, dark puddle appear in the wake of a storm cloud at the moon’s dune-filled equator.

“It’s the only easy way to explain the observations,” said planetary scientist Elizabeth Turtle of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, lead author of a study March 18 in Science. “We’re pretty confident that it has just rained on Titan.”

Aside from Earth, Titan is the only world known to have liquid lakes, clouds and a weather cycle to move moisture between them. But on chilly Titan, where temperatures plunge to -297 degrees Fahrenheit, the frigid lakes are filled with liquid methane and ethane, not water.

Radiation Exposure, By the Numbers

Gathered by the Vancouver Sun from online information on Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Canadian Nuclear Association and international reports:

Radiation Exposure in Millisieverts (mSv)

Air Travel Per Hour: 0.009
Average annual dose due to air travel: 0.01
Dental X-Ray (Brain): 0.01
Chest X-Ray (Lung): 0.1
Average annual dose limit for Canadian nuclear energy workers: 50
Average annual Canadian background dose: 1.8
Worldwide (Annual): 2.4
Screening Mammography (breast): 3
Dose with explosion under control at the Fukushima site (Per Hour): 3
Adult Abdominal CT (stomach): 10
Initial exposure at the Fukushima site (Per Hour): 10
Neonatal Abdominal CT (stomach): 20
Lowest acute dose known to cause cancer: 100
Tuesday’s peak inside the Fukushima plant (Per Hour): 400
Dose which may cause radiation sickness within 24 hours (tiredness, nausea): 1,000
Lifetime exposure that would lead to a fatal cancer in five out of every 100 people: 1,000
Dose which may lead to death when received all at once: 5,000

Armchair Psychologists

Bad Food Makes You a Jerk

from the journal Psychological Science:

Results showed that taste perception significantly affected moral judgments, such that physical disgust (induced via a bitter taste) elicited feelings of moral disgust. Further, this effect was more pronounced in participants with politically conservative views than in participants with politically liberal views. Taken together, these differential findings suggest that embodied gustatory experiences may affect moral processing more than previously thought.

Stop Not Watching YouTube at Work

from a Harvard Business School Working Paper:

To encourage worker productivity offices prohibit Internet use. Consequently, many employees delay Internet activity to the end of the workday. Recent work in social psychology, however, suggests that using willpower to delay gratification can negatively impact performance. We report data from an experiment where subjects in a Willpower Treatment are asked to resist the temptation to join others in watching a humorous video for 10 minutes. In relation to a baseline treatment that does not require willpower, we show that resisting this temptation detrimentally impacts economic productivity on a subsequent task.

Review us on iTunes

Podcasting is a new art form. If you don’t review us, you don’t value art.

Nerd Rage

from the New York Times:

On NYTimes.com, you can view 20 articles each month at no charge (including slide shows, videos and other features). After 20 articles, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber, with full access to our site.

On our smartphone and tablet apps, the Top News section will remain free of charge. For access to all other sections within the apps, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber.

Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.

Nate Silver wrote at the 538 Blog: “ALL incoming links to NYT from Twitter and Facebook, and up to 5/day from Google, will be free reads.”

So does this just incentivize people to share NYTimes articles like crazy?

Can NYTimes.com create a badge or some sort of special user-specific embed so I can signal to people who conspicuous my spending is so that I can justify this purchase?

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In Conversation. A talk show for nerds.

Episode 20. Black ops. (Show notes.)

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Show Notes: Episode 20

This week, we get extreme with our retirement, which will come early. Oh yes, it will.

This Week in Star Trek

Shatner Wants to Play Kirk Again

The 79-year-old actor, who recently surprised the ‘Discovery’ space shuttle crew with a wake-up call, says he will always look back fondly on the Star Trek films, saying, “I think it struck a nerve in its humanity, as well as its sense of adventure. Maybe the actors had something to do with it. … It was a joyful experience for me”.

Hey, Review the Show

Shout outs this week!

New Tumblr Followers: meeksketch, anglobibliofile, smoestoe

You are now considered “Listeners,” a much appreciated member of the In Conversation community, but nonetheless the lowest rung on our ladder toward super-fandom.

If you want to become a fan, review the show!

Newest Viewer: Aaron Merrill, who submitted yet another story. Thanks dude, but you should review the show.

Newest Fan: Tate Watkins

Thank you for the review sir. Be sure to check out Tate’s podcast “Trying to Make Pardner.”

Hey, review the show.

Nerds on Tech

Did Gaddafi Inspire Rap-Based Video Game?

Fifi [50 Cent] paid an undisclosed sum to sing and dance like a fey little puppet in front of Mutassim Gaddafi at the 2005 Venice film festival. But while the other stars have been embarrassed by their (possibly unintentional) connection to a despotic regime, Fifi seems to have used his as the inspiration for a startlingly violent video game called 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, released on the PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2009.

Should I get an iPad2?

Jerry, should I get one?

Mechanical Turd (Submitted by Aaron Merrill)

Intrigued on hearing that Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is increasingly used by spammers, Mark Alen, a UC Berkeley Operations Research PhD candidate decided to see whether he could hire Mechanical Turks to spam him, so he posted an offer to pay for writeups of things to see and do in Shiraz City, France. There is no Shiraz City in France (there is a Shiraz City in Iran, though). This did not deter a flock of MTs who happily wrote fictitious reviews of the good times to be had in Alen’s fictitious town

Lawyers are Obsolete

“The catch here is information overload,” said Aaref A. Hilaly, Clearwell’s chief executive. “How do you zoom in to just the specific set of documents or facts that are relevant to the specific question? It’s not about search; it’s about sifting, and that’s what e-discovery software enables.”

For Neil Fraser, a lawyer at Milberg, a law firm based in New York, the Cataphora software provides a way to better understand the internal workings of corporations he sues, particularly when the real decision makers may be hidden from view.

Weird Science

Engage Tractor Beam

A laser can act as a “tractor beam”, drawing small objects back toward the laser’s source, scientists have said. It is known that light can provide a “push”, for example in solar sails that propel spacecraft on a “wind of light”. Now, in a paper on the Arxiv server, researchers from Hong Kong and China have calculated the conditions required to create a laser-based “pull”.

The trick is not to use a standard laser beam, but rather one known as a Bessel beam, that has a precise pattern of peaks and troughs in its intensity. If such a Bessel beam were to encounter an object not head-on but at a glancing angle, the backward force can be stimulated. As the atoms or molecules of the target absorb and re-radiate the incoming light, the fraction re-radiated forward along the beam direction can interfere and give the object a “push” back toward the source.

Armchair Psychologists

Internet Makes Yer Marriage Better

The relation between compulsive Internet use and marital well-being is tested in a two-wave prospective study among 190 newlywed couples. Theresults suggest that (a) compulsive Internet use predicts marital well-being, and not vice versa, (b) that this is a within- rather than a cross-partner effect, and (c) that the frequency of Internet use may be positively related to marital well-being.

Our Awesome Governments

Space Plane Budget Shell Game

The U.S. Air Force’s secretive X-37B space plane is poised to launch on its second mission Friday (March 4), though what exactly it will be doing once it leaves the ground remains a mystery.

[…]

With its blunt nose and stubby wings, the unmanned X-37B spacecraft resembles a miniature version of NASA’s space shuttles. The vehicle was originally developed as part of a NASA project that was shifted to the military when funding ran dry.

[…]

The secrecy surrounding the X-37B has led to some speculation that the plane could be a space weaponof some sort. But Air Force officials have repeatedly denied that charge, and some experts have postulated that it is a platform for space reconnaissance.

The X-37B is built by Boeing’s Space and Intelligence Systems division. It can fly long, extended missions because of its solar array power system, which allows it to stay in orbit for up to 270 days, Air Force officials have said.

Randomize the Legislature

from Accidental Politicians:

“We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both number of laws passed and average social welfare obtained.”

Unless that social welfare is defined as more monster truck rallies, state fairs, and corn dog eating contests, then I don’t give a heap of shit.

Housekeeping

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Nerd Rage

Remember Google TV?

I had big hopes for the Google box. When it launched, shortly after the new Apple TV, I remember telling my fiance every detail about it with bated breath. I couldn’t wait to buy one.

Then the networks got involved. Even though there are workarounds, the networks decided that it was in their best interest to pull a bunch of the potential programming from the box. What we had left was a machine that didn’t do anything especially well, unless you happened to be a satellite subscriber. But this was exactly what I didn’t want. I wanted the Google TV to enhance my post-cable-cutting experience. I didn’t want to add new cables in order to enjoy it.

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In Conversation. A talk show for nerds.

Episode 19. Better molted than never. (Show notes.)

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Show Notes: Episode 19

This week Cord and Jerry stop being polite, and start getting real. This is a true story.

This Week in Star Trek
Simon Pegg says Star Trek 2 script is finished!

Giving Back to the Fans
Thanks to Sarah Longwell, Krista Speicher, Elisabeth McCaffrey, Ali Tooley, Kathleen O’Hearn, Steve Bice, Brendan Nee, Ray Lehmann, KyMcKenzie, Rob Raffety, and Elle Speicher.

Get a shout-out by following, liking, reviewing, commenting, or reblogging.

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Nerds on Tech

The Xoom Ain’t Too Flashy

Engadget reported yesterday that Motorola’s Xoom tablet would initially ship without Adobe Flash 10.1, which has been a marquee feature leading up to the launch. I wondered if the delay was specific to Xoom, or to the new Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” OS. Macworld has noted an Adobe blog post that answers the question: it’s late for Honeycomb, and it’ll be ready “within a few weeks.”

Until then, we have a product that can’t view its own website. And people still ask, with a straight face, why Flash isn’t on iOS.

Windows Brick 7

Monday, Microsoft started rolling out the first update to Windows Phone 7[…]The updates are failing to install in two ways. For lucky individuals, the process merely hangs on step seven (out of ten); rebooting the phone resurrects it, albeit without the upgrade. For a minority of unlucky users, the process fails at step six, and corrupts the phone’s firmware. What’s worse is that for some of them it appears to be bricking the phone completely, rendering it useless.
Apple vs. Google Subscriptions

Traditional print publishers have spent the past few years cast in the role of the nice old-fashioned girl in high school who was ignored while more recent arrivals got all the attention. But last week, print was suddenly the popular girl, with not just one but two of the big men on campus — Apple and Google — stepping up with digital subscription plans. Publishers, who have been stuck selling single issues rather than subscriptions since the iPad came out last April, suddenly had a way to electronically replicate their subscription business with the hope of bringing in much needed revenue from digital consumers.

Weird Science

The Case of the Pregnant Seaman

“Researchers have long known about a phenomenon called couvade syndrome. Couvade* (from the French word couver, or “to incubate, brood, or hatch eggs”), describes men who experience certain signs of pregnancy—some combination of weight gain, nausea, food cravings, backaches, insomnia, and other delights familiar to moms everywhere. Historically, couvade has been a psychosomatic curiosity or a sign of mental instability.”

“Scientists have now shown that normal, healthy men often undergo real bodily changes when they’re expecting children. What for years we’ve considered to be a disorder of the mind is actually a natural physiological reaction to impending fatherhood.”

Fathers-to-be have elevated levels of cortisol and prolactin, hormones that skyrocket in mothers. Testosterone levels also drop by about a third in the first few week after birth. This combination causes weigh-gains and changes in overall mood.

Solar Flare Didn’t End the World

coronal mass ejection, the plasma is imprinted with its own magnetic field separate from the sun’s. Astronomers can’t predict the direction of the plasma’s magnetic field until the burst hits Earth.

If the plasma’s magnetic field is parallel to the Earth’s, the incoming charged particles are effectively blocked from entering Earth’s magnetosphere. An identical flare with a perpendicular magnetic field would have triggered a much stronger storm.

Armchair Psychologists

Did Tommy Lee Jones Help Al Gore Not Become President?

from MIT Press’s The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

This paper uses a unique data set to measure peer effects among college roommates. Freshman year roommates and dormmates are randomly assigned at Dartmouth College. I find that peers have an impact on grade point average and on decisions to join social groups such as fraternities. Residential peer effects are markedly absent in other major life decisions such as choice of college major. Peer effects in GPA occur at the individual room level, whereas peer effects in fraternity membership occur both at the room level and the entire dorm level. Overall, the data provide strong evidence for the existence of peer effects in student outcomes.

Leading by Example, The Pygmalion Effect

from The Journal of Applied Psychology
Twenty-nine platoons in the Israel Defense Forces were randomly assigned to Pygmalion or control conditions to test the hypothesis that raising manager expectations boosts performance without contrast effects. Leaders of the Pygmalion platoons were informed that their subordinates on average had unusually high command potential. Platoon-level analysis of performance showed that Pygmalion platoons significantly outscored control platoons, confirming the Pygmalion hypothesis.

Our Awesome Governments

Job That No Longer Exists in America: Damage Assessment Chief

This position description was for “Chief, Damage Assessment Division”, was was the part of the Office of Emergency Preparedness (which operated under the auspices of the Executive Office of the President, and then under the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM), and then under the Production Area, and then, finally, the Damage Assessment Division DMA). The job of the DMA was to identify what would happen to the essential production facilities that would keep the country going—industrial, technical, medical, biological, and so on—how they would be targeted, and how they might survive an attack. This also applied to the people who would be required to be in charge of all of this. Damage assessment.

Housekeeping

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Nerd Rage

Blogging is Dead

The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said ina report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.

posted 07 March, 2011
by cordblomquist
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In Conversation. A talk show for nerds.

Episode 18. Romantic dramedy. (Show notes.)

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Episode 18: Show Notes

This week we roll out like Anderson Cooper. You guessed it, we’re keeping them honest. Also, Cord is re-watching “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” The whole damned thing.

This Week in Star Trek

Star Trek Script Close to Completion

Ever since J.J. Abrams’ 2009 reboot of Star Trek scored $385 million at the box office, Paramount, as well as fans, have been waiting for a sequel script to be delivered.Initially, screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci revealed that the script could arrive by the summer of 2010, at which point Kurtzman admitted that he, Orci, and co-screenwriter Damon Lindelof were “halfway through the story”. Last December, Kurtzman admitted that the writers finally “have broken the story,” but offered no timeline for when the script would be finished.

But just this week, however, Orci said this on Twitter: ”aiming to turn in first full draft of Star Trek in six weeks or so.”

In Conversation Gives Back

Special thanks to @mandolosophy for the sweet shout-out on Twitter. Hey, review the show.

Our first international text came in from Peter Snyder. No need to re-review the show.

Nerds on Tech

From Jeopardy Champ to Dr. Watson

Global data storage calculated at 295 exabytes

“The study, published in the journal Science, calculates the amount of data stored in the world by 2007 as 295 exabytes. The researchers calculated the figure by estimating the amount of data held on 60 technologies from PCs and and DVDs to paper adverts and books[…]Scientists calculated the figure by estimating the amount of data held on 60 analogue and digital technologies during the period from 1986 to 2007. They considered everything from computer hard drives to obsolete floppy discs, and x-ray films to microchips on credit cards.”

That amount of data breaks down to:

1.2 billion average hard drives.
13 layers of books covering the entire United States
A stack of CDs that would reach beyond the moon

Daily data broadcasted by human beings, not necessarily stored, is estimated at around two zettabytes of data (a zettabyte is 1000 exabytes). That’s the equivalent of 175 newspapers per person, per day.

“The study also pinpoints the arrival of the digital age as 2002, the first year worldwide digital storage capacity overtook analogue capacity.”

Weird Science

Why are some people more likely to get skin cancer on the left side of their body?

Answer: That’s where people sit when they drive.

Armchair Psychologists

Can Television Be a Substitute for a Real Friend?

Yes. A series of studies published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology examines the Social Surrogacy Hypothesis, which posits that parasocial relationships in favored television programs can provide the experience of belonging.

“Study 1 demonstrated that people report turning to favored television programs when feeling lonely, and feel less lonely when viewing those programs.

“Study 2 demonstrated that experimentally activating belongingness needs leads people to revel longer in descriptions of favored (but not non-favored) television programs.

“Study 3 demonstrated that thinking about favored (but not non-favored) television programs buffers against drops in self-esteem and mood and against increases in feelings of rejection commonly elicited by threats to close relationships.

“Finally, Study 4 demonstrated that thinking about favored television programs reduces activation of chronically activated rejection-related words. These results yield provocative preliminary evidence for the Social Surrogacy Hypothesis.”

Does a musician’s clothing affect how much we like their music?

Yes, and overly revealing clothing makes us think they’re gross.

Are men really more open to casual sex than women?

YES!

“[In] experiments, conducted in 1978 and 1982, male and female confederates of average attractiveness approached potential partners with one of three requests: “Would you go out tonight?” “Will you come over to my apartment?” or “Would you go to bed with me?” The great majority of men were willing to have a sexual liaison with the women who approached them. Women were not. Not one woman agreed to a sexual liaison. Many possible reasons for this marked gender difference were discussed. These studies were run in 1978 and 1982. It has since become important to track how the threat of AIDS is affecting men and women’s willingness to date, come to an apartment, or to engage in casual sexual relations.”

Do we judge others based on attractiveness?

YES!

“Experiment 1 (n = 2639) investigated selection of scholarship applicants and demonstrated that a pro-attractiveness bias held only for selection of opposite-sex scholarship applicants; no such bias was observed for highly attractive same-sex applicants.

“Experiment 2 (n = 622) investigated evaluations of prospective job candidates and demonstrated again that pro-attractiveness bias was observed only for opposite-sex candidates; participants discriminated against highly attractive same-sex candidates.”

Our Awesome Governments

New York Release Legal Guide to the Apocalypse

“Quarantines. The closing of businesses. Mass evacuations. Warrantless searches of homes. The slaughter of infected animals and the seizing of property. When laws can be suspended and whether infectious people can be isolated against their will or subjected to mandatory treatment. It is all there, in dry legalese, in the manual, published by the state court system and the state bar association.”

Internet Freedom Abroad and Wiretapping at Home

Secretary Clinton: “I urge countries everywhere to join the United States in our bet that an open internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries.”

Clinton’s speech came a day after the House voted to extend to December 8 three controversial domestic spy provisions of the Patriot Act. And Customs officials seized 18 more internet domains without giving the pirate website owners a chance to challenge the forfeiture.

What’s more, the Obama administration on Thursday is expected to testify before a House subcommittee about the need to expand the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which already requires telcos and internet access providers to have wiretapping capabilities. The FBI wants Congress to demand that same requirement for encrypted e-mail services like Blackberry, and also wants that for social networks and peer-to-peer messaging networks like Skype.

Help Us Grow

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Nerd Rage

Russian Baby Gymnastics

A video of a woman swing her baby around by the arms and legs was removed from YouTube recently because several viewers found it offensive and disturbing. But Oleg Tyutin, a psychotherapist, has been practicing this uniquely Russian form of “baby gymnastics” for over 20 years. He trains young moms to do the same and claims that “It makes infants more open, more sociable, more relaxed. It also helps them develop more quickly.” One of the mothers Tyutin has trained, when hearing about criticism of the practice, remarked that “People in Europe are used to raising their children in over-sanitised conditions, they’re scared of everything.”

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In Conversation. A talk show for nerds.

Episode 17. Double blind podcasting

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Show Notes: Episode 17

This week, we celebrate the victory of the World Champion Green Bay Packers, and pulling back ever so slightly from the brink of nihilism.

This Week in Star Trek

Shatner Gets Even Heavier

William Shatner is intent on recording a metal album[…]the Star Trek actor will have plenty of experienced help on hand, with members of Deep Purple and Queen guesting on the album according to LA Weekly.

And Shatner is still milking his sci-fi past with all the tracks to have a ‘space’ or ‘flying in space’ theme.

In Conversation Gives Back

We are nothing without our fans. Nothing. So, thanks to Aaron Merrill for suggesting a Nerds on Tech story, Kyle M. for letting us know that folks at The Daily are good people, Elisabeth McCaffrey for suggesting a Weird Science story this week, and our theme-song composer Pete Snyder for giving us two Weird Science stories as well as some funny feedback.

You too can get a shout-out by reblogging the show, leaving a comment, writing a review, or suggesting a story.

@cordblomquist tweets about the show, so give a re-tweet!

Nerds on Tech

Wired Gets Personal

A few selected readers have received an ultra-personalised cover of this months Wired magazine (UK edition). Wired digged up some personal information on the web of each person and printed this on their own personalised cover.

Wired’s statement: “…many of us are unaware how data we post only for social reasons can later be used for other purposes”

Up in Them iPhone Guts

The location and design of the RF components—EMI (electromagnetic interference) shields, connector locations, even board layout—is changed. They redesigned the vibrator—a seemingly minor item, but it takes up a large amount of space inside the phone. My tester said that the “Verizon vibration was quieter, a little softer to feel, and made a better sound on the table.” (No, I’m not making a ‘That’s what she said’ joke.)

The real news is that the chipset also supports both GSM and CDMA, suggesting “universal” models may be forthcoming.

Armchair Psychologists

Sexy News is Good News, or Is It?

from Communication Research:

The experimental study reported here employed one of the most compelling visual cues of female sexual attractiveness (low waist-to-hip ratio) to test the influence of news anchor sexualization on audience evaluations of her as a professional and their memory for the news that she presents. Male participants saw the sexualized version of the anchor as less suited for war and political reporting. They also encoded less news information presented by the sexualized than her unsexualized version. Conclusions were drawn in line with evolutionary psychology expectations of men’s cognitive susceptibility to visual sex cues.

Women participants, on the other hand, did not vary across conditions in their assessments of the anchor’s competence to report on war and political news. Moreover, they encoded more news information presented by the sexualized than unsexualized anchor condition.

Good Vibrations

from The Journal of Sexual Medicine:

The prevalence of women’s vibrator use was found to be 52.5% (95% CI 50.3-54.7%). Vibrator users were significantly more likely to have had a gynecologic exam during the past year (P < 0.001) and to have performed genital self-examination during the previous month (P < 0.001). Vibrator use was significantly related to several aspects of sexual function (i.e., desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, pain, overall function) with recent vibrator users scoring higher on most sexual function domains, indicating more positive sexual function.

Weird Science

One Flu Vaccine to Rule Them All

A new flue vaccine would:

target proteins inside the flu virus that are common to all types of flu instead of being tailored to match individual strains, according to researchers at Oxford University.

The technique has never been tested on humans before and could be used to prevent around a billion people a year contracting the disease, including the variant swine flu.

This means that there would no longer be an annual rush to create new vaccines, at great expense, to match different strains as they develop.

Totally Gross Grossness

To make artificial blood vessels the team took smooth-muscle cells from fresh corpses and cultured them on tubular scaffolds made of a material called polyglycolic acid. Grown this way, smooth muscle secretes collagen, a structural protein that is, among several other things in the body, an important component of the walls of blood vessels.

Kickstarting Synthetic Biology Through Film

This new perspective comes from engineers turning their attention from other fields towards biological sciences and the structures of DNA. They see DNA as programmable code, cells as systems built of genetic circuits, and biology as a platform from which manufacturing systems can be created.

Synthetic Biology is a new approach to genetic engineering. It can make E. Coli bacteria smell like fresh rain, turn sunlight into gasoline, make concrete buildings heal themselves, or goats produce spider silk in their milk. These are strange technologies certainly, but these examples help demonstrate what is possible and already happening with the tools of synthetic biology.

See more at KickStarter.com

Our Awesome Governments

Senate Seating Assignments

from the National Bureau of Economic Research:

In this paper we demonstrate that personal connections amongst politicians, and between politicians and firms, have a significant impact on the voting behavior of U.S. politicians. We exploit a unique database linking politicians to other politicians, and linking politicians to firms, and find both channels to be influential. Networks based on alumni connections between politicians, as well as common seat locations on the chamber floor, are consistent predictors of voting behavior.

Less Smoking, More Drinking & Driving

from The Journal of Public Economics

Using geographic variation in local and state smoke-free bar laws in the US, we observe an increase in fatal accidents involving alcohol following bans on smoking in bars that is not observed in places without bans. Although an increased accident risk might seem surprising at first, two strands of literature on consumer behavior suggest potential explanations — smokers driving longer distances to a bordering jurisdiction that allows smoking in bars and smokers driving longer distances within their jurisdiction to bars that still allow smoking, perhaps through non-compliance or outdoor seating.

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Nerd Rage

There’s no reason to be mad this week. Aaron Rodgers is the Super Bowl MVP. The Packers did it. Done.

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Episode 16. Very female. Disturbingly so.

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Show Notes: Episode 16

We’re “Sweet 16” today and feeling fabulous.

This Week in Star Trek

Gene Roddenberry’s original pitch for Star Trek

STAR TREK is a “Wagon Train” concept — built arround characters who travel to worlds “similar” to our own, and meet the action-adventure-drama which becomes our stories. Their transportation is the cruiser “S.S. Yorktown”, performing a well-defined and long-range Exploration-Science-Security mission which helps create our format.

Other interesting tid-bits: The captain was to be named Robert April, the timeline said “it could be 1995 or 2995,” the executive office was supposed to be “number one” and be a “Nile Valley” female.

The pitch also had one-sentence descriptions of many future episode including the Al-Capone world, and the human zoo.

Others didn’t make it, like an episode described as “Alien people in an alien society, but something disturbingly familiar about the quiet dignity of one who is being condemned to crucifixion.”

In Conversation Gives Back

We want to thank the fans. Here’s to Preston Theler, my high school and college buddy who gave me an awesome shout-out this week.

You too can get a shout-out by reblogging the show, leaving a comment, writing a review, or suggesting a story.

Cord’s also tweeting about the show, so give a re-tweet!

Nerds on Tech

The Bing Sting

Google claimed this week that Microsoft’s Bing search engine has been copying its search results. Google had suspected something was up for a while, so it had its engineers create 100 nonsensical queries such as “hiybbprqag” and insert a fake result for each. Sure enough, those results turned up on Bing within a few weeks.

Google’s Matt Cutts has some great notes on this debacle.

IPv4 is Tapped

There are no more unallocated unicast IPv4 /8s in the IANA IPv4 Address Space Registry.
Kind regards,

Leo Vegoda Number

Resources Manager, IANA ICANN

Match.com buys OkCupid

Match.com is continuing its acquisition strategy today with thepurchase of online dating site OkCupid for $50 million in cash. The deal also includes future earnouts contingent upon performance.

While Match.com has a significant userbase, OkCupid singles tend to be younger, which is why Match found it to be a useful acquisition. The site, which is free, apparently generates revenue via advertising and according to IAC, has “been the fastest growing dating site in the advertising-based category.”

Search These Resumes

Google Inc., the world’s biggest Internet-search service, received more than 75,000 job applications worldwide last week, setting a record for the company as it embarks on a hiring spree.

The flood of resumes topped a previous high set in May 2007 by 15 percent, said Aaron Zamost, a spokesman for the Mountain View, California-based company. Google, which had 24,400 workers at the end of 2010, announced last week that it would add more than 6,000 employees this year.

Our Awesome Governments

The President Killed the Internet Star

The resurgence of the so-called “kill switch” legislation came the same day Egyptians faced an internet blackout designed to counter massive demonstrations in that country.

The bill, which has bipartisan support, is being floated by Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The proposed legislation, which Collins said would not give the president the same power Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is exercising to quell dissent, sailed through the Homeland Security Committee in December but expired with the new Congress weeks later.

The bill is designed to protect against “significant” cyber threats before they cause damage, Collins said.

Don’t Bother Coming Home, Honey

An immigration officer in the U.K. found a novel way to end his relationship with his wife. His cunning plan was to wait until she went abroad to visit family, then add her to name to the terrorist no-fly list. Unable to return from Pakistan for three years, with officials refusing to tell her why, it took three years for the truth to emerge

According to the Daily Mail, his act was only discovered during a background check required for a promotion.

He got fired. Furthermore, his wife is now able to return home.

Armchair Psychologists

Slutiness Makes Sons

One standard deviation increase in unrestrictedness of sociosexual orientation increases the odds of having a son by 12-19% in the representative American samples.

The Mozart Isn’t Helping

From Psychology of Music:

The study investigated the effects of music with high arousal potential and negative affect (HA), music with low arousal potential and positive affect (LA), and everyday noise, on the cognitive task performance of introverts and extraverts. Forty participants completed five cognitive tasks: immediate recall, free recall, numerical and delayed recall, and Stroop. Ten participants completed each of these tasks in one of four sound conditions: HA, LA, everyday noise and silence. Participants were also assessed for levels of introversion/ extroversion, and reported their music/noise and study preferences. Performance was lessened across all cognitive tasks in the presence of background sound (music or noise) compared to silence.

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Nerds Rage

The Daily (For Free)

Andy Baio, a self-described journalist/programmer who works at Expert Labs, decided to do The Daily a favor: Compile all of the stories published each day by and post them to Tumblr.

Now, everyone can read The Daily, and even subscribers can access back issues — which they weren’t able to do previously.

posted 03 February, 2011
by cordblomquist
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Episode 15. Egyptology 101.

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