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Your SSD Drive is Obsolete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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