Whilst out at Tesco this morning, getting some fresh pineapple for breakfast, I also picked up some Factor 50 sun block to use when in San Francisco for WWDC 09 in early June. I’ve been sun burnt twice in California. Once quite badly on the forehead in San Diego, and then on the arms and neck in San Francisco. Not this year 🙂
More change 🙂
If anyone doubted that change has come, and come to science, they need to watch this video. We’ve been waiting a long, long time for a president to take this kind of interest in furthering the cause of science in our country. His budget calls for a doubling of our nation’s investment in basic research in the coming years: “No one can predict what new applications will be born of basic research: new treatments in our hospitals; new sources of efficient energy; new building materials; new kinds of crops more resistant to heat and drought.” “It was basic research in the photoelectric effect that would one day lead to solar panels. It was basic research in physics that would eventually produce the CAT scan. The calculations of today’s GPS satellites are based on the equations that Einstein put to paper more than a century ago….”
You can watch the video at the Cosmic Variance site linked below.
Read more & watch video: Obama on Science | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
Mocking the stone age science at the Texas State Board of Education has now gone viral — late-night comedians have the rest of the country laughing at us. Bill Maher de-pantsed the governor on last Friday’s episode of his HBO series Real Time with Bill Maher: “He [Perry] appointed a creationist to head the Texas State Board of Education, which is shocking. Texas has a board of education?!?”
I hate shaving. I’ve Twittered about it a few times. Beard hair, especially just under my jaw line and on my neck, grows very quickly and mostly dark. If I shave in the morning then by lunchtime there will be significant regrowth of the hair. A 12 o’clock shadow! Not only that the hair is like stiff wire and rubbing a finger over it is actually painful to the face skin. The shaving bumps and razor burn I get are quite painful as well. It’s not quite as bad as the Pseudofolliculitis barbae that some people get, but still a pain in the neck (pun intended!) I think that the hair composition changed a bit after I had surgery for testicular cancer. Maybe my hormone levels went a bit haywire for a bit. I don’t know. I wasn’t tested for testosterone levels at the time.
I’ve been a long advocate of the mantra there is a technical solution for everything. It’s a bit of a glib phrase I know. But it suits my view of the world. If you define it widely enough then the phrase can take in braces for teeth straightening, surgery, lots of things.
So, is there a technical solution for the shaving problem? Research shows that there is. Laser hair removal. In particular a technique that uses a laser with a certain wavelength of laser light that is meant to work really well on coarse, dark male beard hair. It’s known as the Lightsheer Diode Laser System. There are lots of sites on the Internet where people outline their successes (or not – mostly successes though) with beard removal using with the Lightsheer machine. Apparently it works due to the melanin pigment in dark hair follicles absorbing the energy in the laser light. This heats the follicle and destroys or impedes its ability to produce new hair. It seems it doesn’t work on light coloured hair or hair that has gone grey or white as there is not enough melanin to absorb the energy.The science behind it is interesting stuff. Not sure why I didn’t think of this before. I lost the hair on my chest and abdomen during my radiotherapy. That grew back after a while. With Lightsheer it takes several sessions spread out over about a year to provide a complete zapping.
Do I hate shaving and the associated razor irritation enough to try getting it lasered? I don’t know. My beard now grows with colours like a Persian carpet. Not all the hairs are as black as they were 20 years ago. The laser might not work on the light coloured hairs, and definitely won’t work on the white/grey hairs. But then again maybe removing the majority of the hair, which is dark and susceptible to the laser, would be enough. It’s also meant to be painful. Do I have the balls for it? I don’t like pain! There is also the societal aspect. Is it socially acceptable for blokes to get their beard hair permanently removed? I don’t see why not. What’s the difference between a few laser removal sessions and shaving everyday?
Anyway. I’ll have to have a think. It’s meant to be quite expensive as well.
This is interesting. If blocking this single enzyme does stop cancer metastasis then it’ll be a real breakthrough. AS long as the cancer is found early before it can spread of course. Which is why you need to get anything suspicious checked out as early as possible. False alarms and wasted trips to the doctor are better than the alternative.
Institute of Cancer Research scientists have found that an enzyme called LOX is crucial in promoting metastasis, Cancer Cell journal reports.
Drugs to block this enzyme’s action could keep cancer at bay, they hope.
More info at: BBC NEWS | Health | Enzyme behind cancer spread found
More change we can believe in 🙂
US regulators have cleared the way for the world’s first study on human embryonic stem cell therapy.
The move comes three days after the inauguration of President Barack Obama who has been a strong supporter of embryonic stem cell research.
Full story at: BBC NEWS | Health | Green light for US stem cell work
Just want to wish everyone who stumbles upon this blog a Happy 2009. If you want to be where the action is online in 2009 joint Twitter.
I think 2009 is going to be very historic for several reasons. Number 1 being the inauguration of Barack Obama. The fact that he is African American is an incidental in my opinion. The best thing about Barack Obama is that he is an intellectual. He gets that it is okay to listen to experts in various fields and that empirical evidence isn’t a taboo.
Other highlights in 2009 will be the 200 year anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150 year anniversary of the publication of his seminal work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
The world has been on a path to a a better place after the work of Darwin, and Wallace it should be said.
Last April John Holdren, who will be Barack Obama’s chief science advisor, was on Letterman. You can see a video of it here. It’s well worth watching.
Barack Obama talked about science and introduced his science team in his weekly address. See video below. Could we be about to witness a new mini enlightenment after the regression of the Bush years. I think so. It is incumbent on all of us who value rationality, both in the USA and also the wider world, to step up to the plate and advance rational evidenced based thinking and policy.
I wonder how much complaining we’ll hear from the war on Christmas crowd for the Happy Holiday’s closing remark!
The end of a great use of Twitter 🙁
[From Phoenix mission ops: Phoenix is no longer communicating with Earth. We’ll continue to listen, but it’s likely its mission has ended.]
Just finished reading Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. It is a very good book indeed. I read it in print form (on the Sony Reader) and as an Audio book. Skipping between the formats depending on what I was doing. The audio book version is read by Obama. He could have a good career as a voice actor in 8 years after his Presidency 🙂
The book itself is a very good manifesto for a fair and tolerant society. Parts of it moved me close to tears, whilst other parts made me laugh out loud. Not at the ideas but rather at the prose and the turn of phrase used. The only part of the book I disagree with is the chapter on Faith. Obama is a Christian and he outlines why he took this path after a wide ranging exposure to many religious, spiritual and secular ideas in his youth. Whist I can understand at the intellectual level his decision to be baptised as a Christian, I find myself disappointed that he did. I’m perfectly willing to admit that this is my bias and prejudice showing through. With that bias fully acknowledged, It has to be said that Obama presents a good case for why secularists should not expect people of faith to park their beliefs at the door. He also points out however that the religious cannot base their argument on recourse to God’s Will or scripture and expect to carry the argument. Arguments in a democracy have to be open and acceptable to all members of the society, whether religious or not. UPDATE: See video below in which Obama talks about this subject. This is much like the text in the book. This book is highly recommended. Either in print or audio book form.
The world will be a shinier place on 5th November 2008 if Barack Obama is the President Elect of the USA.
Amid many promises about futuristic automobiles, an unlikely one seems to be coming true: hydrogen fuel-cell cars.
From: SciAm Test Drives Two Street-Legal Fuel-Cell Cars: Scientific American
Botheration. It’s going to take at least 8 months to fix the Large Hadron Collider.
Officials at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, say that the time is needed to overhaul a sector of the 27-kilometre-long machine, after an electrical failure on 19 September caused some 6 tonnes of ultra-cold liquid helium to leak into its tunnel. A preliminary report issued on 16 October says that as many as 29 of the nearly 10,000 magnets used to guide the accelerator’s proton beam will need to be replaced. Further magnets may need to be removed and inspected, and modifications must also be made to prevent future accidents. “It’s a serious incident,” says James Gillies, a spokesman for the laboratory.
A team of European physicists has developed an integrated circuit that can build itself. The work, appearing in this week’s Nature1, is an important step towards its ultimate goal — a self-assembling computer.
I’ve had an item in my to do list for a few days to blog about the remarks made by Professor Michael Reiss on how creationism should be handled if it comes up in classrooms. Looks like I’ll have to discuss his resignation as well when I get round to it.
Professor Michael Reiss has quit as director of education at the Royal Society following the controversy over his recent comments on creationism.
From: BBC NEWS | Education | ‘Creationism’ biologist quits job
Nature have a nice web site section on the LHC.
Specials : Nature News: “The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. As the first proton beams zipped around the LHC’s massive 27-kilometre ring on 10 September 2008, it marked a new era of physics that could pin down the identity of the dark matter that shapes galaxies; find the Higgs boson, believed to confer mass on the other particles of the quantum bestiary; and recreate conditions that existed a split-second after the Big Bang. In this online Special, Nature asks how it works, what it will find, and why we should be excited.”
(Via Nature Journal.)
Cool new ant species discovered. More info at Nature site:
It is so new, and so bizarre, that uber-naturalist E. O. Wilson has christened it “the ant from Mars”. Martialis heureka, a native of the Brazilian Amazon, is the founding member of a new subfamily of ants. It adds a new branch to the ant family tree which split off from the others extremely early in the family’s evolution. From The ant from Mars : Nature News
There is an excellent response on the BBC site to those questioning the expense of the LHC in general, and by the current head of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in particular. The LHC is a marvellous endeavour and suggesting that the money would be better spent on climate change, or medical research is missing the point. We need to do both, and more. Humanity needs to explore. We need to probe the quantum realm. We need to explore the cosmos. We need to research for new medical advances. We need to find new cleaner energy sources. We need to do lots of things, but not at the expense of basic research into the way the Universe functions. The money spent on the LHC is not that much in comparison to other national expenditure. The UK contribution is equivalent to the cost of a pint of beer per head per year. It’s peanuts. Both figuratively and in a real sense. More is spent in the UK on peanuts every year than the UK contributes to the LHC. Maybe we should stop pouring money down the Iraq rat hole if we want to save. I’m looking forward to many years of interesting data and results from the LHC.
I like to set goals. I’m not that keen on keeping to them, but I like setting them as targets and frameworks to work with. I’ve got a set of personal and work related goals that want to work to over the next few years. Sort of my own personal Soviet style 5-year plan.
Work Stuff
Become the go-to guy for VMware VI3 questions and also for Mac OS X integration into Windows environments. Also be the person people search out when they have questions about current and new technology.
Personal Stuff
Learn mathematics. Using this selection of self study books:
Click picture for larger view
I want to be able to read Penrose’s The Road to Reality and understand the mathematics in it.
Do several Open University courses to finish a BSc I’m doing with them:
SXN390 Science in Society Project
Do the Open University MSc Science and Society. As long as they let me in. [Update: They did!] I’ve pulled out a few courses recently and they have a rule that stops you registering for new courses. Which is fair enough. They don’t get paid by the government if people don’t complete the courses. In any event I’ll be doing something in the science communication field (including many more posts here on the Soapbox) as we need to fight the hoards of superstitious nut jobs. We can’t cede any of the ground won in the last 400 years with rationality and the scientific method.
Continue to work on some science fiction stories I’m writing. One is set in a space opera scale universe and the other is set in the Frank Herbert Hellstrom’s Hive universe.
Music – I’ve got about dozen songs in various stages of work (all have full lyrics). I want to continue to work on them and maybe package them together as an actual album. That’d be cool 🙂
Write a cricket match scoring system for Macintosh and iPhone using Cocoa. Unless someone else develops on that meets my needs first. I’d be happy if they did. Programming projects always bore the tits of me after the initial requirements specification and design are done! [Update: I’ve also had an idea for an app that uses the Twitter API]
We’ll see how I get on…