Here's a list of quick links to some interesting stuff:

  • Mario Lemieux: So long, and thanks for all the penguins.
  • What Junior Genius decided to get the Buttafuocos and Fisher together again? The original was miserable and no one wants a reunion tour.
  • Space.com has an interesting article on the General Relativistic effect of frame dragging on radiation emitted from black holes. An astute reader might question the article. The frequencies listed, though — 450 Hz and 300 Hz — make no sense. X-Rays have frequencies on the order of 3×1018 Hz. Did someone blew a number by an order of magnitude of orders of magnitude! Not at all. If you go to the MIT press release (and look at the graphs) you'll find that the 450 and 300 Hz are from the "variability spectrum." In other words, this is how much the X-rays vary by. There's a tremendous number of X-rays that "wobble" by 300 and 450 Hz. The black hole rotates at 450 times a second — 450 Hz — and the relativistic effects cause the 300 Hz number to "pop up."
  • African Greys are wonderful pets, but you should still put batteries in the smoke detector and make sure it works. A lot of parrots die saving their owners.
  • Science is for normal people. The best present I got this Christmas was hearing a young lady talk excitedly (when she thought no one could hear) about her visit to the Carnegie Science Center. I'd taken her there two weeks earlier! As we say in High Power Rocketry and Amateur Radio: Pay it forward.
  • Speaking of fun with science, here are some cool home experiments.
  • Why do magnetotactic bacteria have magnets? It's not to figure out "up" and "down" as was thought. For now the question appears to be open. As a side note, one of the big complaints about the "life signal" in the Alan Hale 84001 meteorite is that the purported bacterial fossils had biological magnetite in them. Why, if Mars had no significant magnetic field, would the bacteria-like cells have magnetite? Abiologic origins for the magnetite are still the strongest contender.
  • An Antarctica ice core that appears to date back 900,000 years will add a lot of data to the global warming debate. The core is only 3 km long, shorter than another core taken earlier — but apparently just as old! That it's just as old isn't surprising — ice floes and deposit thicknesses can easily account for the discrepancy. It's the wealth of data that will be most useful, enabling comparisons to the earlier ice core.
  • Diebold is claiming that their data format is proprietary and thus Democrats cannot look at the original data from Diebold voting machines. There are many discrepancies in the Alaska voting machine records, and Diebold has been questioned many times before in other places. By releasing the data in a non-proprietary format, any irregularities in the data will be "sanitized" away. Interestingly, while Diebold is protecting it's data file format from the Democrats, other sets of data in the same format are freely available on the web. Reach your own conclusions. Via Slashdot.
  • Doug Thompson, of Capitol Hill Blue, is on the no-fly list. As a critic of politicians, whether Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative, is it any surprise he's on the list?
  • Alli, the Over-The-Counter version (i.e. half-dose) of Orlistat, is near approval. While Orlistat blocks absorption of fat (and fat-soluble vitamins), much of it's effect is fear of what happens should you eat too much fat. Think of it as the fat equivalent of antabuse (a drug used to treat alcohol addiction) and you've got the idea.
  • Cowher chose for the Steelers to wear white in the Super Bowl. Tradidiontally, black is the intimidating color. Forget tradition. Psychologically, Cowher is brilliant. The team has become conditioned to associate the white uniforms with winning. If you think this is silly, then you also thought sitting in the same seat to take exams where you sat in class is silly — and you did worse on the tests as a result. Before anyone comments that the Steelers are hardly virginal, let me point out that the white wedding dress has nothing to do with virginity, but rather it being the first wedding.
  • The political leanings affect how a politican's brain interprets facts. They think they're choosing among the facts, but their brain is picking and choosing the facts to choose from. One more reason I'm not sure humans have the ability to make many real choices.
  • Veronica Mars should survive the UPN - WB merger.
  • The Carbolic Smoke Ball is a horrible, horrible site. Anyone who reads it should be ashamed. The site is so terrible, I check it every couple hours to see what new perversity it has posted on it. I think everyone should keep a close watch on this site so that you know how cruel and vicious and hysterically funny a blog can be.
  • I think I posted about atlatal hunting possibly becoming legal here in Pennsylvania. Froth Slosh B'Gosh has a newer link. An atlatal is a stone-age hunting tool that uses basic physics to enable a human to throw a spear with vicious speed. In one example, someone learning to use an atlatl put a spear through a steel drum with one of these things. Unfortunately, he wasn't aiming at the steel drum. Oopsie. They do take practice.