Scientists gone wild

OK, in case you lot didn't know, I enjoy playing games. And I especially enjoy playing games that have a point to them, or games that involve numbers. That made the game I recently played with Nathan extra fun¹. But this is a different game, one that arose out of the fact that there's a road in Chicagoland that's called Euclid Avenue. That brought up the discussion about naming roads after people who were valuable in the sciences, not just politicians and activists.

So we got to a-thinking, about who we'd name streets after. And, just for fun, we decided that we'd limit our city plan to 26 consecutive streets, alphabetically. Sure, then we have to chose between Hooke, Halley or Heisenberg and Fr. Mendel or Mendeleev², but it's easier that way than having unending roads named after semi-obscure scientists.

So my game is: who would you have as your alphabetic roads, keeping in mind both scientific advancement and popular opinion of them?

My partial list;
(Archimedes, Boltzman, Curie, Darwin, Einstein, Faraday, Geiger, Hooke, and then I give up trying to think of an "I" without straining myself)


¹I am thinking of a rule which governs sequences of three numbers. The sequence 2-4-6, as it so happens, obeys this rule. Write down a sequence of three numbers on a card, and I'll mark it "Yes" for fits the rule, or "No" for not fitting the rule. Then you can write down another set of three numbers and ask whether it fits again, and so on. When you're confident that you know the rule, write down the rule. You can test as many triplets as you like.
²I really wanted to link to the Oscar Mayer Periodic table, but after 10 minutes of searching, I couldn't find images of Bolognium.

I don't care if you're Black/Asain/Jewish/Arab, just don't try to get my money

I've been a little bit bored from time to time, but it's nice to be able to see how biased I am and where I fit in spectra. I could link to the obvious¹, but really, who cares about that. That is SO last year. So, I'm going to link to the not so obvious. And the down right unobvious^2,3. And my summary is; Libertarian. I don't discriminate against Asains, Blacks, Arabs, Jews, and the disabled. I hate Jefferson and Roosevelt (FDR) and Bush equally, but favor Lincoln (a lot), Grant and Carter (a little). I am slightly biased against gays and the overweight, and I associated the sciences with men and the liberal arts with women. I don't think that most of the situations deserve money, or at least certainly not paid to the government (SPOILER - You're not supposed to know this before taking the test - I was about $72,300 below the average of $72,300 and change).

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¹I did!
²Yes, there's a word for this, but I'm too tired to google it.
³Admittedly, this links to the not so obvious at the end. And a few others.

Reasons they should never give me power

Three inventions that I think they should have;

Google Maps on airplane windows. I was flying from Austin, TX to Chicago a few weeks ago in the evening, and I wanted to see where we were. I didn't know, cause everything was lit up the same (ie, with those lovely sodium lights). It was terrible. I think that they should transpose the names of roads and towns on the windows. It'd make the process of flying more interesting.

Salt licks. I like salt. We need more of these. Cows and deer have them. Clearly we have the technology to make them - there's no difficulty in manufacturing them. Why can't I go to the supermarket and buy a stick of salt? I'm gonna blame Big Dave for this one.

Air dryers for bathrooms. Like the hand ones, but for me when I get out of the shower. I can't think of anything more unpleasant than stepping out of a warm shower onto a cold floor with cold air. So.... if you have a big vent on either side blowing warm air at you, then you dry off pleasantly. It's a win-win situation^1,2.

I have a whole bunch of other inventions, but they're not as good as these. Unless you count the one that I thought was brilliant and amazing, but promptly forgot the next day. Shame.

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¹Unless you have to worry about doing your hair. But that's not a problem for me.
²And unless you count the environment. Then it's a win-win-lose. And I'm not quite sure who the second win is for. Maybe manufacturers.

Holla at da physicists

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/physicists-find-way-to-see-extra-dimensions-12520.html
Also, how do I make fancy little blue links? I was only visited by the Ghost of Internet Past.

[Insert pun with "Ewe" in it]

I always love it when people with no knowledge of science whatsoever start to protest something that isn't actually what it is. Like this. Apparently, testing to determine how hormones determine the sexual prefrences of rams is "frightening," and has no relevence to science at all, and especially to humans, so should be stopped.

Now, let's forget that;

1. The scientist in question actually says that this has little implication for humans, whose sexuality is "is much more complex than that of rams so we don't refer to the animals as gay."¹
   
2. The actual experiment doesn't alter "gay sheep". It alters sheep who prefer ewes to prefer rams, sexually. By their terminology, it alters straight sheep.
   
3. The experiment didn't work. At all.

Now, the thing is, PETA's attacking the researchers (both verbally and physically). I'm not entirely sure why, because the number of rams killed a year is 18, and they're killed far more humanely than kosher, halal or most other (ie unclean) methods, of which several million in the US are killed each year.

Of course, gay rights activists jumped on this. Especially the ones who are with PETA.

I do so love the misinterpretation of science.



¹Here you go.