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SkipScience and academia
Barry Marshall and Robin Warren win this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that stomach ulcers were caused, not from maternal stress (!), but from the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. You may remember Marshall for single-handedly convincing the medical community by swallowing an entire test tube full of said bacteria and then treating himself using antibiotics. « Corante
Last week marked the 60th anniversary of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whose one most famous contribution to popular culture is the Doomsday Clock. It’s nice to finally nail down the origins of this pop culture item. (Trivia packrats, take note!) « Cosmic Variance. The clock currently reads 11:53, right where it was in 1947 when it first appeared on the magazine cover.
In an interview with the Guardian, Stephen Hawking said he would rather meet Marilyn Monroe over Isaac Newton. Cute. « The Quantum Pontiff
Hurricane Rita, and New Orleans
US Army Corps of Engineers plan to get New Orleans dry by today. Last week’s lashing by Hurricane Rita created another levee breach which reinforced the urgency of getting back to business ASAP. Louisiana attorney-general Charles Foti presses charges against owners of nursing homes who failed to evacuate their residents. Read this eyewitness account of Katrina v. City of New Orleans. « Mumblings of a Platonist.
Meanwhile the Orange and Blue accepts a physics professor displaced from Tulane University. Where I also learn (with a strong viscereal reaction that is not quite shock) that there is at least one elementary school in Chambana that offers Chinese in its curriculum.
Quirky engineering
German engineering students invent an intelligent beermat that knows when a bear mug placed on top of it is empty. « PhD Comics Blog
Dog washing machine is a hit in Germany.
Simon Bradshaw once wrote a famous email on Brain Eater Syndrome, about why electrical engineers tend to be more susceptible to crackpot science than any other field of professional endeavor.
Miscellaneous
Esquire magazine writer wrote an article about Wikipedia and posted a crappy draft of it on Wikipedia itself for review. Wikipedians hacked it to bits and put together a much more polished article after 60 hours and about 500 edits. No doubt about it, peer review is the most powerful mechanism ever devised for maximizing factual accuracy.
College student gets hauled over the coals by campus security for satirizing a creationist student’s email. Choice quote:
When someone with authority tells you, “Well, we can’t let you do this, otherwise we’ll have to let everyone do it too,” they are basically admitting that their argument is crap. They cannot explain why what you did in a particular situation is bad, only that such actions could conceivably be bad. This is not acceptable.
How true.
World News
Bali got bombed again. « blankspaces
Foetuses suspected for destinies in Satanic rituals in the US were confiscated in Bogota. Ironically, “[t]he corpses were wrapped in plastic and concealed inside statues of Christian icons”.
The New York Times reports that $100m of taxpayers’ money earmarked for ice intended for post-Katrina disaster relief was completely squandered away by bureaucratic inefficiency in pointless redirection of refrigerated trucks.
New Canine Flu is reaching epidemic proportions in the US dog population. Blog celebrities such as Coconut may want to take note. Meanwhile Sun readers are aghast at a picture purporting to show a live dog with a double hook pierced through its nose for the purpose of shark trawling. Snopes is skeptical.
The AP reports that a gift of bull semen from Shandong Province in China improved bilateral ties with Singapore. Good thing it wasn’t pure bullshit. Ironically, the article notes that “The semen was pooled from dairy bull from the United States and Canada”.
The first traffic fatality of the academic year was recorded on September 30 when Sarah Emily Channick, LAS, died Sep 30 at the intersection of Sixth and Chalmers. The fatality occurred in broad daylight. Sarah was reported to be chatting on her cell phone at the time. « Running from the Thought Police
Discovered this nifty chiclet generator for my Google PageRank: