I’ve been against wide-spread spy cameras on privacy principles, ever since I heard about plans for them a few years ago. Now it seems that my concerns are unfounded… there’s no incentive to install them in any new cities, and the existing ones will probably scrap them soon, as they discover the same thing.
“Conjoined twins with shared brains can pass sensory information to one another”
It will be interesting to see how this develops over time.
“Artificial replacement human livers made in lab”
By the end of this decade or the next, “regenerative medicine” could well be commonplace. Dr. Who, eat your heart(s) out. 😉
“Genes are left-wing”
Damned genes and their liberal agenda. For political reasons they refuse to justify the conservatives’ assertion that they’re just better than everybody else.
“Alien Earthlike worlds ‘like grains of sand’, say ‘wobble’ boffins”
We space/science/SF geeks have always hoped that something like this would be the case, but we didn’t know what to expect. It looks like a second of the variables in the calculation of the odds of intelligent civilizations in the universe that we could communicate with (the Drake Equation) has been solved… only four more to go. 🙂
“LED bulbs in the home: So far, so good”
I’ve talked about compact fluorescent lights before, and (in the comments) about LED lights. Apparently LEDs are getting really good now… CF lights may turn out to be really short-lived.
“Ridiculous, constricting clothing — to the rescue!”
(I’m out of the office today, but here’s a bonus post to keep you amused.)
A “thrilling tale of how massive Victorian skirts saved a female naturalist from being impaled.”
“Thrilling” might be a bit of an overstatement, but it is interesting. Although if “impaled” is taken in an alternate vernacular context, that sentence might seem to promise something a little more titillating than the actual story is. 😉
(Via a very short BoingBoing article, most of which is quoted above.)
“Boffins mount campaign against France’s official kilogramme”
I’ve mentioned the problem before, about three years ago: the platinum/iridium cylinder in France that is the official reference for the kilogram is losing weight, for reasons that currently baffle science. Any reference object is useless if it can’t be relied on to stay the same, so the science community is making a determined effort to retire it, replacing it with a definition based on Planck’s Constant, a measurement “reflecting the sizes of quanta in quantum mechanics.”
Which is a good idea… but software developers have a maxim: “constants aren’t, variables won’t.” (For the non-developers out there: it’s a shortened version of “constants aren’t constant, and variables won’t vary.” It refers to the rare but baffling behavior of things we declare as constant in our programs, which should never be able to change but sometimes do, and that of variables, which are supposed to change but sometimes don’t. We’ve known it for decades, from painful experience.)
Sometime in the next century, scientists are going to learn that rule themselves, when they improve their measurement methods and discover that the size of quanta vary too. Remember, you heard it here first. 😉
“Science Tarot Cards”
A delightfully contradictory juxtaposition. GoddessJ is a science wonk who collects Tarot decks, one of these would make a perfect Christmas gift for her.
Weird Telemarketer Spam Call
On the twelfth of October, I received a very odd phone call. When I picked up, an obviously robotic voice said:
ATTENTION: BECAUSE YOU ARE A PREFERRED WESTJET CUSTOMER YOU WILL RECEIVE A SPECIAL GIFT. TO ACCEPT PRESS ONE.
Um… in the first place, I’m not a preferred WestJet customer. So far as I can remember, I’ve never been a WestJet customer at all, and in any case I haven’t flown on any planes in many years.
Second, why are they asking me to press a button to accept this gift? It sounds to me like the company behind it can’t afford enough operators to handle their calls, so they’re asking you to press something to confirm that you’re a human dumb enough to go for the vague promise of a free something, and when you do you’ll be put into a wait queue. Probably slightly better (and more legal) than “ghost calls,” where they just hang up on you without saying anything if they don’t have a free operator to talk to you when they get through — but only slightly.
I have to admire the cajones of any company willing to try that. But I don’t have to put up with it. I just hung up.
ADDENDUM: Yesterday I received another call. Same computer voice, same modus operandi, but this time saying that I’ve won 50,000 AirMiles points, and to accept I should “press 1.” I have to “accept” it? And we don’t have an AirMiles card. Nice try.
This morning I found a site where you can check and report phone numbers of scammers and the like. I looked up the number that the caller ID said they called from, and also did a Google-search of the site for similar calls from other numbers, and got nearly a hundred pages of results… apparently they’ve been at it for a while, under several phone numbers. I wonder how long they can get away with this before they’re shut down?