Thanks For Scooping My Poop Hand Sanitizer! “If your lazy cat could talk, they might thank you but instead would probably tell you that you’re blocking the tv or explain that back when cats lived in the wild, they didn’t scoop their own poop”.
Around the world, there are buildings that are decorated and built almost entirely with human bones. They form eerily symmetrical patterns, and turn death into an architectural flourish. No, this isn’t the decor at the Arkansas nuclear plant, but….
The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath. “I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological,” he says, noting that it showed low activity in certain areas of the frontal and temporal lobes linked to empathy, morality and self-control. When he looked up the code, he was greeted by an unsettling revelation: the psychopathic brain pictured in the scan was his own.
Experiments to Do With Your Baby. Seems fair-play to me, since the little tykes are experimenting on you their every waking moment. And, really, someone put those words in that order in print, then signed their name to it? That’s the part I don’t get. They gonna shankyou just for that title.
STEERING SUNSHINE USING ELECTROFLUIDIC CELLS, OMG, I’M GEEKING OUT!! …but- wait!— If we do this, just hand over an automated, distributed-network solar energy-gathering power nanogrid system, will ‘they’ still need us? Just a mesh of modules based on a cellular-level analog of an amoral machine intelligence that optimizes for performance, for output —I mean, what could go wrong?A minor network expansion to ‘It‘ might look a lot like a war to us, especially since all of our data-streams flow through ‘It‘. Will ‘It‘ use discrete persuasion, or just push us like pawns on a playing-field?
And, yeah, speaking of Malcolm McDowell, nominations are open for the “Knights of the Sci-Fi Ghetto“. Does anyone else remember David Warner’s “Quest of the Delta Knights“? Or Donald Pleasence in “The Mutations“? Films like these make you a working actor!
China’s “Jade Rabbit” lunar rover is on it’s way! Packed with a ground-piercing radar, cameras, spectrometers and plutonium-powered heaters, the rover lifted off at 1730 GMT (12:30 p.m. EST) Sunday.
A short post today. Thanksgiving has passed, hope you all survived it. My thoughts turn to the Long Cold Time ahead. I’ve got glass-blocks to set to close the hole in my bathroom wall, and glass blocks make me think of ice cubes, and ice cubes make me think of partying at the South end of the world.
The Amundsen-Scott Station is the National Science Foundation’s permanent Antarctic base. While the NSF has recently labored to gentrify Amundsen-Scott and tone down the wild Polie culture that once ruled there, here’s a look back on the bad old days: “Soused at the South Pole“.
During the winter of 2000, Amundsen-Scott was the scene of an unusual case of poisoning. The Men’s Journal details the mysterious case of Rodney Marks and the background of selecting individuals for over-winter duty (think “a rare and delicate balance of good social skills and an antisocial disposition – basically, loners with very long fuses”).
This is aggregate data for all buses in all cities in operation, with some cities doing better than the average, others considerably worse. Passenger-miles are a summation of (passenger_n * miles_n) for all passengers (1 passenger mile = 1 passenger travelling 1 mile, 2 passengers travelling 0.5 miles, etc).
The state of Oklahoma shows something over 5,500 BTU/passenger mile for buses, reflecting the outcome of running empty buses on routes at times of low ridership. Running ‘behemoth buses’ at any time other than high-load times is obviously a complete waste of money. Smaller, more flexible vehicle options (such as jitneys) would address this problem while cutting costs and improving service.
Okay, I’m super-pumped over GoldieBlox science stuff for girls! I’ve still got serious phosphene burn from past exposure to the “Pink Aisle”, and if we can spare just one generation of kids (and their parents) from that…!
Tulsans tend to get pretty worked up about “change” in the abstract. Witness the public debate wasted over essentially minor changes in the recently revamped municipal trash/recycling program: you’d have thought we were granting the vote to cats but not dogs or something. Whether it’s just the hardened arteries of a population that thinks of any change as a change for the worse, or those with a vested interest in the status quo trying to keep their petty fiefdoms untouched, resistance to change sure gets in the way of problem solving in Tulsa.
Improving public transportation should be one of those “totally good” things, right? Fewer ozone alert days, you can read while someone else does the driving, increased access to Our Fair City, etc. As a pre-teen I used to be able to buy a day-pass for the bus for the price of a soda and take the bus to the Central Library and back or just ride the “Super Loop” around the city all afternoon if I wanted to. The bus worked for me, but I wasn’t depending on it to get me to work or school on time.
Recently, INCOG released their latest plan for improving public transit, labelled“FastForward”. The plan has the Peoria-Riverside core as its principal focus, calling for 9 new buses, improving wait times to only 15-20 minutes and business development incentives within a 10 minute walk to the bus line. FastForward might be a small step in the right direction, but the “large bus” model is why public transit in Tulsa never seems to get any better.
From my admittedly cursory reading of the “FastForward” plan I saw no sign that anything smaller than the usual ‘Behemoth bus’ was even considered. That shows a demonstrable lack of vision… or something worse. This is why public transportation in Tulsa has gone from ‘sucky’ to ‘suckier’.
Observe the standard Tulsa Transit bus:
Though they’ve added some bike carriers and are converting the fleet to natural gas, they are still big expensive buses that are mostly empty most of the time. Too expensive, they are to few and too far between, which makes the wait times too long. In the words of Tulsa City Councilor G.T. Bynum,“We’re wasting millions of dollars to provide a lousy service”.Who wants to stand in the heat or dark or rain for even the “improved” 15-20 minute wait time?
You DO want public transportation to work, don’t you? Then get that wait time down to 5 minutes! Consider the idea of using a greater number of smaller, cheaper jitneys! It’s way more cost-effective to keep more of them on the road to reduce wait times, even during off-peak hours. During rush hours, go ahead and run those stanky old buses (the only time they are efficient is when they’re full). Jitneys offer the flexibility to deviate slightly from the published route for the comfort and convenience of passengers, making the service friendlier for all.
I don’t know about you, but I’d like to consider alternatives that haven’t already failed (andfailedconsistently) here. Maybe if all the workable options were actually presented to the potential riding public (and they made their voices heard) Tulsans would get the public transportation system they deserve, instead of just the bare minimum required to say we have public transit at all.
Contrary to popular belief, the biggest reason for the rise in U.S. health care spending is not an aging population or patient demand, but rather the increasing price of drugs, procedures and hospital care, a new study finds. Cough-<nationalize the gougers>-cough!
Despite being considered extinct for nearly 80 years, an intrepid group of British naturalists from the Centre for Fortean Zoology has set out to find proof that the thylacine (AKA ‘Tasmanian tiger’) is still alive and kicking.
“Tulsa: Where ‘Good Government’ Just Doesn’t Pay!”
T-town is in for another three years of scandal-plagued government with the re-election of Dewey F. Bartlett yesterday. I’d like to wish him good luck, and his pants a higher ignition temperature, this time around! The good news from last night is that the infrastructure improvement projects all passed, so maybe the ‘street-crater slalom’ will get a little less challenging.
This is one of those elections that left me wishing for a “None of the Above” option on the ballot. More than $4 million was spent on the mayoral campaign, and I found both candidates unworthy. Why should we have to get stuck with lemons like this? Voters should be able to say “Sorry, try again!” and call for a fresh slate of candidates.
Sandia’s Multi-Modal Vehicle concept is just weird enough to love. Look for something like it under your X-mas tree (or circling your compound) in the near future!
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