Cornstarch, water and bass proves awesomeness of physics
Cornstarch, water and bass video proves conclusive awesomeness of physics
My knitting blog is now located at the Needle Exchange!
All you need is cash
Gold Nanoparticles Resurrect Failed HIV Drug
By hacking off the ends of a failed HIV drug and sticking the resulting molecules onto gold nanoparticles, scientists have stopped HIV from infecting lab-cultured white blood cells. It is the first time gold nanoparticles have shown potential in therapies for HIV.
Hmm… This sounds familiar.
How creative are you?
This is my latest web experiment. Find out how creative you are with this Creativity Test! Type in as many creative and unusual ways as you can think of to use the objects you are given. A percentile score is calculated based on your answers. This test takes an average of 20-40 min to complete. By taking part, you can win one of four $25 Amazon gift certificates!
I’m a multi-multi-multi-tabber
On average, I have about 15-20 Safari tabs open at one time*. My brother commented that this was ridiculous, but it makes sense to me now. Every once in a while you will find a little story about someone that is just like you, that has your quirks and does things that you see in yourself, and you feel comfort that there are people going through what you’re going through and have succeeded. Most of the time when I read Female Science Professor, it’s to know that there are other folks that are dealing with science-y girl-type stuff, but in this case, the comfort is in hearing this story of her experience with “an ADD”.
After I was finished editing, I glanced over to see what my companion was doing. He had said that he was going to work on a manuscript, but when I glanced at his laptop, he was reading a political blog. Seconds later he went back to his manuscript, wrote a sentence, then checked some news headlines — then he went back to the manuscript to write another sentence or two, then he checked the weather online, then he went to some journal websites to scan the tables of contents, then he wrote a sentence, then he jumped up to get something to drink, came back and wrote a sentence, and so on. It was amazing. In the course of a few hours, he made progress on the manuscript, and entertained me with pieces of information gleaned from his internet expeditions.
Having ADD has long been a source of frustration for this person. There are times when it has made him extremely upset and angry with himself. The medications that he has tried over the years worked in that they helped him focus, but they also kept him awake for days on end and had other side effects that scared him. So now he just lives with it and, although he hates his inability to focus, if he keeps going back to his original activity, even if he can’t sustain that activity for more than a few minutes, he gets things done. In fact, he gets a lot done. He published 10 papers last year and wrote at least 2 successful grant proposals. And he is very well informed about the news and weather.
I’ve been off medication for the past month and there are some days that are the absolute worst. It’s also hard because I don’t know which side-effects to attribute to the birth control and which to attribute to the Adderall, but I will say that some side-effects have recently abated that I had initially associated with the birth control and that I now know are from the Adderall. My personality is also a lot different; I feel less anxious when interacting with people when I’m off the ADD meds, and my jokes are funnier (either they’re getting a better response overall or I’m telling the ruder ones more often). That said, I can’t write a computer program or an essay for shit anymore. I’ll have to suck it up, I think! Essays don’t write themselves. Still, it’s a relief to see people in my situation doing the same things and still being successful. I won’t have to take Adderall for the rest of my life! Just the next 4 years. I’ll set the last bottle on fire on the evening after My Defense.
* This is my sly way of announcing that I’ve switched from Firefox to Safari. I feel like a weight has been lifted! I use Safari! Firefox is a memory slut!
I think they have this on google.
A similar part-based approach is followed in [24] to detect naked people. First, large skin-colored components are found in an image by applying a skin filter that combines color and texture. Based on geometrical constraints between detected components an image is labeled as containing naked people or not. Obviously this method is suited for specific genres only.
– Snoek, C., & Worring, M. (2001). Multimodal video indexing: A review of the state-of-the-art. Technical Report 2001-20, Intelligent Sensory Information Systems Group, University of Amsterdam.
Time for Science!
- My honours thesis has evolved into a possible linguistics paper as well as a psych paper, so my supervisor is doing various analyses of the data I used and has come up with some interesting new findings. I’m not going to say much more than that, but I will say that it mirrors some of the stuff discussed in a recent Mixing Memory post on Language, Writing, and the Spatial Representation of Events. Neat.
- Mixing Memory has become one of my favourite cogs blogs. Here’s another great one: Thinking About Evolution.
- Here’s a glowing review of PT-141, The Greatest Sex Drug… Ever… from someone who I’m assuming has never even tried it. Oh my. This Guardian article seems to be a bit more even-handed. It references an even more interesting study about personal autonomy. “That’s a tricky thing to measure, but it can be done. Paredes did it like this: first, he looked at rat couples living in standard, box-shaped cages and recorded the details of their sexual behaviour. Then, he altered the cages in only one particular: he divided them into two chambers with a clear wall broken only by one opening, too small for the males to get through but just right for the females…. It let them get away from the males whenever they chose to, and thereby made it entirely their choice whether to have sex…. The effects of giving a female rat greater personal control over her sex life are essentially the same as those of giving her PT-141. Autonomy, in other words, is as real an aphrodisiac as any substance known to science.”
- Choose Your Science Idol!
- And continuing the political bent: The Frontal Cortex on Fearmongering.
- What’s your favourite scientist-artist dream team?