Skin cancer has been cured. No joking, it looks like they’ve turned this potentially deadly disease, which strikes millions of families (including my own) into a treatable, curable nuisance. As long as it’s caught early-and you are going to the dermatologist regularly, right?- this new treatment will cure a skin cancer using an at-home device, with no surgery, no pain, and no chemo.
Erin read this story to me while lying in bed this morning and I looked at the ceiling thinking remember where you were when you heard this- this is the crack in the dam that will eventually knock this scourge out of our lives forever. I’d say “it’s a miracle!” but really it’s the result of decades of hard, thankless, anonymous labor by the men and women in the white coats. A heartfelt thanks to them.
What’s the next cancer to fall? As my friend Barry says, we really are living in an age of wonders.
…Having created a medium in which the refractive index is less than one, Putz and Svozil’s idea is simply to immerse a computer in it. That simple act (and presumably some clever design to create an optical computer in the first place) would allow superluminal computation to take place.
Assuming that this device could actually be built, what could you do with a superluminal computer? That’s a good question that Putz and Svozil do not address directly. They say such a device would fall into a class of processing machine known as hypercomputers. These are hypothetical devices more powerful than Turing machines, that allow non-Turing computations. They were first discussed by Alan Turing in the 1930s.
I suspect a lot of this hype is of the not-as-good-as-it-sounds variety (i.e. maybe it’s technically “faster than light” because the medium has a slower value for c or something (kind of like Cherenkov radiation). Still, it’s neat sounding.
I’ve made my peace with insomnia. I figure there are much worse afflictions to have, and getting an extra 4-5 hours of life out of the day isn’t too bad of a tradeoff. So I just kind of roll with it.
But when I wake up at 4am and can’t get back to sleep because Blondie’s “The Tide is High” is running through my brain… well, that’s just the universe being cruel.
I just had an absolutely wonderful conversation with a friend I had not talked to in almost two years. We have the kind of relationship where, when I picked up the phone, we immediately picked up almost exactly where we left off. What’s weird is that we’ve spent all of two weeks together total. Put this individual, Erin, and me in a room and we can talk for hours. Nice to have friends like that.
But I’m starting to begrudge being a blogger because people don’t talk to me anymore. They read my blog and feel as though they’ve conversed with me. But I don’t know about their days or their feelings. I don’t get to talk WITH them. I merely talk AT them. Or, more accurately, they overhear the conversations I have outloud with myself.
I agree. And while I can’t say I begrudge blogging, I have noticed that if I go into length on a topic of concern to me on my blog, I will often meet people who’s eyes glaze over when I try to bring it up in person. When pressed, their eyes will glaze and they’ll say “oh, I read that last week on your blog” in a very been there, done that kind of way. It’s a bummer because I sometimes feel like I’m giving half of a relationship (the me-to-them part) without getting the reciprocal. I doesn’t happen often, but when it does it makes me think twice about the time and effort that go into those long posts. I wonder if this is how professional writers feel?
The flip side of this is pouring myself into a post that I really care about and getting absolutely NO response. This happens all the time, most notably a couple of years ago with this post, the one I’m probably the proudest of in all my writing. Different strokes, I guess.
It’s not like there are thousands of people reading this, though- for some reason my blog has never caught fire, even after almost seven years. When I don’t get any responses, I remind myself that I’m really just doing this to keep a record of my thoughts and not to entertain. I guess we’re all busy, and the zeitgeist is that blogs are sooo early 90’s. It is neat, though, that the big Internet machine will still have a copy of all my posts in a thousand years.
Besides, I suspect that if I suddenly got a huge readership I would feel a lot more pressure to write. On the whole I’m very happy with the balance.
Our schools are biased against mesofacts. The arc of our educational system is to be treated as little generalists when children, absorbing bits of knowledge about everything from biology to social studies to geology. But then, as we grow older, we are encouraged to specialize. This might have been useful in decades past, but in our increasingly fast-paced and interdisciplinary world, lacking an even approximate knowledge of our surroundings is unwise.
This guy is my hero. When faced with a workplace lunchtime argument (you know, the kind we all have every day) of whether or not a lava lamp would work on Jupiter, he went home and built himself a 100 pound centrifuge, attached his accelerometer-equipped Android phone, and answered the question.
The centrifuge is a genuinely terrifying device. The lights dim when it is switched on. A strong wind is produced as the centrifuge induces a cyclone in the room. The smell of boiling insulation emanates from the overloaded 25 amp cables. If not perfectly adjusted and lubricated, it will shred the teeth off solid brass gears in under a second. Runs were conducted from the relative safety of the next room while peeking through a crack in the door.
During the heyday of the Apollo missions, astronauts put smallish reflectors on the surface of the moon.
About the size of a large pizza box and covered in prisms, these reflectors have been used by Earthbound scientists for scientific study of the moon ever since. These scientists fire very precise lasers at the reflectors and measure the amount of time it takes for the reflections to return. Since they know the speed of light with extreme accuracy (and have very accurate clocks), they can measure the time it takes the reflection to return and thus determine how far away the moon is.
Did you know that the moon is moving away from us? True thing. Our celestial neighbor is spiraling away at a rate of about 38mm per year, or approximately the same rate as the continents drift or your thumbnail grows. Neat, huh? Or how about this for accuracy: the laser that scientists shoot at the moon is powerful, but the reflectors on the surface are so far away that they don’t catch all of the light that hits it on the rebound. Of the 10,000,000,000,000,000 photons (10 quadrillion) that leave the laser, only one will return, and that’s on a good day. The detectors have to be very accurate to pick up the reflection.
A big mystery that scientists are trying to solve about the reflectors is just why, after over three decades, are the mirrors becoming so much less efficient? Their reflectivity has dropped by an order of magnitude (10x), and, during a full moon, they drop an additional order of magnitude. The reflectors are as much as 100x less reflective today than they were when they were placed on the surface. In addition, during a total lunar eclipse (full moon going into the shadow of the Earth), the reflectors’ efficiency returns to normal levels (which eliminates any explanation of lunar dust on the lenses). Strangely, this effect didn’t happen when the reflectors were first insalled. Why? We don’t know, but there are theories.
It’s a bizarre mystery that tells us there are still many things left for us to lear about “that boring place we’ve already been”.
