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Comment Re:Apple can kiss my shiny white ass (Score 1, Offtopic) 405

by MousePotato (#31896696) Attached to: In Defense of Jailbreaking

actually, i think you miss the point. If you buy something it should be yours to do whatever you choose to do with. People are purchasing iphones and ps3's, they aren't leasing them. Once you take possession after purchase they shouldn't be able to change they deal... its called bait and switch and is a questionable practice.

full disclosure; i own neither device because of said practices and while the ipad looks like a nice device I'll never own one of those either.

Comment Actually... (Score 1) 4

by MousePotato (#31703280) Attached to: Hulu continues to please me

I'm lovin Hulu too. I watched all of LOST over the Christmas break, got caught up on several episodes of Stargate, 24, V, Who do you think you are?, Ghost Hunters... Its been great.

Funny enough, I had cancelled cable and Sat about 2 years ago so the ability to watch these shows has been nice. I don't miss the bills from either and since I get most of my news off the web anyway I haven't really missed TV for the most part. The small fraction that does is satisfied with the Huluability to fill the idiot box need when its there.

Comment funny enough.. (Score 1) 4

by MousePotato (#31702942) Attached to: Worst April Fools' Ever

today of all days... after several years of regularly having mod points and then recently nothing for about a year... today i have mod points.

at first i thought it to be part of the joke but they seem to be working.
Mars

NASA Mars Satellite Snaps 1st Public-Picked Photos 61

Posted by timothy from the at-least-it-wasn't-uranus dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA today said it took eight high-resolution photos of Mars that were chosen through a public suggestion box the space agency put up in January. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera, aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is nicknamed 'the people's camera,' NASA stated. Through the suggestion box known as HiWish, NASA has received nearly 1,000 suggestions. The first eight images of areas the public selected are available online."

Comment Re:Define Smart. (Score 1) 584

by MousePotato (#31679308) Attached to: How Smart Are You?

I think getting laid regularly requires some sort of street smarts.

Really? There are plenty of really tiny organisms out there who manage to do it all the time, sans any level of demonstrable intellect. Hence my sarcastic remark about Walmart.

Having a high IQ is just one of the factors of street smarts.

I've met plenty of 'street smart' people in my life. Some obviously more intelligent than others to be sure. If you would have said a high degree of cunning, environmental awareness and social savvy were determinant factors for street smarts I would agree with you. IQ, however, I find a difficult sell; there are plenty street smart, non rocket surgeon types filling jails worldwide.
Books

Submission + - Book Review: A User's Guide to the Universe

Submitted by
alfredw
alfredw writes: "[NOTE TO EDITORS: Disclosure: I am a graduate student in the same department as one author (Goldberg). I've taken his Cosmology and Graduate Electricity and Magnetism class. He's not my academic advisor, nor is he on my thesis committee and he has no determination of my grades or future performance. I also shared an office with the other author (Blomquist) for about a week in 2008, when I was joining the department and he was leaving. We're casual acquaintances only.

Please publish only my obfuscated email address.

I have chosen to review this book because it was released recently (end of Feb, 2010).]

Have you ever wanted to buttonhole a physicist at a cocktail party? Do you have the burning desire to sit down with a professor and ask a laundry list of "physics" questions about time travel and black holes? Do you want to know more about modern physics, but want to do it with pop culture experiments instead of mathematics? If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, then you're in the target audience for A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertaintym

A User's Guide to the Universe (hereinafter "A User's Guide") is the physicist's answer to Phil Plait's Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End.... What Goldberg and Blomquist have created is a fun, light read about interesting areas of modern physics that will entertain while it educates. The book assumes very little scientific background on the part of the reader. Those with some knowledge (this is Slashdot, after all) will find the explanations of well-known concepts (the double slit experiment, for example) lucid, direct, brief and entertaining.

A User's Guide covers topics like relativity, time travel, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and alien life. It does so with a very tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, and footnotes that act as the authors' very own peanut gallery. While this humour lightens up what could otherwise be a few dry areas of discussion, the littering of the text with pop-culture references is bound to make the book feel a bit dated in years to come. For now (March 2010), though, A User's Guide is so fresh you might call it ripe.

Unlike Death from the Skies, this book is well illustrated. The pen-and-ink cartoons are omnipresent, and serve to both illustrate the text, and to take every opportunity for a joke (cheap or otherwise) that presents itself. Overall, I felt that the cartoons were a strong addition to the book, as they can provide a needed laugh in a serious section, or can eliminate the proverbial thousand words when describing an experiment or concept.

The chapter on time travel is a stand-out. It presents several "practical" designs for time machines, which use black holes, cosmic strings or wormholes as components. I am an avid reader of pop-sci books, and I found designs that were new to me. The discussion of the Grandfather Paradox (if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, then you were never born and could never have committed murder) and ways around it are very helpful and present a solid physical framework for thinking about these issues. When the Grandfather Paradox is reformulated using pool balls, instead of thinking humans, it becomes clear that the issues are physical and not metaphysical. Also, the authors helpfully include a chart ranking sci-fi shows and movies for their time travel savvy.

You'll also find a strong and entertaining treatment of inflationary cosmology, including discussions of the evidence behind the theory and a look at some consequences. This book avoids both a heavy technical treatment and a historical look at the development of the theory (see, for example, Alan Guth's The Inflationary Universe for that) and instead dives right in to the juiciest parts. This style is well-suited to the reader who wants the funs bits without all of the baggage.

If you're curious about quantum mechanics, the second chapter contains a one of the best introductions in the field. By asking questions like "can we build a Star Trek transporter?" the authors drive a quick and satisfying tour through the weirdness of the microscopic world. This "evil genius hands-on" approach is this book's most important contribution to pop sci literature, and its most endearing feature. You'll start by looking at Star Trek, but end with the mysteries of the double-slit experiment, wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle.

Finally, at the end of the book, the authors helpfully include two sets of references: one to the pop sci literature, and one to the technical literature. Many of the best pop physics books of the past are listed, and the bibliography could serve as useful direction to more depth for the interested.

Overall, A User's Guide accomplishes what it sets out to do. It combines a hands-on, question-driven approach to physics with a tongue-in-cheek, pop-culture-based sense of humour. And then it throws on a layer of great cartoons to make the entire package something that most science books aren't: enjoyable. This book is fine, and you may well learn something in the process."
Earth

Submission + - Global Warming Spawned the "Age of Dinosaurs"

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "About 200 million years ago, the Triassic period ended with the fourth great mass extinction allowing dinosaurs to expand into many niches that had become unoccupied becoming increasingly dominant, abundant and diverse, and dominating the earth for the next 150 million years. One theory is that the end-Triassic extinction (ETE) came about after enormous flows of basalt burst to the earth's surface covering more than nine million square kilometers and although the theory is not new, Scientific American reports that for the first time scientists have linked this great volcanism to catastrophic climate change via an analysis of carbon isotopes in wood and soil preserved in rocks and found that that the extinction event at the end of the Triassic occurred at the same time as carbon dioxide levels jumped. Geologist Jessica Whiteside of Brown University and her team found a drop in carbon 13 suggesting that more of the lighter isotope of carbon (C 12) had suddenly become available, since plants prefer to use it, which in turn suggests soaring levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. All in all, it adds up to strong direct evidence that the eruption of a giant flood of basalt may have caused a climatic catastrophe resulting in the major mass extinction at the end of the Triassic creating new opportunities which early dinosaurs were apparently in a good position to exploit. "It does not paint a pretty picture of what happens when CO2 levels rise," writes David Biello adding that it remains to be seen which species might benefit from today's ongoing sixth extinction and its related climate change, as theropod dinosaurs benefited from the end-Triassic extinction. "It usually isn't the dominant life forms on the planet at the time.""

Submission + - Fatty Foods May Cause Cocaine-Like Addiction (cnn.com)

Submitted by WrongSizeGlass
WrongSizeGlass writes: From the "there's an excuse for everything" department:
CNN is reporting that Fatty foods may cause cocaine-like addiction. "A new study in rats suggests that high-fat, high-calorie foods affect the brain in much the same way as cocaine and heroin." "Not surprisingly, the rats that gorged themselves on the human food quickly became obese."
I'm a big eater, but I've never been tempted to sell all my stuff, skip work and ruin every relationship I have just to get another burger fix. How about a little personal responsibility for our food choices?
Idle

Submission + - Is That a Tweet in Your Pants?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Elizabeth Armstrong Moore reports that you know you've got issues if your skivvies start texting. Incontinence issues, to be more precise. SIMsystem's new-and-improved skivvies come equipped with a sensor strip that alerts caregivers to wetness via text message. From the technology summary: 'The SIMbox, when fitted into the individual resident's stretchpants (SIMpants), transmits sensor readings from the SIMstrip in the SIMpad® over a wireless network to the SIMserver. The SIMsystemManager software running on the SIMserver then detects key information about continence events and determines when to alert care staff about an event requiring attention.' So, who's going to start an open source project?

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