Month: September 2005

Odd Behavior And Creativity May Go Hand-in-hand.

Often viewed as a hindrance, having a quirky or socially awkward approach to life may be the key to becoming a great artist, composer or inventor.

New research on individuals with schizotypal personalities – people characterized by odd behavior and language but who are not psychotic or schizophrenic – offers the first neurological evidence that they are more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic individuals, and rely more heavily on the right sides of their brains than the general population to access their creativity.

Get the Crazy Drunk Guy some paint.

As many of you know, my home state of Iowa has worked for years to promote the Iowa Child Project – a grassroots effort to restore Iowa’s depleted rainforests, which were destroyed some 400 million years ago by unregulated brontosaurus development and careless asteroids. The centerpiece of this critically needed environmental program is the Iowa Rainforest Project, a planned 85 acre glass-enclosed tropical bio-vegi-dome/ entertainment complex/ factory outlet mall slated for construction next to the I-80 Citgo Truck Haven in Coralville. This important project has earned the rave reviews of environmentalists, public officials, media, and glass contractors across the Hawkeye State.

Please help us regain our long-lost Jurassic environmental heritage.

Images from the land of Corn & Soybeans

One of the best things about living in rural northern Illinois is the ability to view entire weather systems as they pass through. With nothing but sky from horizon to horizon, it’s hard for a thunderstorm to sneak up on you.

On September 20th Liftport successfully tested their lifter which climbed 1000 feet.

“Even though the challenges to bring the space elevator to reality are substantial, there are no physical or economic reasons why it can’t be built in our lifetime.” That’s the matter-of-fact feeling of physicist, Bradley Edwards of Eureka Scientific in Berkeley, California, but carrying out heavy lifting design work in Seattle, Washington.

The hurdle to date, Edwards said, has been the commercial fabrication of carbon nanotubes. Both U.S. and Japanese firms, among others, are ramping up production of carbon nanotubes, with tons of this now exotic matter soon to be available. “That quantity of material is going to be around well before five years time. It’s not going to take long,” he said.

Given the far stronger-than-steel ribbon of carbon nanotubes, a space elevator could be up within a decade.

Wow, this is starting to sound real – and close.

S*E*R*S (the Space Elevator Roving Showcase) Movie.

NASA

Happy Stanislav Petrov day. Official or not, I’m going to celebrate it.

On September 25, 1983 the officer on duty couldn’t make it for some reason and was replaced by another officer, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov. 44-year old Stanislav arrived in the bunker, took the command and the shift started normally. Everything was routine, until the quiet flow of the shift was suddenly interrupted.

About forty minutes after midnight, when it was late afternoon in the States, sirens in the bunker howled, warning lights blazed. Cosmos-1382, an Oko satellite, detected a launch of a Minuteman nuclear missile from Malmstrom AirForce Base in Montana, the main American ICBM field. Americans have launched an attack on the Soviet Union. Everyone in the room felt the gravity of the situation. On a large US map on the wall a light turned on showing the location of the missile launch. A “Start” button flashed before Stanislav. He had less than 10 minutes to decide the fate of the world. Military instructions that he remembered all too well said he needs to press it and send a confirmation to the Defence Minister of the USSR. But something didn’t look right. “Who would start a nuclear war with only one missile?” thought Stanislav Petrov. That must have been a reading error, a false positive, a bug somewhere in the notification system. As a software engineer he knew that no system is immune to errors.

But Petrov hesitated, knowing that Soviet response would be to launch a devastating retaliation attack on the United States. Thousands of missiles from launch-pads in Siberia, from nuclear submarines in the Pacific Ocean would slowly raise in flames and start the unstoppable journey to their targets in the United States and in Europe, only to bring death and destruction on the titanic scale twenty minutes later.

Weighting all information he had, Stanislav decided to ignore the alarm.

Get to the nearest post office and send him a telegram. Or order a bouquet of flowers online for him. Or send him a photo of your children and thank him that they are still alive. Look outside at the blue sky and thank him that it’s not covered with impenetrable layer of radioactive dust and clouds. Walk outside and thank him that you can do it without a radiation protection suit.

Thank you, Mr. Petrov. THANK YOU!

One of the primary goals of the “Classics” web site is to encourage instructors of history of psychology courses to assign primary source reading to their students. Secondary textbooks are useful for giving general overviews and setting contexts, but they cannot replace reading the original words of important thinkers.

I designed and implemented the C++ programming language.

He was a finalist for the ArsDigita Prize for excellence in building non-commercial web sites at the age of 13. At 14 he co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification, now used by thousands of sites to notify their readers of updates.

Rich Sanchez is back in the rebuilt “Hurricane One” filing live reports on the move. (The roving live unit was trashed during Katrina.)

“We happened to be hit by a twelve-by-eight portion of fence that weighed about 200 pounds, that flew through the air, [and] landed on top of our vehicle with four of us in it. We’re all OK, but it appears that the vehicle may be totaled.”

~ The cable net clearly wins the Reporter Storm Jacket Wars with its bright red slickers and GIANT CNN LOGOS.

Here’s the CNN transcript from August 29.

Ever wish you had a million dollars? All you have to do is send a self addressed, stamped envelope to this guy. He’ll send you a million dollar bill. No, he won’t bill you for a million dollars, he’ll send you one of these.

Just don’t try to spend it.