Lost Stockings of the 1950's TV Women

Take a look into womens commercials of the fifties with : Beacon Floor Wax, Bravo Floor Wax, Albolene Cream, Accent, Calgon Bath Beads, Bubble Bee Tuna, Crisco Oil, Lustre Creme, Liquid Vel, Vel, Freewax, Gas, Lustre Creme, G.E. Dutch Skillet, Kodak Copy Machine, Elmers Glue, Borden's Cottage Cheese, Buttermilk, Mazola Corn Oil, Congestaid, Faberge Tigress, Niagara, Dessert Cake, All, RCA Whirlpool Range, Cashmere Bouquet, Skin Mist, Tender Loving Care, Vel, Sunbeam Bread, Johnson Baby Powder, Alka Seltzer, Sunbeam Bread, Coffee, Sinactin, Clairol Hair Color, Total, Bold, Colgate Mouth Wash, Prell, Breck, VO5, Enden, Halo, Wash N Curl.

Looking Into The Eyes Of The Dead

From the end of World War II and up until about 1960, the superpowers of the Cold War era, conducted nuclear tests, detonating bombs into the atmosphere. These detonations have affected the content of radioactive trace materials in the air and created what scientists refer to as the C-14 bomb pulse. From the first nuclear detonation and, until the ban on nuclear testing was evoked, the quantity of C-14 in the atmosphere doubled. Since 1960, it has only slowly decreased to natural levels.
This sudden curve has left an impression in the food chain and therefore also in the lens crystallins of the eyes, which have absorbed the increased carbon content through food stuffs. Since the crystallins remain unchanged once they have been created, they reflect the content of C-14 present in the atmosphere at the time of their creation. An event occurring shortly after birth. Using a large nuclear accelerator, physicists at Aarhus University can now determine the amount of C-14 in as little as one milligram of lens tissue and thereby calculate the year of birth.
(read more)

Never dye your hair

As we discovered in his book The Double Helix, Nobel Prize winner James D. Watson – immortalized for his part in revealing the structure of DNA – is a colorful, larger than life character. Surprisingly, the science in Watson's Double Helix is almost, if not entirely, overshadowed by the wheeling and dealing of his ambitious scientific peers – which is exactly what makes it such a rollickingly good read. Now, unencumbered by political correctness, and wielding an innate sense of candor, Watson again pries open the inner workings of scientific research – this time for the benefit of neophyte scientists. Avoid Boring People is both the product of an exemplary scientific career and an exceptional life, and the gems of wisdom that Watson imparts will surely fast-track any young scientist's ambitions. Watson's advice is the type that you'd expect from a man who "discovered the secret of life"; the kinds of things that you'd change if you could live your life over again.(read more>>)
Avoid Boring People: Lessons From A Life In Science
James D. Watson (2007)
ISBN:0375412840

Snow in Jerusalem 1921

"Sir, (a+bn)/n = x, hence God exists. Reply!"

Which math-phobic among us has not beseeched God for help with another colon-clenching algebra or calculus exam? Had we heeded the words of the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker, perhaps we would have realized we've been talking to the wrong person: "God made the integers; all else is the work of man."
What is it with God and mathematics? Even as science and religion have quarrelled for centuries and are only recently exploring ways to kiss and make up, mathematicians have been saying for millennia that no truer expression of the divine can be found than in an ethereally beautiful equation, formula or proof.
The New York Times reported recently that mathematicians believe in God at a rate 2 1/2 times that of biologists, quoting a survey of the National Academy of Sciences. Admittedly, that's not saying much: Only 14.6 per cent of mathematicians embraced the God hypothesis, versus 5.5 per cent of biologists (versus some 80 per cent of Canadians who believe in a supreme being).
Count John Allen Paulos among the non-believers. A mathematician who teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia and who has popularized his subject in bestselling books such as Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Paulos's latest offering is a slim but explosive volume whose title is self-explanatory: Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up (Hill & Wang).
Deploying "a lightly heretical touch," he dissects a playlist of "golden oldies" that includes the first-cause argument (sometimes tweaked as the cosmological argument, which hinges on the Big Bang), the argument for intelligent design, the ontological argument (crudely, that if we can conceive of God, then God exists), the argument from the anthropic principle (that the universe is "fine-tuned" to allow us to exist), the moral universality argument, and others.
The famous Pascal's wager – that it's in our self-interest to believe in God because we lose nothing in case He does exist – is upended as logically flawed, based on what statisticians call Type I and Type II errors.
His arguments notwithstanding, Paulos concedes that there's "no way to conclusively disprove the existence of God."
The reason, he notes, is a consequence of basic logic, but not one "from which theists can take much heart."
As for the problem of good and evil, he defers to fellow atheist, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg: "With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion."
Or as Paulos might say, no mathematician has ever deliberately flown planes into buildings.(from Star)

Drew Endy and the Art of DNA Hacking

The 24th Chaos Communication Congress (24C3) is the annual four-day conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). It takes place at the bcc Berliner Congress Center in Berlin, Germany. The Congress offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics and attracts a diverse audience of thousands of hackers, scientists, artists, and utopians from all around the world. The 24C3s slogan is Volldampf voraus! – the German equivalent of “full steam ahead” – a particular request for talks and projects featuring forward looking hands-on topics.
Drew Endy is an inventive scientific heir of the original genetic engineers at Stanford and UCSF who started to revolutionize biology and medicine around the time he was born in 1970. His generation may leap even further, not just by splicing a few genes but by constructing entire synthetic life forms whose impact across many technologies could rival the transforming effects of the computer age.
The imperative of the born engineer drives Endy's interest in biology: "I like to build stuff," he said. But he's a trained engineer who also quotes Thomas Jefferson as he describes the young generation of wired, wiki-fed students who are hurtling fearlessly into this new future: "The earth belongs to the living."

Genetic engineering is now a thirty year old technology. For reference, over a similar period of time, modern computing machines went from exclusive objects used to design weapons of mass destruction, to the now ubiquitous panoply of personal computing devices that support mass communication and construction. Inspired by this and many other past examples of the overwhelmingly constructive uses of technology by individuals, we have been working over the past five years to develop new tools that will help to make biology easy to engineer. We have also been working to foster a constructive culture of future biological technologists, who can reliably and responsibly conceive, develop, and deliver biological technologies that solve local problems.

A powerful forehand : Maria Sharapova vs Anna Kournikova

Russian Maria Sharapova used strong serving to capture her third Grand Slam title, beating Serbian Ana Ivanovic, 7-5, 6-3 on Saturday to win the 2008 Australian Open.
The fifth-seeded Sharapova won 24 of her last 26 service points in the battle of 20-year-olds. Incredibly, she won 24 of 27 points on her first serve for the match.
"This is just incredible," Sharapova said to the crowd at Rod Laver Arena after the match. "If someone had told me in the middle of last year that I'd be standing on this stage in front of all you guys with the big one I'd probably say forget it."
Sharapova, who didn't lose a set over these two weeks, had also won Wimbledon in 2004 and the U.S. Open in 2006. She lost the 2007 Australian Open final to American Serena Williams. (read more>>)
(Kournikova's "I lost my balls" trick)

Penn, Teller and Feng Shui Bullshit

The purpose of the series was to reveal the truth behind talking to the dead, Nostradamus, remote viewing, feng shui, alien abductees, creationists, extreme environmentalists, bottled water, alternative medicine and more. Undercover operatives were used to film the stories, and these location shots are interspersed with Penn’s comments (Teller remains mute), in the studio. The programs are fast paced, use a lot of humor, and pull no punches, as you might guess from the provocative series title.

They certainly get their message across. For example, in the segment on feng shui, they call in three feng shui experts to rearrange furniture in the same Californian house. No one who sees this program will forget how each of the three feng shui experts comes up with completely different arrangements of furniture - each expert supposedly using the same feng shui “science”. Especially telling was how the first feng shui expert said that the red sofa was bad for the family – she mentioned several health problems that would result. Then the second one said the red color was “absolutely perfect”. What a hoot. Does this prove that feng shui is bullshit? Well no, of course not. To do that you would need a much bigger experiment. But it’s not the job of Penn & Teller or anyone else to prove that feng shui is nonsense; if feng shui experts want us to believe in it, it is up to them to provide evidence that it does work. What P&T do is demonstrate the general idea of how things should be tested. And they make it pretty clear that they think feng shui failed the test.
(for bottled water bullshit click here for other here)