Sapere Aude
Month: August 2012
Rosacea – a common skin disease characterized by red blotches on one’s face – may be caused by “tiny bugs closely related to spiders living in the pores of your face.” Tiny bugs that “crawl about your face in the dark”, lay eggs in your pores, and release a burst of faeces when they die.
Also, you are only 0.7% human in terms of dna, the rest is bacterial dna, and bacterial cells on and in your body outnumber human cells 10:1.
The benefits of a green roof, reduction of temperature, are very similar to that of the CoolRoofs, but add oxygen creation, water management and sound dampening.
2019-04-24:
rooftops on new buildings and those that go through extensive renovation on old buildings need to be covered in green roof infrastructure, solar panels or a combination of the 2.
Obviously, the technology would be incalculably dangerous. With d-mod, local nonsatiation goes right out the window, since you can instantly dial yourself to a “bliss point” where you are just perfectly satisfied and don’t want anything else. That’s the end of scarcity. When we can decide what we want, desire becomes less important than meta-desire. What do we want to want? D-mod is like putting the parameters of the utility function in the utility function itself. The resultant “clades” of humans will be very, very different from each other, much more different than people are now. This will make human interaction very weird.
hard to better define the existential ennui of suburbia.
In July, Nick Pirrone and 3 friends were driving home from a St. Louis Cardinals game when they stopped at an Applebee’s in St. Charles, Mo., for dinner. It was after 22:00, and when the teenagers walked into the casual dining restaurant, they didn’t find the traditional family-friendly atmosphere they’d grown up with. Instead, they found a karaoke bar. “There were a lot of people drinking and singing Backstreet Boys,. The place was packed. There was even a DJ.” The 4 ate half-price appetizers and were so amused by the revelry that they returned a few weeks later with a group of 14. “It was actually kind of fun. I mean, there’s not much else to do around here. It’s the suburbs.”
i just found over 2000 miles in my aa.com account. that should get me an extra bag of peanuts on my next flight. upgrade, here i come!
When a human stood on the Moon and looked back at the Earth, we changed, fundamentally. Our human horizon popped out 300K km. Forever, we would see the Earth differently, because we had seen it from someplace truly foreign. This is why Mars is important. When we get a human to Mars our horizon will expand 1000x farther, and it will never go back.
One of the greatest figures in world history, the first to set foot on another world.
The achievement of Neil Armstrong and his crew, relayed live on television on July 20th 1969, held the entire planet spellbound. On their return to Earth, the astronauts were mobbed. Presidents, prime ministers and kings jostled to be seen with them. Schools, buildings and roads were named after them. Medals were showered upon them. A whirlwind post-flight tour took them to 25 countries in 35 days.
this is terrible! the painting was one of the last remaining depictions of jesus. how will future generations know how he looked like?
The software combines long syntheses of compounds into shorter and more economical routes, and identifies suspicious chemical recipes that could lead to chemical weapons.
Their main trick seems to be to combine multiple steps into steps that can happen at once, what they call “one pot”.
2022-02-23: Nice analogy on the energy landscape for reactions, twisty pathways along the edges of steep ridges.
What would it take to have software that showed you the best synthesis for a given compound, though? Now that’s a dream that even I think is out of reach for us, at least for as far out into the future as I can imagine. And this paper illustrates why! Look at all the tiny variations that end up making a difference, and sometimes a big difference. If we could model or compute our way to the answers in such situations, believe me, we would do that rather than set up endless arrays of reactions just to see what happens. Everyone who’s done research-level synthetic organic chemistry has experienced this: you flip one chiral center in your molecule, or made a chain 1 carbon longer, you change the solvent from one ether to another, raise or lower the temperature a bit, switch a sodium salt for a potassium one, change a ligand on your palladium catalyst, whatever, and all sorts of craziness breaks loose. And it’s often not easy to see why things changed so much. Ex post facto you can sometimes come up with hypotheses, and use those to fix things up if you’re right. But there are plenty of throw-your-hands-up moments that just never get explained at all.
Organic chemistry wobbles and teeters across an energy landscape that (from the viewpoint of any given reaction) is full of huge hills, deep valleys, and twisty little pathways that are followed by walking along the edges of steep, crumbling ridges. But from a distance, all that topography is compressed into a pretty narrow thermodynamic range. The differences between a reaction working and not working, between it giving you mostly Product A, mostly Product B, mostly returned starting material, or mostly scorched pan drippings are energetically very small. All sorts of little changes can send things off in different directions, and these can be largely inside the error bars of our attempts to model them. Organic chemistry is indeed a mature science, but don’t confuse that with thinking that it’s a solved problem. If you just want the molecules, damn the cost, to answer other questions we can generally provide them. But if you want them made elegantly, you’ll need to take a seat – and you better have packed some lunch with you.
researchers — who struggled for several years to build electronic circuits out of graphene with very limited results (except for radio-frequency applications) — have now succeeded in making a variety of electronic components from an amazing new material: a 2D version of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). the material could help usher in radically new products, from whole walls that glow to clothing with embedded electronics to glasses with built-in display screens. “It’s the most exciting time for electronics in the last 20 or 30 years. It’s opening up the door to a completely new domain of electronic materials and devices.”
in general, materials science remains under-appreciated as the source of much of our wealth and comfort, both current and future.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 