Wilson Tucker’s 1952 The Long Loud Silence is The Road of the 1950’s.

It’s a pure survival story, one about the complete deterioration of society into a vicious, gritty state of no-holds-barred struggle after a nuclear and biological holocaust. Unlike many other post-apocalyptic novelists, Tucker doesn’t envision much society left at all after total destruction: there is no reversion to a pseudo-Native American tribal state, to early rural 19th century agrarianism, to feudalism, to a theocratic dystopia. A total Hobbesian (or Darwinian) state of nature prevails for decades after the catastrophe. Society does not rebuild.

The hardback of The Vision Revolution has been out for one year, and I couldn’t be happier with the reaction it has received, including reviews in fantastic places like the Wall Street Journal and Sciam Mind and mentions in places like the New York Times. Soon it will appear in China, Korea and Germany.

In the year since their 2008 preliminary ranking, Cell Stem Cell and Cell Host and Microbe saw their Impact Factors surge, according to new data released in the 2009 Journal Citation Reports(c) published by ThomsonReuters.   The Impact Factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The Impact Factor helps to evaluate a journal's relative importance, especially when compared with others in the same field.

In the report released June 17, Cell Stem Cell's rating rose to 23.563 - a growth of 40% from the journal's previous score. Cell Host and Microbe ranks 13.021 - boasting an increase of 75% from the journal's 2008 Impact Factor.

High-resolution images show that the solar corona is filled with large, banana-shaped magnetic structures called coronal loops. It is thought that these coronal loops, some over a few 100,000 km long, play a fundamental role in governing the physics of the corona and are even responsible for huge atmospheric explosions that occur in the atmosphere, what we call solar flares.

As if a vaguely distant coach and a missing striker who doesn't like his fans is not bad enough, a new study says Scots are more patriotic than those in England. 

Dr. Jackie Abell from Lancaster University, writing in the British Psychological Society's Journal of Social Psychology, said the study set out to understand the differences between how the Scottish and the English demonstrate their nationalism via support for the national football team.

Rather than hijack Eric Diaz' excellent recent post with lengthy and tangential comments, I'll post my thoughts about the roots of war here. Machines, Organizations&Us is a column on human-machine interactions, so after laying some anthropological and ethical groundwork I'll offer speculations on relationships between technology (and our feelings about technology) and war.

One of my aikido students asked me,

The DZERO collaboration just sent to the Cornell ArXiv a paper which presents their new precise cross-section limits for the rare decay of mesons into pairs of muons. This important new article hides a small controversy, at least to my untrained eye. And since I am a bitch who thrives in the mud of controversies (or, at least some would describe me that way), let me do precisely that here.

MODIS Rapidfire For Citizen Scientists - #3

This is part #3 of a brief explanation of the NASA/GSFC MODIS Rapid Response System - Rapidfire - together with a Howto for citizen scientists.  The first parts were -
MODIS Rapidfire For Citizen Scientists - #1
MODIS Rapidfire For Citizen Scientists - #2


In this part, I'll show you some more tips on using the Arctic mosaic and images from the various bands available.

Pinpointing the North Pole

Yesterday I posted the highly insightful and scientifically bullet proof (wink-wink, nod-nod) Robin Hood Morality Quiz—you shoulda ranked Robin, Maid Marion, Little John and the good sheriff of Nottingham from most-to-least moral. Check the chart below to see how disturbed you are. Percentages are of total respondents.

•  RH, LJ, MM, SN: A moralist with conventional ideas. Old fashioned. 5% total.
•  RH, LJ, SN, MM: Massively puritanical. Women conspire against men. 2% total.
•  RH, MM, LJ, SN: Your philosophy is a confused mix of romanticism and moralism. 4% total.

Chemistry labs just don’t smell like they used to.  When I were a lad, chemistry lessons involved a procedure called Qualitative Inorganic Analysis.  This involved bubbling hydrogen sulfide H₂S, produced in a Kipp’s apparatus, through solutions to precipitate various metals group by group.