Wicked Waves August 31, 2016
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New from TOOOL USD30.
Every Girl Should Have One August 29, 2016
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When I think of all the pool floats I have bought for my girls, I cringe when I realize I could have bought them this. They never would have asked for another (for one thing. For another, the other kids at camp wouldn’t have swiped this sucker, that’s for damned sure).
From Amazon.
They Are Here Somewhere August 28, 2016
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From reddit.com.
Gluten-free Bread Adventures III August 27, 2016
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Well, not exactly, except the yellow thingie below is a toast-cutter for punching 
out bat-logoed bread, while the egg cup is, well, um, yeah. Looks like fun. It comes as a set from Amazon.
Zinc Oxide and You August 26, 2016
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Japanese researchers at Tohoku University have created a special coating which reduces friction on high-speed, high-temperature bearings by 30%. Made of a zinc oxide material, the coating has been integrated into bearings in a nifty jet engine-powered generator for emergency use capable of producing eight thousand watts, enough for two Japanese homes:
Tiny, isn’t it? Is there anything zinc oxide can’t do?
Why Your Life is Not a Journey August 25, 2016
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Snippets from the film “Tree of Life”. .
Gluten-free Bread Machine Adventures II August 23, 2016
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in which Our Hero tries Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Wonderful Bread Mix, using the package directions exactly. The bread machine in question is the Black and Decker All-In-One Deluxe(tm) Automatic Breadmaker, set for Regular crust and Rapid rise. This nominally takes 1:58 to bake.
Delicious with butter so far. Have not yet tried the toast Update possible at breakfast.
A Theory of High-temperature Superconductivity August 18, 2016
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Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have a potential explanation for high-temperature superconductivity of cuprates, the superconducting breakthrough of the 1980s. They theorize that a certain density of electron pairs is required and when the density is too small or too great, superconductivity disappears.
They painstakingly created many different cuprates with different amounts of doping to create cuprates (actually, 2500 different compounds of lanthanum, strontium copper and oxygen) with differing number of electron pairs using an amazing beam epitaxy system to create each compound layer by layer. Because cuprates have 50 atoms per unit cell, it’s very easy to get a mixture of compounds, so it’s hard to know what kind of result you are seeing. They fixed that problem with this:
This beam epitaxy system builds compounds layer by layer and has some awesome built-in surface chemistry tools, like an absorption spectrometer and an electron diffraction gizmo to monitor surface morphology, thickness, chemical composition, and crystal structure of the resulting thin films in real time.
This is exceptionally elegant work, and points to potential understanding of a general theory which may help in finding room-temperature superconductors.
Homework: Dependence of the critical temperature in overdoped copper oxides on superfluid density , I. Božović, X. He, J. Wu & A. T. Bollinger
Cheap Water Disinfectant From SLAC August 16, 2016
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A bunch of scientists as Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory have developed a thin-film composite which can disinfect a liter of water with just 1.6mg in 20 minutes (99.999% inactivation). It does this with a sandwich of MoS2 and copper and sunlight. The MoS2 generates hydrogen peroxide and the copper promotes the hole-electron separation which multiplies the effectiveness six times.
The method is not a cure-all; for instance, it doesn’t remove chemical pollutants from water. So far it’s been tested on only three strains of bacteria, although there’s no reason to think it would not kill other bacterial strains and other types of microbes, such as viruses. And it’s only been tested on specific concentrations of bacteria mixed with less than an ounce of water in the lab, not on the complex stews of contaminants found in the real world.
Still, it’s a damned good start. I would like to point out that these materials are very cheap and found nearly everywhere.
Homework:
Rossia pacifica (the Stubby Squid) August 15, 2016
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lives 900 feet down. Not an octopus, however.
Science News Roundup August 12, 2016
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I haven’t had a lot of free time for stuff I like lately, but I didn’t want a few items from my science newsfeeds to go unnoticed by you, my adoring public. I expect most people don’t follow this kind of stuff closely, so pay attention:
First off, a team from the UK has found that a commonly available drug Fenamate can reduce the inflammation in a particular pathway to protect against a Alzheimer’s disease model in rodents. A mouse is not a man, but the results are intriguing enough (protected all rats in the study) that trials with humans are being strongly considered. Because the drug is already approved for pain relief, the difficulty in getting into trials in the first place is enormously reduced. “In the USA, wholesale price of a week’s supply of generic mefenamic acid has been quoted as $426.90 in 2014. Brand-name Ponstel is $571.70. In contrast, in the UK, a weeks supply is £1.66, or £8.17 for branded Ponstan. In the Philippines, 10 tablets of 500 mg generic mefenamic acid cost PHP39.00 (or the equivalent of $0.88USD) as of October 25, 2014.”—Wikipedia.
Evil bastards? Well, sure. What do you expect from companies who can buy or sell legislators?
Next, paraplegic patients have had nerve and muscle function partially restored using a three-step training regimen in Brazil. Starting with VR to give them the sensation of walking through haptic feedback during brain-controlled maneuvering through a VR landscape, the patients then proceeded to move using a robotic walker on a treadmill with full support, also run through the brain-machine interface. Finally, they practiced walking with the robosuit used in that World Cup game a couple of years ago. This took months, but the eight fully paralyzed patients who completed (one moved away) ALL showed some improvement.
This is a big deal. None of these guys were ever supposed to get any sensation or control back.
This program is on-going, so we don’t know how much improvement will ultimately result from this innovative program, but I for one am pretty excited. Isn’t this why we work in computer science in the first place?
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi August 3, 2016
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The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi is a fun little novel of theft, betrayal, cleverness and impossible physics which brazenly attempts to disguise itself as science fiction. Too advanced; it has to be magic.
Well, there is a Martian city that migrates run by captive human brains (in electronic bodies; apparently perfect copies of one’s self can be made in this future), shape-shifting people and spaceships, memory bullets (not ones that remember shapes, but more like computer viruses for mind and smart matter). Nothing impossible about that at all, no sir. There is a quantum prison in which the prisoners all play Prisoner’s Dilemma with guns instead of money inside a computer simulation, wherein these perfect copies of people play each other. Insane torture, sure, but certainly possible, right? Uh huh. There is the thief, rescued from this prison by the aforementioned shape-shifting person and ship, agents of a goddess interested in stealing…something. I kind of forget what the McGuffin is because of all the pretty shiny futuristic stuff going on in the impossible far future—it’s very distracting.
The focus on future tech didn’t make anyone else unhappy, though; Hannu Rajaniemi sold a trilogy’s worth of books, of which TQT is just the first. Honestly, I liked it enough to at least look for the second one.
This Old House August 3, 2016
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We renovated our house for rental (and we are FINALLY finished, thank you very much) a wrenching business that took more than a year.The trauma associated with this (I lost my father, my wife lost her father, the children moved out, I lost my job (threw it away; can’t say that was smart), and an unholy assortment of lesser terrors. like crippling sciatica, pneumonia and gluten poisoning) could render less hearty men to catatonia, instead of meditation which is where I went.
We built a bathroom in the basement, driving nails into the concrete with a .22 caliber shell:
Well, that’s all the photos of the bathroom in the basement, except this one (featuring the amazing walk-in bathtub):
Next we installed a beautiful laminate floor in half the house:
This necessitated the removal, refinishing and replacement of the kitchen cabinets:
We did the counters while we were at it. The total effect throughout the house was, I like to think, very creditable:
All the furniture seen here was bought at the Oakland Museum’s white elephant sale for dirt cheap, despite being nice antiques or nearly so. We wanted to rent the house as furnished, but the renters declined that honor, opting to BUILD their own furniture. And they seem to be doing it but first they put up this sign:
Hilarious. I didn’t look in the bathroom for other restaurantalia, but they probably have that as well.
Fluke, by Christopher Moore August 1, 2016
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Fluke, by Christpher Moore, is another hilarious tale of a, well, tail, specifically the fluke of a humpback with the words “Bite me” on its fluke. The first person to witness this unusual coloration is Nathan Quinn, a whale biologist with a great fascination with whale song. He and his terminally cute but too young-for-him research pixie Amy Earhart photograph the whale in the course of research… and the frame of film containing it goes missing. And his sound recordings. And his boat. And, finally, him. He is pursued by his colleague and photographer Clay, Clay’s mean sex-fiend schoolteacher girlfriend Claire, a surfer-Rastafarian hybrid named Kona1 (nee Brad Thompson or something not very Jamaican, Hawaiian or surfish, but more New Jerseyish) and The Old Broad who funds them and who insisted that the whale called her to tell him to bring him a pastrami sandwich.
Much funnier when he tells it, of course; Moore’s signature humor is gentle and mocking and wry and just silly sometimes. Basically, I would die to be a tenth as funny at any time. Fluke had me laughing in crowded doctor’s waiting rooms.
Available on Amazon, naturally, but I got mine at sfpl.org.
WARNING: contains some actual science. Does not detract from the story in the slightest.
—
1Kona refers to the research pixie as “the snowy biscuit”, for her fair complexion and, well, biscuitness
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