Numerical Tic-Tac-Toe

Here’s a cool spin on a game you probably haven’t played since you solved it in elementary school. You and another player take turns naming numbers one through nine. Each number may only be used once. The player who collects any three numbers that add up to 15 wins. If all numbers are used up without someone getting 15, the game is a draw.

Once two players have figured out all the strategies to winning the game, it becomes easy, and imperative, to prevent the opponent from winning. Just like Tic-Tac-Toe, two experienced players will have games that always end in a draw, which is important for teaching an advanced Artificial Intelligence why nobody wins playing Global Thermo-Nuclear Warfare–sorry, had a flashback to the 1983 movie War Games there.

In the research paper The Game of JAM: An Isomorph of Tic-Tac-Toe, John A. Michon notes how this game promotes a different way of thinking about a classic problem (he refers to this game as “Number Scrabble”):

Although the games are mathematically equivalent, they are likely to differ psychologically, because they require different sorts of information. Number Scrabble is a numerical game requiring addition and subtraction of numbers, whereas Tic-Tac-Toe requires a spatial representation, which can only be disposed of with some difficulty, even by fairly experienced players.

Tic-Tac-Toe and the Numerical version are Mathematically equivalent, and we can plot this out visually. In the table below, all rows, columns, and diagonals add up to 15.

4	3	8
9	5	1
2	7	6

Plaing Tic-Tac-Toe on this grid is the same as playing the numerical version. You can find a shockwave demonstration of this principle to play for yourself. This website calls the game Add Fast.

Taking the number five opens up four paths to victory. The numbers {1, 3, 7, 9} each open another path. {2, 4, 6, 8} are the least valuable strategically.

This seems like a cool game to play with your kids. When they get good at it, show them the relationship to Tic-Tac-Toe. Or you can learn the number-grid, and amaze your friends by kicking their butts at this game.

Future Wonder of the World: Three Gorges Dam

Three Gorges Dam Before Filling Reservoir Image Courtesy Wikimedia Click for a Larger Image

When Three Gorges Dam goes fully online in China in 2009, after 17 years of construction, it will be 607 feet high and 1.4 miles long. Its reservoir will be 410 miles in length and 3,700 feet in width. It will be the largest dam on Earth, and probably the largest dam our planet will ever see.

The dam’s reservoir will require the relocation of over 1.5 million people. 13 full-sized cities were leveled by the people who lived in them, brick by brick, to prevent the buildings from interfering with boat traffic. Some 1,300 archaeological sites will also be submerged.

The dam also contributed to the extinction of the Yangtze river dolphin. The weight of the dam and reservoir can cause induced seismicity, or earthquakes. Over the fifteen days it took to initially fill the reservoir, there was a measurable wobble to the Earth’s spin.

Three Gorges Dam 2006 (top) 2000(bottom) Image Courtesy NASA

According to a Chinese official, the dam has three main functions:

The first is to avoid floods. That’s the most crucial function. The second is to generate electricity. The third is to improve transportation.

In 1954, the river flooded, killing 33,169 people and forcing 18,884,000 to relocate. The dam will prevent such events from occurring in the future. The dam’s 32 generators will produce 700,000 kW of electricity, with a total capacity of 22.4 million kW, which will reduce coal consumption by 31 million tons per year, cutting the emission of 100 million tons of greenhouse gas. In the educational video game, Civilization IV, the dam is a World Wonder, providing power to the entire continent.

All of this comes at the astoundingly low price of 180 billion yuan ($25 billion dollars).

So remember, when talking heads say humans are too tiny and insignificant to impact the environment, refer them to Three Gorges Dam, a project with many pros and cons that has literally made the Earth tremble.

Sources:

• Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes, 2006.
• Wikipedia Entry for Three Gorges Dam.

Off-World Environmentalism: Fighting Space Pollution

Tracked Debris Orbiting Earth Photo by NASA

All the politicians and military strategists were buzzing about China’s missile test in January 2007, where the country blew up one of its old satellites in orbit. After the debates about the diplomatic and militaristic implications of this demonstration had settled down, scientists took the opportunity to get on their soapboxes and complain about the real problem with China’s missile test, the fact that it put between 500 and 800 pieces of junk into Earth’s orbit.

Each bit of space trash orbiting our planet is a potential hazard to satellites and future space travelers. The U.S. Space Surveillance Network currently tracks 13,000 pieces of space junk larger than four inches in diameter. This includes more than 2,000 spent rocket stages. Every time we launch something into orbit, we produce more space trash. There have been about 4,000 launches worldwide since the dawn of space flight.

Space is junk-filled enough without our adding to the mix. The NASA Spaceguard programs is currently tracking 2,700 Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and adding more to the list every day. 700 of these are at least half a mile wide, big enough to cause global climate catastrophe were one to hit Earth.

The Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan region of Mexico is the likely candidate for the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs and 70 percent of all life on Earth. Some scientists theorize the impact vaporized carbonate rocks, releasing massive quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and generating a dramatic greenhouse effect that shifted temperatures as much as 10 degrees. Other’s theorize the asteroid put enough dust and smoke into the atmosphere to block out the sun for up to six months, long enough to kill off most plant life and doom the entire food chain of animals relying on them. Whatever the mechanism, the impact was a climate shattering experience for planet Earth and traumatic to all life here.

Six months after a repair mission to the Hubble telescope corrected the satellite’s focus, the human race was treated to the incredible sight of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 colliding with Jupiter. The train of over twenty fragments produced a trail of black smudges in Jupiter’s atmosphere. When you consider the fact that 1300 Earths can fit inside this largest planet in our solar system, those smudges start to resemble bug splats on a windshield, as in that’s what would happen to our home world.

Impact Scars in Jupiter’s Atmosphere Photo by NASA

Luckily, we have Jupiter’s magnificent mass to serve as the clean sweep for our solar system. Some scientists wonder if highly evolved life is even possible in solar systems that lack giant planets like Jupiter to reduce the amount of large debris floating throughout them.

But having Jupiter doesn’t mean we can lower our guard. In addition to tracking NEO’s, scientists are formulating plans for how to deal with an asteroid on collision course with Earth, should we find one. Missiles are ineffective, because they would simply produce more debris; however, asteroid tugboats, solar sails, and attaching rocket boosters to asteroids are just some of the options we have on the table for nudging these rocks just enough to pass us by.

The ability to escape off-world is another possibility, but only so long as we keep the space surrounding our planet free of debris. In April 1994, the space shuttle Endeavour took a ding on its window measuring a half-inch in diameter. This was caused by an orbiting paint chip. Anything much larger might have destroyed the shuttle and its crew, generating even more space debris.

There is now so much junk orbiting our planet that some scientists fear we have reached a critical mass, and that collisions are now inevitable. Each collision would generate more debris, which generates more collisions, and a chain reaction occurs that fills our orbit with so much trash it would not only prevent us from venturing into space for a very long time, but also destroy weather and communications satellites with all the benefits they bring us as well.

So while the Pentagon assures us no space debris poses a threat from their recent shoot-down of our own satellite, we do need to worry that the U.S. and China’s military demonstrations could bring about escalating weapons technologies in space, where even a small war would ground all humans on Earth for centuries.

The Digital Big-Bang

One Gigabyte 20 Years Ago (left) One Gigabyte Today (Right) source

Bill Gates is often misquoted as having said, “no one will ever need more than 640K of memory,” in the 1980s. 24 years ago, my Commodore 64 personal computer ran games like “Mail-Order Monsters” and “Archon” on a mere 64 kilobytes of memory. This was a huge advance over my 1977 Atari 2600 game console, which ran “Pong” and “Space Invaders” on a scant 128 bytes of memory. Today my dual-core Pentium uses a gigabyte of RAM, about 7.8 million times as much memory as the Atari, and, after upgrading to Windows Vista, even that doesn’t cut it anymore.

From bits to bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and, with impending DVD technological advances, terabytes, our computing power grows exponentially. This empirically observed fact is known as Moore’s Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who observed in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated component doubles every 18 months. In other words, computers double in power every year and a half. This Law of Computing has held true now for over 40 years in an explosion of processing power that allows for what history will record as the Information Age, the times in which we are currently living.

Now it’s time to familiarize ourselves with a new measurement, the exabyte. We can thank research firm IDC’s white paper The Expanding Digital Universe for introducing us to this latest milestone, which estimates the human race collectively produced 161 exabytes of data in 2006.

So what’s an exabyte? To visualize this number, it’s helpful to begin at the smallest measurement of data, the bit. A bit is a 1 or 0, “on” or “off,” “true” or “false.” Up one level from this binary state we have the byte, which is 8 bits. If you open Notepad on your computer, type any one letter and save the file, you have generated one byte of data, which you can verify by right-clicking on the file and selecting “Properties.”

Every additional character typed and saved will add another byte to the file’s size. Every 1,000 characters is a kilobyte, and every 1,000 kilobytes a megabyte. A 90,000-word novel translates into about 0.5 megabytes¹. An exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data, or 500 billion novels. That’s 77 novels written for every person on Earth², and we are producing 161 times that much data, 230 billion CDs worth³, or nearly 12,400 novels for every person on Earth every year.

We produced more data last year than has been produced in the last 5,000 years of human history. That’s just for 2006, and that’s only the beginning. “In 2010, the amount of digital information created and copied worldwide will rise six fold to a staggering 988 exabytes,” that’s 12 Petabytes short of having to adopt yet another term of measurement, the Zettabyte.

The search engine Google is named after the largest number the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner could think of, the googol. It is the number one followed by 100 zeros. By one recent estimate, it takes 450,000 computers networked on server farms to run the Google search engine, indexing 8 billion Web pages every year. I wonder when we’ll be talking about our hard drives (or maybe they’ll be flash drives by then) in terms of googlebytes?

And then we still have the googolplex waiting for us in the distant future, the number one followed by a googol of zeroes.

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¹500,000 characters in Novel based on a Microsoft Word Count and Character count of one of my novels, which came out to 450,000 characters for a 82,000 world novel. So this is a very conservative estimate.

²1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes translates to
1,000,000,000,000 megabytes which translates to
500,000,000,000 novels divided by 6.5 billion human beings

³CDs hold 700MB of Data
700,000,000
161,000,000,000,000,000,000
230,000,000,000

Adventuring: The National Zoological Park, Reptiles, and Invertebrates, and Brains, oh my!

The Invertebrate Exhibit

Giant Hermit Crab

Awesome moment at this exhibit was getting to see one of Zoo staff feeding the Pacific Octopus. It ballooned up from a little white ball into a red explosion of tentacles. The Zookeeper fed it a muscle and a hermit crab, and had to fight octopus a bit to keep it from climbing out of the tank by climbing up her feeding staff.

Check out the Complete Flickr set

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The Reptile House

Emerald Tree Boa

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard some variation of this in the Zoo:

Guy: Yo that snake’s all like, “Wassuuuuup?” and that snake’s all like, “Just chillin’.”

Girl: Tee hee hee. You’re so funny, I wan’t to have sex with you now.

So geeky guys take note: Chicks dig it when you anthropomorphize animals at the zoo… unless said chick has a brain.

Check out the Complete Flickr set

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Think Tank

Comparing Brains Left to Right: Fox Squirrel, Orang utan, Human, Asian Elephant, Fin Whale

A display that has a warning sign that you are about to have your preconception challenged is always cool. Mostly displays here, but very thought-provoking ones.

My favorite was the “Is a Cow a Tool?” display. I’d never thought of cows as being a tool for carrying around milk and meat for us, but there you go, we developed them to serve that purpose.

Check out the Complete Flickr set

Clan Apis

Clan Apis

Clan Apis chronicles the life and times of a single worker honey bee, Nyuki, who’s delightfully wise-ass and wholly enchanted with her life in a hive where her personal experiences are no different from those of the her thousands of neighbors.

Dr. Jay Hosler’s understanding of entomology, evolution, and natural science allows him to fill Nyuki’s life with all the minutiae of the honey bee’s world. From the details of her life as a larvae, joining the swarm to establish another hive, and defending that hive from other bees and animals. We even learn the physiological effects of the bee ageing process, what happens when bees get old and how they die.

Dr. Hosler’s literary knowledge gives the story another layer. The irony of a dung beetle named Sisyphus, forever rolling his boulder of poop along. The bee characters all have names like Nyuki, Dvorah, Hachi, Zambur, Abeja, and Melissa, which mean “bee” in Swahili, Hebrew, Japanese, Farsi, Spanish, and Greek respectively.

While the his decision not to anthropomorphize his bees’ physiology ensures Disney will never have anything to do with the story (that and its realism, Hosler’s worker bees are female), Dr. Hosler’s choice does not make it difficult to distinguish characters from one another and keeps them entirely bee-like, instead just of being dumb humans with bee-features.

Dr. Hosler’s combination of literary, artistic, and scientific talents create some wonderfully witty moments that stick with the reader long after. My favorite of these is his recounting of the evolution of life in the sea, as things get more complex and more crowded, a lone amphibian, struggling to find some breathing room, struggles to find its way onto land, the first human ancestor to do so:

Although Nyuki’s life is wholly ordinary and unexceptional for a honey bee, her attitude, her perpetual ionian enchantment with her world makes her exceptional and unique.

You can purchase Clan Apis online through Amazon.

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Jay Hosler also has some great comic strips online.

The OLPC XO-1, Shortcut to the Information Age

So I got my OLPC XO-1 in the mail about a month ago, and I’m still wrestling with my opinion of it. Personally I think it’s the bee’s knees. Everyone who comes into the comic shop fawns over it. I’m the envy of the local geek crowd.

I love it when people ask me, “What’s that?” and I get to extol the virtues of Nick Negroponte’s beautiful vision of supplying underprivileged children all over the world with their own laptops to learn art, reading, mathematics, programming, science, and connect them with the entire world as their classroom. Just like so many people here in America have done through the Internet.

“Huh. But don’t those poor kids have more pressing concerns, like survival, that need to come first?” they always reply in some form or another, and the heart-bubbles floating around my head all pop and I wake up, blinking dumbly.

Which brings me to my conflict. While I dig the OLPC XO-1, will it serve its purpose of enlightening young minds all over the world? Even I laughed at Newt Gingrich when he suggested we provide the homeless with laptops, but now I’m not so sure.

People get stuck in this idea that other nations need to repeat every step of America’s history to achieve America’s quality of life. China can either work through America’s entire history of building a middle class that will demand its own fair workplace standards, or Americans can exert economic pressure on China to do away with its sweatshops. Similarly, third-world countries can step through fossil-fuel power plants, or they can skip straight to renewable energy.

Why reinvent the wheel? The OLPC is a shortcut for lesser-developed nations. Why not help them skip being a second-world country and go straight to the Information Age, with all its collaborative memetic innovation? I say get them into the Global Village ASAP. The sooner they start using LEDs, solar panels, and well-water pumps, the sooner they’ll start contributing their own inventions, software, art, and literature to the world.

OLPC as an E-Book Image Courtesy OLPC Foundation

On the downside. This laptop is hand-me-down softwares and technologies. The hand-me-down 433mhz processors with hand-me-down 256k RAM. Hardware-wise, this brand new laptop is my brand new PC from 1993. Software-wise the hand-me-down Sim City is the same one that ran on my Apple IIe in Junior High, but I’ve got a better opinion of the rest of the software suite further down.

So is the $200 price tag justified? The software’s open-source, so there’s $0 of the total. A refurnished Thinkpad runs $200-$300, but this is brand new. Former OLPC CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen, is now working on a $75 laptop. How they intend to accomplish this when they couldn’t accomplish it with the OLPC is anybody’s guess, but the competition among charities will definitely spurn more innovation. The $200 price tag is very prohibitive to the OLPC’s ultimate success.

On the plus-side, the hardware has features that are uniquely perfect for the OLPC’s intended recipients. Practically speaking. This is a rugged little #$%@ of a machine. A fully charged battery runs for hours (three hours for one of my sessions). The twin wifi antenna are rubberized and folded in to serve as a locking mechanism for the laptop when closed. With flash memory storage, I don’t have to worry about bouncing it around and wrecking the hardrive, and stuffing all the main components behind the screen means it doesn’t make your sperm-count decline uncomfortably when it sits in your lap.

The keyboard is a rubber mat, which is awesomely spill-proof and would feel great if it wasn’t so tiny. I read one hacker’s first mod to his XO-1 was to convert it to a Dvorak keyboard layout. What’s the point? I’m reduced to hunt-and-peck mode using my forefingers when I type on it, but that’s okay because the keyboard isn’t meant for my adult hands, and when my friend’s five-year-old daughter got her hands on the laptop, she looked like a pro typing utter gibberish into it’s Journaling Software.

The monitor flips completely around and folds flat on the laptop, turning it into an e-book reader. This is a really nice feature, and one that makes this laptop a real keeper for me. If nothing else, I’ve now got a screen bigger than my cellphone to read all the free books I download from Project Gutenberg, and a laptop with the battery life to survive a long flight.

OLPC Network Neighborhood Image Courtesy OLPC Foundation

So this is a sweetly innovative, however overpriced, bit of technology. Which brings me to the second most common objection I get to the OLPC, “Are kids in third-world countries even going to be able to use that thing?”

The assumption here is that this learning toy is beyond the technological grasp of children living in villages without electricity. That somehow people deprived of Best Buy, Cinema Multiplexes, and the mind-numbing inanity of American Idol lack the cognitive foundation for Computing 101. Whenever a Baby Boomer raises this objection, I just remind myself that they are from the same generation that couldn’t program a VCR.

The reality is that the OLPC’s linux user interface sorta takes me back to my Commodore 64 days, when computing was just the basics. Only my Commodore’s interface was a command line, (LOAD *,8,1 anyone?), whereas the OLPC is cartoony and graphical. Kids will get into this thing and make it sing in ways the developers never anticipated. Just like kids run technological circles around their elders in modern America.

The OLPC provides plenty of pre-loaded software that will educate in a well-rounded fashion. The Video, Picture, and Sound Capture capabilities using the built in video and microphone introduce students to multimedia. The journal provides a creative writing outlet, while the Paint and TamTamJam softwares allow for art and music creative outlets.

Etoys and Turtle Art introduce kids to programming logic, while Pippy introduces kids to the joys of Python Programming, the easiest, most advanced programming language out there. Through these, kids are introduced to mathematics, building their own software toys, and logical constructs.

Most of all, the web browser introduces them to the world’s knowledge. The chat introduces them to world’s people.

They’re doing all this on an open-source operating system, where they can eventually incorporate what they learn into publishing their own improvements and innovations to the World Wide Web, where the rest of us will enjoy them.

That’s dream worth supporting, not to mention a huge return on our investment.

Adventuring: The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum

French Astrolabe, 1600s

The Hubble Telescope was impressive. For some reason, I’d never realized how huge this orbiting eye on the Universe actually is, easily three-stories tall. Scale was a common theme for me throughout the museum. The walk-through size of Skylab, the claustrophobia-inducing interior of the cramped Mercury capsule. These pictures won’t fully communicate these dimensions. You have to see for yourself in person.

You can view the complete flickr set here.

Mind Webs: 49 hours Worth of Speculative Fiction Radio

Mind Webs CD Cover

Here’s an online treasure trove of audio files brought to you by the Internet Archive of the 1970s radio series Mind Webs. The show featured the greatest speculative fiction stories from top-notch authors of the day. You can find a summary of plotlines here. I’ve been listening to the shows for weeks in my car now, and enjoying them immensely.

Some of my personal favorites:

Harry Harrison’s The Ever Branching Tree, about an elementary school field trip back in time to observe evolution as it happens.

Robert Silverberg’s wonderfully satirical and observant When We Went to See the End of the World, which is even more relevant as a commentary on today’s world than the one it was written for 30 years ago.

Brian W. Aldiss’ The Night That All Time Broke Loose involves an alternate reality where “time gas” allows people to cause various elements of their surrounding reality, their dinner, home decor, even bodies, to travel back in time, dialing them to desired states. It seems like a miracle technology, until a gas line breaks at the time gas plant and starts de-evolving everything.

Science Etcetera Saturnday, 20080105

The Heliosphere credits: ESA, Martin Kornmesser, Lars Lindberg Christensen

The Sun Earth Plan website illustrates the beautiful scientific ideas we will be deprived of if the UK doesn’t get it’s science funding restored (HT Kav).

Two decades of data from over 30 sites in the frozen north indicate that Trees are absorbing less CO2 as world warms, further placing the onus on us to solve the problem.

Energy is all around us, not just in oil, as is illustrated in one company Harnessing Energy from Asphalt Heat and another using Sunlight to Make Fuel From CO2.

Congratulations! You have a 100 percent chance of carrying at least 1 type of pesticide!!!

Alan Boyle has the absolute best write up thus far covering the Presidential Candidates on Science.

After contributing diddly squat to the project, but making sure to bask in its good publicity, Intel has Quit One Laptop Per Child Program. Thankfully, the Open Source community keeps churning out the OLPC hacks.

The the National Academy of Sciences has published a book, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, which is available online for free (but you have to pay to download it, stupid National Academies Press), and provides guidelines for teaching evolutionary science in school and insists that “Intelligent Design” has no place in science classrooms, “just like facts don’t have a place within an organized religion.” – Superintendent Chalmers from The Simpsons.

And this Starbucks cup agrees with the NAS. So Thpppt!!!

Las Vegas is set to build the world’s first 30 Story Vertical Farm.

Cool Tools has some cool exerpts from Motion Mountain’s Free Online Physics Textbook (HT Clint).

Adventuring: The Smithsonian Natural History Museum

I’ve got a huge backlog of photos I need to get up on Flickr, enough to cover several months worth of Saturndays. Here’s two sets from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum:

Hall of Bones

Man and the Manlike Apes

The Hall of Bones does a great job of illustrating the incredible biological and adaptation diversity of a tool all animals share, an internal skeleton. Without this scaffolding on which to drap our skin over and attach our muscules to, we’d be just a bunch of blobs, oozing from place to place… Well, that could be pretty cool too.

Visit the flickr set here.

Hall of Mammals

Morganucodon oehleri Common Ancestor to Us All

While the Hall of Bones fascinated me and was immensely instructional, the Hall of Mammals was fairly disappointing. Yes, the huge collection of diversity in the Class Mammalia is pretty amazing. Yes, the exhibit is very educational. It’s certainly not without merit.

However, I saw this exhibit the day following an all-day adventure at the Zoo, seeing real live animals, fully animated with their biological clockworks running with near indecipherable and irreproducible complexity.

Compare this to a collection of taxidermied animals, frozen in time, and positioned best as possible to appear as they do in real life, but still unconvincing enough to trigger my Uncanny Valley response.

That’s why we have to keep them alive.

Visit the flickr set here.

Science Etcetera Mercuryday, 20080102

Countries around the world yesterday had cause to cheer as tones of new materials entered their public domains, such as the works of H.P. Lovecraft (who’s horror monsters we at the comic shop believe will appear in the movie Cloverfield on 1-18-2008), astronomer Mary Proctor, mathematician Von Neumann, biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, and many others. In America, Canada, and the U.K. a whole heap of diddly-squat entered the public domain. In America, this is because the copyright holders of a certain animated mouse with a head shaped like an H₂O molecule bought Congress in 1998.

H2O Mickey Mouse

Environmentalists are calling 2008 the Year of the Frog to raise awareness about the ongoing mass extinction of this very important amphibian by a fungus whose growth is being accelerated by global warming. Many Science Centers I’ve been to have started collecting frogs as a sort of Noah’s Ark. It shouldn’t need to come to that.

I’ve been a little too skeptical to blog this story so far, but, yes Virginia, there really are continents of floating garbage now choking our oceans to death.

Online garden shopping will outgrow catalogues in 2008. I know I can’t live without Logee’s!

I’ve seen kits for this, but it sounds like a pretty straightforward DIY project Grow your own Magic Crystal Tree.

Happy Birthday Isaac Asimov!

Isaac Asimov

Author or editor of over 500 books, including the incredible Foundation Series and I, Robot books. I was led to Asimov by my favorite author at the time, Kurt Vonnegut, who lavished much praise on his prolific friend. Asimov and Vonnegut are now equal in my eyes, Vonnegut for his humanity, Asimov for his down to Earth brilliance, both were presidents of the American Humanist Association

Despite being a member of Mensa (like myself), Asimov was very concerned with bringing complex subjects within the realm of understanding of everyday human beings. He advocated the elimination of English grammar, which he believed was so illogical as to promot illiteracy, deconstructed the Bible so thoroughly it took multiple volumes to cover it, and explained complex scientific subjects with a simplicity that promoted science in common discourse.

I got a treat yesterday as I was listening to NPR, and learned that, despite writing extensively about space travel, Asimov was too afraid to ever fly in a plane. I’ve read Asimov’s own accounts of his longtime resistance to word processors, which, once overcome, dramatically increased his productivity.

He would be 87 today.

Science Etecetera Marsday 20080101

Happy New Year! Here’s what happened during my recent hiatus:

Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests

If you’ve never seen Theo Jansen’s fantastic wind-powered robots, you’re in for a real treat. Now instructables has a DIY Strandbeest out of Knex.

With another 365 days ahead of us, it’s a good time to ponder on the Economist’s recent article The future of futurology.

Jellyfish invasions, a more green-conscious world, quantum physics discovery gambling odds… PopSci has their 2008 Guide to Science.

A practical joke series of advertisements meant to make people think, the Forever Landfill pretends to offer personal garbage disposal for people who don’t want to think about sustainability.

Croc-Hunter widow Terri Irwin is Launching a Whale Rescue operation intended to prove that all the scientific data Japan is supposedly killing whales for can be obtained through non-lethal means. Go Terri!!!

The long-time practice of training doctors in heart-surgery by Killing Dogs is about to End.

Climate Skeptics should appreciate this commentary on Global Warming and media weather coverage, which predicts more alarmist news coverage of weather in an “Availability Cascade.”

I firmly believe there should be a fourth law of motion that states “A wire at rest will tangle.” Science is tackling the subject of knotting, including DNA tangles .

Housewives rock!!! They’re more ecologically aware and recycle more than university students.

Generation Y represents the Heaviest Library Users, but it’s mostly for the free Internet.

Wolfquest is a Free Game about surviving as a wild wolf in Yellowstone Park and is scoring high marks with players.

North America’s Largest Solar-Electric Plant has just come online.

Stephen Hawking has joined the protests against UK’s science funding cuts.

I think a camera on my shoulder, recording everything I do, might be pretty useful, that’s why 24-7 Photo-Logging appeals to my desire to never misplace my keys again.

How to Fossilize your hamster is a pretty cool title for a book of DIY science experiments.