Mr. Hartan's Science Class
"Knowledge is a reckoning . . . a way to assess your location, your true position, not a strategy for improving your position." -Walter Kirn-Archive for July, 2009
So Cool Yet So Very Creepy: Personal Urns
Courtesy of OhGizmo!
By Chris Scott Barr
There’s a funny little thing that my brother and I like to tell our parents when they’re being particularly nerve-wracking these days. We kindly remind them that we’ll be the ones that pick out their nursing home, so they should be nice. Yes, we always say it in a joking manner, and we can only get away with it because grounding doesn’t work when you’re in your 20’s and live in your own house. This train of thought has always made me wonder how I can have the last laugh on my kids when my time is finally up. Well let’s just say if they stick me in some crappy nursing home, I know exactly what my final wish will be.
What better way to creep someone out than to request that your ashes be contained in an Urn that looks exactly like your head? Well thanks to the Personal Urn, this creepy joke from beyond the grave can be pulled off quite effectively. The company will take a full 3D image of the person’s head (postmortem) and then it will be printed off using the latest 3D printing technology. Just make the proper arrangements before you go, and will one to each of your children. Make sure to specify that you want it kept on their mantle with a bit of your ashes inside. There’s no way that they could bring themselves to disobey your last wishes, even if it is really creepy. But then they should have thought about that when they stuffed you in that crummy nursing home straight out of Happy Gilmore.
Okay, I wouldn’t actually do anything that mean to my future kids. I would consider having one of these made for my personal use. I mean, who’s going to steal cookies from a cookie jar that looks just like my head? Sure, $2,600 is a lot for a creepy cookie jar. But it would make for one hell of a conversation piece.
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Could You Survive Without Money? Meet the Guy Who Does.
Article courtesy of men.style.com
By Christopher Ketcham; Photograph by Mark Heithoff
In modern-day Utah, a man has lived for the better part of a decade on zero dollars a day. People used to think he was crazy. READ ON.
Moths Outwit Bats by Jamming Sonar
Moths Outwit Bats by Jamming Sonar
by Christopher Joyce and featured on Morning Edition (NPR) – 17 July 2009
Picture Credit: William Conner
This tiger moth, Bertholdia trigona, is the first animal known to defend itself by jamming the sonar of its predator, bats. Science/AAAS
Timeline: The Evolution of Life
11:06 14 July 2009 by Michael Marshall
There are all sorts of ways to reconstruct the history of life on Earth. Pinning down when specific events occurred is often tricky, though. For this, biologists depend mainly on dating the rocks in which fossils are found, and by looking at the “molecular clocks” in the DNA of living organisms.
There are problems with each of these methods. The fossil record is like a movie with most of the frames cut out. Because it is so incomplete, it can be difficult to establish exactly when particular evolutionary changes happened.
Modern genetics allows scientists to measure how different species are from each other at a molecular level, and thus to estimate how much time has passed since a single lineage split into different species. Confounding factors rack up for species that are very distantly related, making the earlier dates more uncertain.
These difficulties mean that the dates in the timeline should be taken as approximate. As a general rule, they become more uncertain the further back along the geological timescale we look. Dates that are very uncertain are marked with a question mark. PLEASE READ ON.
Pocket Plant Press and Solar Cooker
. . . from Instructables.com
Pocket Plant Press (click on the picture for more details)
Solar Cooker (click on the picture for more details)
Healthy Examples
Healthy Examples: Plenty of Countries Get Healthcare Right
by Jonathan Cohn (5 July 009) of the Boston Globe
“I DON’T WANT America to begin rationing care to their citizens in the way these other countries do.”
That was Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, speaking last month about healthcare reform. But it could have been virtually any other Republican, not to mention any number of sympathetic interest groups, because that’s the party line for many who oppose healthcare reform. If President Obama and his supporters get their way, this argument goes, healthcare in America will start to look like healthcare overseas. Yes, maybe everybody will have insurance. But people will have to wait in long lines. And when they are done waiting in line, the care won’t be very good.
Typically the people making these arguments are basing their analysis on one of two countries, Canada and England, where such descriptions hold at least some truth. Although the people in both countries receive pretty good healthcare – their citizens do better than Americans in many important respects – they are also subjected to longer waits for specialty care and tighter limits on some advanced treatments.
But no serious politician is talking about recreating either the British or the Canadian system here. The British have truly “socialized medicine,” in which the government directly employs most doctors. The Canadians have one of the world’s most centralized “single-payer” systems, in which the government insures everybody directly and private insurance has virtually no role. A better understanding for how universal healthcare might work in America would come from other countries – countries whose insurance architecture and medical cultures more closely resemble the framework we’d likely create here. READ ON.
Living in a 17,000 Foot Home in a Gouge in the Earth
The Sleepers:
Curtis, Deborah and their children, Kian, Perry and baby Theodore Wesley live in a cave, a 17,000-square-foot gouge in the earth left by a 1930s sandstone mine. It’s Tom Sawyer country here in Festus, Mo., just a few miles from the Mississippi River, and the Sleepers showed their adventurous side by making their home 45 feet under a forest (and a neighbor’s home). Curtis Sleeper said they chose to build in the cave because of the serenity and privacy he and his wife felt on the first day they visited the site.
Curtis Sleeper said they chose to build in the cave because of the serenity and privacy he and his wife felt on the first day they visited the site. The front of the three-bedroom home is constructed from glass doors and used materials bought from a local store. Insulation sealant keeps the interiors 65 to 70 degrees year-round, Curtis said.
