Dear 17-year-old Doors discoverers,
Well, this was probably unavoidable. You are about to think some very dumb stuff about poetry, women, and dead Native Americans. This is a tradition, or affliction, that has been passed down to at least three generations of 17-year-old white boys and then foisted upon 15-year-old-white girls for just as many decades— girls your own age are way past this shit, stick with the sophomores. You are going to abuse the word “shaman” in ways that will violate international torture conventions. You’re going to think that something important and meaningful is happening to you, even though you haven’t left your room for three days. You are going to sit at the feet of the master of total self-regard, one James Douglass Morrison, the “Lizard King,” and think yourself the Prince of Salamanders and heir to a throne carved from your own bullshit.
Check It Out
Links to cool places or things.
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Aphantasia: A life without mental images – BBC News
Interesting.
Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then gazing over the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs to mind?
Most people can readily conjure images inside their head – known as their mind’s eye.
But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some people are unable to visualise mental images.Niel Kenmuir, from Lancaster, has always had a blind mind’s eye.
He knew he was different even in childhood. “My stepfather, when I couldn’t sleep, told me to count sheep, and he explained what he meant, I tried to do it and I couldn’t,” he says.
The Strange Saga of the MH370 Plane Part — NYMag
Speaking of MH-370, remember that Boeing 777 wing flapiron that washed ashore last month on Reunion Island? It turns out the ID plate on it is curiously missing, and the wing part appears to have been marinated somehow to artificially boost its barnacle growth.
This mystery gets stranger and stranger.
Tomorrow marks one month since a piece of a Boeing 777 washed up on the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion, but French investigators are no closer to confirming that the part came from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. In fact, leaks from within the investigation suggest that the part might not have come from the plane at all.
Cold Fusion Heats Up: Fusion Energy and LENR Update | David H. Bailey
A friend forwarded this HuffPost story on cold fusion research and I was surprised to learn that a Raleigh-based company called Industrial Heat is said to have working technology.
Perhaps the most startling (and most controversial) report is by an Italian-American engineer-entrepreneur named Andrea Rossi. Rossi claims that he has developed a tabletop reactor that produces heat by an as-yet-not-fully-understood LENR process.Rossi has gone well beyond laboratory demonstration; he claims that he and the private firm Industrial Heat, LLC of Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, have actually installed a working system at an (undisclosed) commercial customer’s site.
According to Rossi and a handful of others who have observed the system in operation, it is producing 1 MWatt continuous net output power, in the form of heat, from a few grams of “fuel” in each of a set of modest-sized reactors in a network. The system has now been operating for approximately six months, as part of a one-year acceptance test. Rossi and IH LLC are in talks with Chinese firms for large-scale commercial manufacture.
Source: Cold Fusion Heats Up: Fusion Energy and LENR Update | David H. Bailey
Tam Hunt: Do Electric Vehicles Lead to Environmental Benefits?
Here’s a very comprehensive rebuttal of Stephen Holland’s recent UNC-G study concluding that electric vehicles are only marginally better for the environment.
A number of studies have come out in recent years questioning the conventional wisdom that electric vehicles are better for the environment than efficient traditional cars.
A recent study from a team that included Stephen Holland of the University of North Carolina Greensboro as first author makes a remarkable statement, that “electric vehicles, on average, generate greater environmental externalities than gasoline vehicles.” The study compares electric vehicles (EVs) with gasoline vehicles and finds EVs wanting.
I’ll examine this study in some detail here to show why EVs are, in fact, very good for the environment.
Source: Tam Hunt: Do Electric Vehicles Lead to Environmental Benefits?
Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous – The Washington Post
A good opinion piece on why America needs more than just STEM education.
Twenty years ago, tech companies might have survived simply as product manufacturers. Now they have to be on the cutting edge of design, marketing and social networking. You can make a sneaker equally well in many parts of the world, but you can’t sell it for $300 unless you’ve built a story around it. The same is true for cars, clothes and coffee. The value added is in the brand — how it is imagined, presented, sold and sustained. Or consider America’s vast entertainment industry, built around stories, songs, design and creativity. All of this requires skills far beyond the offerings of a narrow STEM curriculum.
Source: Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous – The Washington Post
So Long, Drawl | NC State News
For more than half a century, the familiar Southern accent has been fading in Raleigh. Its disappearance has been so slow and so subtle that locals may not even have noticed. But for Robin Dodsworth, an associate professor in sociolinguistics at NC State, the decline tells the story of rapid social change across the urban South.
Source: So Long, Drawl | NC State News
Dick Cheney chilling on Sept 11, 2001
Dick Cheney kicking back on Sept. 11, 2001.
The National Archives released a series of photos taken by White House staff on the morning of Sept 11, 2001. A few of them show a very relaxed (perhaps even bored) Vice President Dick Cheney as scenes of carnage are shown on his television.
I find his lack of reaction very strange.
Map of Triangle-area Google Fiber huts
Google Fiber in the Triangle
A News and Observer story alerted me to the recent approval by Raleigh City Council of 10 Google Fiber hut sites in the city. A quick look at the city council minutes showed me where they were. I took a few minutes this afternoon to map these sites onto Google Maps to get a better look at where Google Fiber might soon be deployed.
The result is this Google Map. I have since added the four sites in Cary and one in Morrisville which have already been approved. I searched for approval of sites in Durham, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Garner but as far as I know these municipalities have not yet approved their sites. If someone learns that this has changed, please give me a heads up and I will add these sites to my map.
The upright Google Fiber bunnies signify fiber hut locations, while the horizontal bunnies indicate where conduit permits have been requested. I’ve also put an icon on Raleigh’s proposed Google FiberSpace at 518 W. Jones St in Glenwood South area.
The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle – The New Yorker
Here’s a terrifying story on the Cascadia Fault, which is overdue for an earthquake so devastating it will almost assuredly destroy Seattle. I love The New Yorker’s expert, in-depth writing.
When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.
Source: The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle – The New Yorker