Isegoria

Study says bees can find explosives:

The researchers found that ordinary honeybees can readily be trained by being exposed to the odor of an explosive, then given sugar water as a reward. After a few times, the bee, anticipating the sugar water, will stick out its tongue at the smell of the explosive.

The Los Alamos study was designed to test technology pioneered by a small British biotechnology company, Inscentinel. The company has developed a small portable sensing unit — a box, basically — into which three strapped-down bees are placed. The bees’ so-called proboscis extension reflexes are automatically detected by a camera and associated software, with the results available on a laptop computer.

Haarmann said the study showed that trained bees can detect explosives in a parts-per-trillion concentration, even when masked by other odors.

While that is similar to what dogs can do, Haarmann said, there are situations in which using bees might be preferable. The bee box, he suggested, could be held by a robotic device right next to a suspected bomb while the operator watched the laptop from a safe distance.

Phil Carter says that the Iraq Study Group talked to generals when it should have talked to corporals and ends with these words on bureaucracy:

To be fair, many of the panel’s 79 recommendations do sound practical — they’re the kinds of strategic and tactical course corrections that should have been made long ago. The reason they have not been previously adopted or implemented is also telling. Strategist and historian Eliot Cohen gets it precisely right in today’s Wall Street Journal when he writes that our looming defeat stems from “an unwillingness or inability to grab the bureaucracy by the throat and make it act.” Diplomat Robert Komer wrote much the same thing a generation ago in his classic study of Vietnam titled Bureaucracy Does Its Thing. Forget about its technological sophistication or vaunted all-volunteer force — today’s American military is the largest and most lethargic bureaucracy in world history. Its job in Iraq has been made tougher by the grafting of numerous civilian headquarters onto its existing Hydra-headed command — first the Pentagon’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, then the Coalition Provisional Authority, then a U.S. Embassy, and now a U.S. diplomatic mission and a nascent Iraqi government. The Iraq Study Group, the Pentagon, and the U.S. headquarters in Baghdad have all displayed an almost pathological inability to listen to and learn from their own people. Our enemies suffer from no such bureaucratic encumbrances; they learn, they adapt, and they evolve much faster than we do. It’s a shame we needed the Iraq Study Group to show us that.

John Jay talks about The Color Purple:

Today’s installment of Scientists You Should Know is brought to you by the color purple. Mauve, in fact. This past April marked 150 years since mankind stopped relying on plants and bugs to supply the colors of its world, and mauve was the first of those artificial colors. Before you snicker, consider that mauve was once such a novelty that an entire decade was named for it.* Before the discovery of purple dyes derived from coal tar, literally thousands of shellfish had to be slaughtered to obtain a few grams of purple — making it so expensive that it became a royal color in ancient times.

Until the advent of the artificial aniline colorants, most dyes were of plant (such as madder), insect (such as cochineal) or (I shit you not) bird fecal origin. Imagine the work it took to collect enough poop, bugs or plants to dye a garment, and you can see why a coal tar-derived synthetic dye was a huge leap forward — at least for the clothing manufacturers, if not for the insect-gatherers. We’ll leave the birds right out of it, because I’m quite sure even the people who made their living from that extraction were happy to learn a new skill or two.

The dominion of plant and animal dyes came to an end over the Easter academic break in 1856, when an 18 year old student of the Royal College of Chemistry, working in his home laboratory, was trying to make quinine from coal tar, which was a common, oily by-product of the process of making coke and town gas from coal. The project had been suggested to William Perkin by his mentor, the German organic chemist August Hofmann.

As Jay reiterates in Educated Beyond our Intelligence, Perkin was just 15 when he went to college and 18 when he made one of the most important chemical discoveries in history — which would be hard to do in a modern school environment:

We treat adolescents and young 20-somethings like pets in this society. We don’t expect much from them, and with some rare exceptions, we don’t get a lot from them.

The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote:

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Frankly, I thought the notion of Peanuts Meets Marvel was too geeky, even for me — until I took a look.

(Hat tip to Drawn!)

When someone asks you a question like, What are the most northern, southern, eastern, and western states of America? you have to assume it’s a trick question:

If you note the map above, Alaska is clearly the most northern state, and Hawaii, at 20º North, is without doubt the most southern state. (Note how much further south it is than Florida}

As far as the most western state, note how Alaska’s Aleutian Islands stretch right up to the edge of the Western Hemisphere at the 180º line of Longitude, thus the most western state in the country.

Alaska is also the answer for eastern, as the Aleutian Islands stretch across the 180º line of Longitude, into the Eastern Hemisphere, and up the edge of the Russian Federation.

This frame from a larger Dilbert strip really spoke to me.

The CDC tracks the loss of natural teeth by state, and the numbers (for adults 65+) are much, much higher than you might expect: 42.8% in West Virginia, 38.1% in Kentucky, 32.2% in Tennessee, 31.9% in Alabama, etc.

Richard Stuebi asks, What is Energy Worth?:

Everyone pays attention to — and often whines about — the price or cost of energy. I would like to pose a different question: what is the value of energy? What is energy really worth?
[...]
A healthy adult can exert about 100 watts of effort for a reasonably sustained period. [...] Thus, over the course of a 10-hour day, a human might produce 1000 watt-hours — or 1 kilowatt-hour. From your local utility, you probably pay about a dime for a kilowatt-hour. On the other hand, if you were to pay that adult a (low) wage of $5/hour for that degree of effort, that kilowatt-hour would cost $50.

In other words, electricity is priced about 1/500 the equivalent value of human effort.

Oil is even more of a steal. There are 3412 Btu in a kilowatt-hour, meaning that an adult can produce about 3412 Btu of energy effort in a 1o-hour day — or 341 Btus per hour. In a barrel of oil, there are 6.2 million Btus — equivalent to over 18,000 man-hours, which would cost over $90,000 at a (low) wage of $5/hour.

At $60/barrel, oil is priced about 1/1500 the equivalent value of human effort.

And we complain that energy is expensive? Try replacing our taken-for-granted energy forms with the work of humans — and paying a wage for it!

This frame from a larger Dilbert strip really spoke to me.

From Father’s effort to save his family called ‘superhuman’:

The family got stuck in the snow November 25 while traveling home to San Francisco after a Thanksgiving trip to Portland.

They attempted to take a shortcut over roads that can be impassable in winter.

Temperatures at night hovered near or below freezing.

The parents ate berries, authorities have said, while feeding the children baby food and crackers. When their meager food supply ran low, Kati Kim — who was nursing the younger child — breast-fed both children.

After nine days James Kim left his family to seek help, promising to return if he did not find anyone.

Dressed only in street clothes, Kim made it eight miles through “rugged, steep, snowy terrain with sodden branches, slick rocks, downed trees and poison oak nestled between sheer cliffs,” before ending up where his body was found, in a ravine, about a half-mile from the car.

What should he have done? That’s not clear, but experts point the rule of threes for surviving in cold wilderness conditions:

1. You can survive for three hours without shelter
2. You can survive for three days without water
3. You can survive for three weeks without food

The CDC tracks the loss of natural teeth by state, and the numbers (for adults 65+) are much, much higher than you might expect: 42.8% in West Virginia, 38.1% in Kentucky, 32.2% in Tennessee, 31.9% in Alabama, etc.