In what has to be the crowning achievement in film editing, I present Brokeback to the Future.
F-ing brilliant.
by John Cole| 10 Comments
This post is in: Humorous
In what has to be the crowning achievement in film editing, I present Brokeback to the Future.
F-ing brilliant.
by John Cole| 56 Comments
This post is in: Movies
I could only watch 45 minutes of Crash. Was the point of the movie to try to jam as many storylines of objectionable people into a movie?
Blech. Should I finish this movie?
*** Update ***
I finished it, against my better judgement, and if that is the best Hollywood has to offer, I am ready to give the Oscar to Brokeback Mountain, which I have not seen yet (I hate love stories of any kind).
BTW- L4yer Cake was excellent. I kept wondering why it did not receive wider play in the US. Until I saw the ending, and then I knew why it did not play in US markets.
by Tim F| 44 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
A few years ago the solar system got a bit more crowded when astronomers at the Palomar Observatory spotted a tenth ‘planet,’ romantically named 2003 UB313, circling the sun out beyond Pluto’s orbit. Questions of whether this thing constituted a real planet or just an especially reflective asteroid should have been put to bed last year when some folks at the Keck Lab in Hawaii discovered that the rock, codenamed ‘Xena,’ has a moon.
Some people weren’t satisfied. Maybe it’s a big asteroid with a really little asteroid spinning around it, they said. Nope (Nature, subscription wall. you know the drill):
The recently discovered ‘tenth planet’ of our Solar System is substantially larger than Pluto, astronomers have found.
For many, the discovery that object 2003 UB313 is about 3,000 kilometres across will remove any doubt that it deserves to be called a planet.
…When astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena unveiled 2003 UB313 to the world in July 2005, his team was already confident that the new object was at least as large as Pluto, and deserved the status of ‘planet’.
But UB313’s elongated orbit takes it almost twice as far away from the Sun as Pluto ever gets, making it very difficult to measure its diameter precisely. One clue to its larger size came from the fact that it is slightly brighter than Pluto; a larger mirror would reflect more of the Sun’s light. But an alternative explanation could have been that UB313 is simply made of a more reflective material than Pluto.
Using the Institute for Millimetre Radio Astronomy (IRAM) 30-metre telescope in Spain, Bertoldi’s team has now studied the radiowaves coming from UB313, which reveal how much of the Sun’s rays are absorbed and re-radiated as heat. Because very little reflected sunlight is emitted at these wavelengths, the object’s brightness in radiowaves depends only on its size and surface temperature.
Based on its enormous distance from the Sun, UB313 is calculated to be tremendously cold: a staggering -248 °C. Bertoldi and his colleagues combined this value with their measurements of UB313’s radiation to determine its reflectivity and size.
Assuming they’re about the same density (they’re not, but bear with me), that puts Xena at about 2.3 times as massive as Pluto and one-75th as massive as our own blue rock. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) hasn’t thought up a proper name yet, so if you have any ideas you can either leave them here or drop them a line yourself.
He Only Looks Small Because He’s A Long Ways OffPost + Comments (44)
by Tim F| 32 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
As I mentioned in an earlier post, some scientific projects have a certain amount of notoriety cued up and waiting for whomever gets to finish line X first. A good example is prion proteins, the cause of a particularly baffling set of illensses that include mad cow and Creutzfelt-Jakob diseases. Unlike any other disease that we know about, prion diseases don’t pass from person to person via a virus or a bacteria or any other sort of living agent but instead constitute a single misfolded protein. The problem is that the single protein can induce other proteins to misfold, which then set off a chain reaction that leaves the brain spongy and riddled with insoluble protein aggregates.
After years of fierce controversy we’ve gained a relatively good idea of how the prion protein (PRP) changes from its innocuous form to the misfolded, disease state. As a result we have a few good pointers for staying healthy. First, don’t eat people. The first known prion disease, kuru, mystified anthropologists who found no infectious reason for the fatal wasting disease afflicting members of a New Guinea tribe of cannibals. As it turns out the acid environment of our stomach is a great place for PRP to slip out of its usual conformation and into the killer state. Similarly, don’t feed cow tissue to cows. The same rule that applies to us applies to them. Finally, you can get it from cows but only if they already have the misfolded protein, so avoid brain tissue of questionable provenance.
The most important thing that we didn’t know, until now, is what exactly PRP does when it isn’t killing people (1).
Harvey Lodish at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his co-workers stumbled on one answer when studying mouse stem cells that divide to generate new blood cells. They found that many of these stem cells have prion proteins stuck all over their surfaces.
The team shows that these prions help stem cells from the bone marrow to manufacture more and more new blood cells.
…Stem cells that lacked the prion protein wore out, and were unable to manufacture new cells, long before those that carried working prions. “It’s a first clue to what these proteins might do,” Lodish says, who reports the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(2).
In a nutshell, we need the prion protein in order to keep our stem cells alive. Some kinds of work can be pretty hard to present to a mixed audience in a way that makes sense and conveys why it’s interesting; these guys have it made. In the global race for stem cell technology score one for America.
(1) link (subscription wall)
(2) Read more here.
***
Treat this as an open science thread. Yes, that includes manimals.
by John Cole| 19 Comments
This post is in: Media
QuietAgent.Com, a firm I had never heard of before, has found a brilliant way to get some free media during the Superbowl week-end. Their idea? Create an ad so offensive the networks reject it, and then spread the word that your ad was rejected.
In their ad, they used an image of President Bush and his voice, and then put in a series of things in the background that would make sure the ad was rejected, such as a picture of infected toes, a dog taking a crap, etc. And, of course, ABC rejected it (.pdf warning).
They are banking that this ‘controversy’ will then get picked up by the networks (they are marketing it as “The Super Bowl Commercial you’re not allowed to see”), and much like the Swift Vet ads, get played (blacked out, of course) or discussed over and over. Great idea, and if it works and this does get picked up by the networks and the cable news folks, everyone in the marketing department at Quiet Agent deserves a raise.
by John Cole| 53 Comments
This post is in: Politics
Red State is following the election:
Update [2006-2-2 13:30:52 by krempasky]: Heh. They had more ballots cast then members in the room. Hilarity ensues.
Update [2006-2-2 13:40:40 by Augustine]: First ballot: Shadegg took roughly 40 on the first ballot, Blunt 110, Boehner 75.
Insert your own jokes.
*** Update ***
Shadegg has dropped out, which means that Boehner is going to win this.
*** Update #2 ***
It is official. Boehner is the new majority leader.
Democrats are going to have a field day with this.
by John Cole| 19 Comments
This post is in: Military
I tend to disagree with assertions that the military is ‘broken,’ but there is more than just anecdotal evidence that the military is under a great deal of strain due to the heavy deployments overseas. Via Gary Farber, here is some more:
Struggling to retain enough officers to lead its forces, the Army has begun to dramatically increase the number of soldiers it promotes, raising fears within the service that wartime strains are diluting the quality of the officer corps.
Last year, the Army promoted 97% of all eligible captains to the rank of major, Pentagon data show. That was up from a historical average of 70% to 80%.
Traditionally, the Army has used the step to major as a winnowing point to push lower-performing soldiers out of the military.
The service also promoted 86% of eligible majors to the rank of lieutenant colonel in 2005, up from the historical average of 65% to 75%.
The higher rates of promotion are part of efforts to fill new slots created by an Army reorganization and to compensate for officers who are resigning from the service, many after multiple rotations to Iraq.
The promotion rates “are much higher than they have been in the past because we need more officers than we did before,” said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman.
That is an exceedingly high rate, and I worry about the quality control.