Four nuclear reactors in Japan, Israel and Scotland were forced to shutdown due to infiltration of enormous swarms of jellyfish, which clogged the plant’s cooling system.
Such massive invasions of the jellyfish species have raised speculations and scientists are trying to figure out the reason behind such unusual growing trends.
Recent studies have found out that jellyfish blooming occurs mostly during the summer and spring months. This may partly explain why the three recent power plant incidents happened in close succession. The conditions brought on by climate change may also be creating more jellyfish blooms than there used to be.
Graham said there have been dozens of cases of jellyfish causing partial or complete shutdowns of coastal power plants in the past few decades, as well as shutdowns of desalination plants. Steve Haddock of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute said a power plant in Australia was shut down by jellyfish as long ago as 1937. Such events aren’t surprising; all these plants draw water out of the ocean, and they are already fitted with filtration devices called flumes that remove jellyfish and other debris.
“Only when you have a huge influx of jellies do they overwhelm the flumes,” Graham told Life’s Little Mysteries. This happens when a jellyfish bloom — a huge swarm of adult specimens brought together by ocean currents — flows into a power plant’s filtration system.
Tom Waits (introducing Muriel, London, 1981): “This is a song about an American television personality named Ernie Kovacs who was very popular in the late 50’s. He had his own show and he had a beautiful wife, Edie Adams, (here in a high pitched goofy voice he sings): “And you may ask yourself, how did you get that beautiful wife? How did you get that beautiful car?” Ernie was very fond of Edie, they were very close for many years. They went to a party in Beverley Hills one night. Edie took the Rolls and Ernie took the Corvair. That’s just the way they had things worked out, and on Ernie’s way home, he’d had a few cocktails, and he wrapped himself around a telephone pole there on Santa Monica and La Cienega, he’s history now. Edie used to do advertisements for Muriel Cigars, it’s a real cheap 10 cent cigar in the States and so this is about a guy in the lounge who’s smoking a cigar and remembering - remember with me now.”
(…)
Larry Goldstein (about I never Talk to Strangers, 1978): “One of the few people with whom he can work is Bette Midler. “I met her, now let me see, a couple of years ago at the bottom Line (a nightclub) in New York,” he said, “and we got along famously. I admire her a great deal. And you know…I’ll kick anybody’s ass who knocks her. I wrote a couple of tunes for her.” (Shiver Me Timbers among them.) The two stayed close friends and then one day Bette dropped by the studio during the recording of Foreign Affairs just to say hello. The topic of duets arose, and she asked Waits to try and write one for them. So Tom went home and went to work and came back the next day with a brand new song, to be recorded that day, I Never Talk To Strangers, which has become the most popular song on the album. When I asked him about the possibility of more collaboration between the two, Waits was intentionally vague and mysterious. “We might work something out,” he said.
In 1980 this song prompted Francis Ford Coppola to contact Waits on working together on the soundtrack for One From The Heart.
Tom Waits (1981): “When I was in New York back in April of 1980, Francis was there auditioning people he wanted to be involved with the film. Somebody had sent him my records and Francis liked the song I Never Talk to Strangers, a duet I’d done with Bette Midler. He liked the relationship between the singers, a conversation between a guy and a girl in a bar. That was the impetus for him contacting me and asking me if I was interested in writing music for his film.”
It is well recognized that there are consistent differences in the psychological characteristics of boys and girls; for example, boys engage in more ‘rough and tumble’ play than girls do.
Studies also show that children who become gay or lesbian adults differ in such traits from those who become heterosexual – so-called gender nonconformity. Research which follows these children to adulthood shows that between 50 to 80 per cent of gender nonconforming boys become gay, and about one third of such girls become lesbian. (…)
The team followed a group of 4,000 British women who were one of a pair of twins. They were asked questions about their sexual attractions and behavior, and a series of follow up questions about their gender nonconformity. In line with previous research, the team found modest genetic influences on sexual orientation (25 per cent) and childhood gender nonconformity (31 per cent).
A lipogram (from Greek lipagrammatos, “missing letter”) is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided — usually a common vowel.
Writing a lipogram is a trivial task for uncommon letters like Z, J, or X, but it is much more difficult for common letters like E, T or A. Writing this way, the author must omit many ordinary words.
Perec is noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter “e.”
It has been translated into English under the title A Void (1994).
The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Both of Georges Perec’s parents perished in World War II. In French, the phrase “sans e” (”without e”) sounds like “sans eux” (”without them”).
I stand at the window and see a house, trees, sky.
Theoretically I might say there were 327 brightnesses and nuances of color. Do I have 327? No. I have sky, house, and trees. It is impossible to achieve 327 as such. And yet even though such droll calculation were possible and implied, say, for the house 120, the trees 90, the sky 117 — I should at least have this arrangement and division of the total, and not, say, 127 and 100 and 100; or 150 and 177. (…)
Or, I hear a melody (17 tones) with its accompaniment (32 tones). I hear the melody and accompaniment, not simply 49 and certainly not 20 plus 29. (…)
When we are presented with a number of stimuli we do not as a rule experience “a number” of individual things, this one and that and that. Instead larger wholes separated from and related to one another are given in experience; their arrangement and division are concrete and definite.
Do such arrangements and divisions follow definite principles?
What’s the tradeoff between people using their experience (people using the knowledge they’ve gained, and the expertise that they’ve developed), versus being able to just follow steps and procedures?
We know from the literature that people sometimes make mistakes. A lot of organizations are worried about mistakes, and try to cut down on errors by introducing checklists, introducing procedures, and those are extremely valuable. I don’t want to fly in an airplane with pilots who have forgot their checklists. (…)
How do people make the tradeoffs when they start to become experts? And does it have to be one or the other? Do people either have to just follow procedures, or do they have to abandon all procedures and use their knowledge and their intuition?
This gets us into the work on system one and system two thinking.
System one is really about intuition, people using the expertise and the experience they’ve gained. System two is a way of monitoring things, and we need both of those, and we need to blend them.
Amazon.com made waves in March when it announced Cloud Player, a new “cloud music” service that allows users to upload their music collections for personal use. It did so without a license agreement, and the major music labels were not amused. Sony Music said it was keeping its “legal options open” as it pressured Amazon to pay up.
In the following weeks, two more companies announced music services of their own. Google, which has long had a frosty relationship with the labels, followed Amazon’s lead; Google Music Beta was announced without the Big Four on board. But Apple has been negotiating licenses so it can operate iCloud with the labels’ blessing.
The different strategies pursued by these firms presents a puzzle. Either Apple wasted millions of dollars on licenses it doesn’t need, or Amazon and Google are vulnerable to massive copyright lawsuits. All three are sophisticated firms that employ a small army of lawyers, so it’s a bit surprising that they reached such divergent assessments of what the law requires.
Why does music elevate your mood, move you to tears or make you dance? It’s a mystery to most of us, but not so much to evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi.
My research suggests that when we listen to music without any visual component, our auditory system—or at least the lower-level auditory areas—”thinks” it is the sounds of a human moving in our midst, doing some sort of behavior, perhaps an emotionally expressive behavior.
The auditory system “thinks” this because music has been “designed” by cultural evolution to sound like people moving about. That is, over time, humans figured out how to better and better make sounds that mimicked (and often exaggerated) the fundamental kinds of sounds humans make when we move.
I lay out more than 40 respects in which music sounds like people doing stuff. At the core of “moving people” is the walk. The human gait has unique characteristics, from its regularly repeating step (the beat) to the sounds of other parts of the body during the gait that are in time with the step (notes, more generally).
I have been reading Curzio Malaparte’s Technique of the Coup d’état this weekend. It’s a fascinating document – the basic argument is that the October Revolution represented an exportable, universally applicable technology for taking control of the state, quite independent of ideological motivation or broader strategic situation. (…)
So, what’s this open-source putsch kit consist of? Basically you need a small force of determined rebels. Small is important – you want quality not quantity as secrecy, unanimity, and common understanding good enough to permit independent action are required. You want as much chaos as possible in advance of the coup, although not so much that everything’s shut. And then you occupy key infrastructures and command-and-control targets. Don’t, whatever you do, go after ministries or similar grand institutional buildings – get the stuff that would really cause trouble if it blew up.
As a shy person, I’ve believed for most of my life that being among new people required an elaborate social disguise, one that would allow me to feel both present and absent, noticed and unnoticed. I’d yearn for some sort of social recognition without the bother of having to be recognized, without that oppressive pressure to live up to anything that might get me attention in the first place. So I’d find myself executing oblique tactics — being stingy and stealthy with eye contact; wearing a mask of deep concentration; staring at an underappreciated object in the room, like a light fixture or molding — in hopes of discouraging people from engaging me in actual conversation while still conveying the impression that I might be interesting to talk to.
The problem with polite conversation, I thought, was that it required the orderly recitation of platitudes before one can say anything interesting, let alone something as original and insightful as I wanted to believe myself to be. I couldn’t bear it. I had an irrational expectation that people should already know what I was about and come to me with suitable topics to draw me out.
{ George Widener, for future robots, orientation map of events, for the year 4421| Elenore Weber of Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York defined Widener, one of the most widely collected living outsider artists, as “a high-functioning savant” and a “lightning calculator.” His bio reads: “Like some people with aspergers, he is gifted in dates, numbers, and drawing. In his memory, he has several thousand historical dates, thousands of calendars, and more than a thousand census statistics.” | Salon }
So what is financial engineering? In a logically consistent world, financial engineering should be layered above a solid base of financial science. Financial engineering would be the study of how to create functional financial devices – convertible bonds, warrants, synthetic CDOs, etc. – that perform in desired ways, not just at expiration, but throughout their lifetime. That’s what Black-Scholes does – it tells you, under certain assumptions, how to engineer a perfect option from stock and bonds.
But what exactly is financial science?
Canonical financial engineering or quantitative finance rests upon the science of Brownian motion and other idealizations that, while they capture some of the essential features of uncertainty, are not finally very accurate descriptions of the characteristic behavior of financial objects. (…) Markets are filled with anomalies that disagree with standard theories. Stock evolution, to take just one of many examples, isn’t Brownian. We don’t really know what describes its motion. Maybe we never will. And when we try to model stochastic volatility, it’s an order of magnitude vaguer. (…)
If you’re going to work in this field, you have to understand that you’re not doing classical science at all, and that the classical scientific approach doesn’t have the unimpeachable value it has in the hard sciences.
Each of us receives, on average, 60 mutations in our genome from our parents, a new study has revealed — far fewer than previously estimated. (…)
“We had previously estimated that parents would contribute an average of 100-200 mistakes to their child. Our genetic study, the first of its kind, shows that actually much fewer mistakes — or mutations — are made.” It is these mistakes or “mutations” that help us evolve.
The geneticists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who co-led the study with scientists from Montreal and Boston, also found that the percentage of mutations from each parent varies in every person.
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.
Drugs are another means toward this end. Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous—though, perversely, these sets only partially intersect. There are drugs of extraordinary power and utility, like psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well-tolerated, and yet one can still be sent to prison for their use—while drugs like tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libitum in almost every society on earth. There are other points on this continuum—3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA or “Ecstasy”) has remarkable therapeutic potential, but it is also susceptible to abuse, and it appears to be neurotoxic.
At Çatalhöyük in Turkey, it appears that people did not live in families. Instead, the society seems to have been organised completely differently.
Discovered in 1958, Çatalhöyük’s many buildings are built so close together that people had to get in through the roof. Its inhabitants farmed crops and domesticated animals, and experimented with painting and sculpture.
They also buried their dead beneath the floors of the houses, suggesting that people were buried where they lived. So Marin Pilloud of the Central Identification Laboratory in Hickam, Hawaii, realised she could work out who lived together. (…)
We are used to the idea that living in close contact with our relatives helps to promote our own genetic inheritance and keep hold of our money and possessions over the generations. So why should Stone Age populations be different?
Pilloud thinks Çatalhöyük developed its odd social structure as the people began settling down and farming, rather than hunting and gathering. “It makes a lot of sense to shift to a community-centred society with the adoption of agriculture,” she says. People living in close quarters all year round and working together to produce food needed to create a strong community, rather than only cooperating with relatives.
Last year, a team of NASA-funded scientists claimed to have found bacteria that could use arsenic to build their DNA, making them unlike any form of life known on Earth. That didn’t go over so well. One unfortunate side-effect of the hullabaloo over arsenic life was that people were distracted from all the other research that’s going on these days into weird biochemistry. Derek Lowe, a pharmaceutical chemist who writes the excellent blog In the Pipeline, draws our attention today to one such experiment, in which E. coli is evolving into a chlorine-based form of life.
Scientists have been contorting E. coli in all sorts of ways for years now to figure out what the limits of life are. Some researchers have rewritten its genetic code, for example, so that its DNA can encode proteins that include amino acids that are not used by any known organism.
Others have been tinkering with the DNA itself. In all living things, DNA is naturally composed of four compounds, adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. Thymine is a ring of carbon and nitrogen atoms, with oxygen and hydrogens atoms dangling off the sides. Since the 1970s, some scientists have tried to swap thymine for other molecules. This compound is called 5-chlorouracil, the “chloro-” referring to the chlorine marked here in red. No natural DNA contains chlorine.
How Flawed is the Nation’s Most Watched Economic Indicator
Last October, when the government released its monthly tally of how many people had jobs, there was a collective groan. The September report, which came out the first Friday in October, said the number of employed people in the U.S. had dropped by 95,000, worse than the 57,000 job drop the month before. After looking like we had finally hit an economic rebound, the jobs market was again slipping back again perhaps toward the dreaded double-dip recession. Or was it?
A month later the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks and releases the employment numbers for the government, revised its jobs count for September. In fact, the economy, it turned out, had lost only 41,000 jobs that month. Is that right? Actually no. A month later, the BLS revised the number again. The final tally: In September, the number of people working in America fell by just 24,000. So the economy was improving? Not quite. Remember that month before figure of 57,000 jobs lost. Yeah, well, that was wrong, too, off by nearly all of the drop, or 56,000 jobs.
