Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor

A review of one of my favorite Dr. Who episodes.

The acting, cinematography, set design and effects make this a great episode. Think you need BBC America to see it now or Netflix to see it soon.
Well worht the time to watch.

Tim Hawkins- Old Rock Star Songs

Beer microbes live 553 days outside ISS

Microbes from a place called Beer. Was A town called Beer a song from, The Jam?

Bacterial spores have been known to endure several years in orbit but this is the longest any cells of cyanobacteria, or photosynthesising microbes, have been seen to survive in space.

This type of research also plays into the popular theory that micro-organisms can somehow be transported between the planets in rocks - in meteorites - to seed life where it does not yet exist.

Rocks from the Earth have been blasted all the way to Mars and the other way as well and the idea that comets or space debris from other solar systems could have been a seed for life here is interesting. Some meteorites are older then our solar system formation.

This discovery could have implications on future colonization, exploration of the Moon and Mars. There are many scientific and cultural reasons for humans to colonize the Moon and Mars. some argue we will soon come into another age of exploration and in the coming decades we will spread out to the planets.

Travelling to Another Place, a beach sculpture

Stavanger, Norway hosted Another Place when I lived there. Meant to keep on traveling the sculptures are staying at Crosby Beach in the UK for a while longer.

It is a great experience to see, so please go see Another Place if you are traveling to other places near by Crosby Beach. A hundred cast iron human figures all standing and looking out to sea is something great to see. I Norway they were at Sola Airport's beach and made flying in or out more fun.

From
Antony Gormley decided to pursue art after studying anthropology and nearly becoming a Buddhist monk while travelling in India. The human body, his own in particular, has been his subject in sculpture that explores humanity, space and community

Another Place picks up related themes. It was first staged in 1997 at Cuxhaven, Germany, which was one of the major ports for emigration to America in the middle of the last century. "And in one sense it takes on utopia," he says - "the human need to imagine another life in another place and the founding of a better life on better principles. But in today's scientific, rational and globalised world we know there is no better place. In some way we have to deal with the here and now and so in a way the work measures the distance between the shore and the horizon through repeated human forms. The persistence of the human form in art is an attempt to deal with that question. Sculpture may now have come down from its plinth and where it belongs is perhaps not very clear. And I've tried to deal with that in a number of ways because I ultimately want to deal with the question of where we fit in the scheme of things."

I scream, you scream, we all scream

for ice cream

How to make your own in a few hours

Listening to radio on line to find new music

A station to follow and listen to for interesting music

Streaming on line, play lists, information on bands they follow.

Web traffic changes over 20 years

Great graphic and article on user trends

Over half the traffic is now video with peer to peer and the web making up most of the rest of the traffic.

Apollo 7 astronaut. on what is science and what is not

Climate change alarmists ignore scientific methods

Individuals should look at the evidence/data, and then judge for themselves whether the evidence supports the alarmists' hypothesis. I have, and it does not.

Human-caused global warming is simply not a threat to be concerned about. It is nature, not human activity, that rules the climate. Humans have adjusted to temperature changes for at least 100,000 years, and they will certainly do so in the future.

Cheap easy brown bag popcorn

Yum !
Gourmet popcorn on the cheap

early-human using tools 3.4 million years ago.

Early humans used tools much earlier than we used to think

Remaking American cities, economic geography

Serious discussion on economy and geography at Reason.com

From 1870's ubranisation peaked in 1920s, post World War 2 creation and movement to suburbia.

1st reset urbanization
2nd reset Metropolitan-ism with the city and it's expansion into suburbia
could the 3rd rest be the creation of more mega regions, a grouping of metropolotin areas like the Boston, New York and Washington DC area.

May depend on how government approaches infrastructure, i.e. the interstate highways and bypass, ring roads, primed the move to suburbs.

He is for increasing speed of travel. Making connections to hub cities.

In the 40s people could travel to and from Chicago for day shopping from 100s of miles away, so I am not sure this prediction will pan out. We already had that in many parts of America and it only stayed that way in the dense east coast corridor.
The Bay area and chcicago have limited train commutting cultures.

Telecommuting and decentralization seem more likely to me. And that will reduce congestion on the current roads.

Special exceptions due to tourism may make LA, Las Vegas, and Orlando move to a model where most of the workers would commute in trains.

The Economist remaps Europe:

Reasonible conclusions based on the premise.



Found this at Reason,com Blog

Government dietary advice often proves disastrous.

More and more, the history of dietary guidelines that our public-health authorities promulgate resembles the Woody Allen comedy Sleeper, in which the main character, awaking from a centuries-long slumber, learns that every food we once thought bad for us is actually good, starting with steak and chocolate.

Egg on Their Faces

According to Scientific American, growing research into carbohydrate-based diets has demonstrated that the medical establishment may have harmed Americans by steering them toward carbs.