Ramblings & ephemera
From Bruce Schneier’s “The Economics of Spam” (Crypto-Gram: 15 November 2008):
Researchers infiltrated the Storm worm and monitored its doings.
“After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%. Of these, all but one were for male-enhancement products and the average purchase price was close [...]
Posted on June 27th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, security | No Comments »
From Milton Glaser’s “Ten Things I Have Learned” (Milton Glaser: 22 November 2001):
… the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have [...]
Posted on May 22nd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, politics | No Comments »
From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
But if the direct conflict between scientific knowledge and specific religious beliefs has not been so important in itself, there are at least four sources of tension between science and religion that have been important.
The first source of tension arises from the [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, religion, science | No Comments »
From Allen Abel And Madeleine Czigler’s “Tangerine trees and marmalade skies” (National Post: 24 June 2008):
… it was [marketing sage & Chicago scientist Louis Cheskin] who turned Marlboro cigarettes from a woman’s brand — originally red-tipped to hide lipstick smears — into the cowboy-themed cancer sticks of universal renown.
Related posts
What in our brains invest memories [...]
Posted on March 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, science | No Comments »
From David Pogue’s “TED’s Greatest Hits” (The New York Times: 10 February 2009):
Kamal Meattle reported the results of his efforts to fill an office building with plants, in an effort to reduce headache, asthma, and other productivity-sapping aliments in thickly polluted India. After researching NASA documents, he concluded that a set of three particular common, [...]
Posted on March 4th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: cool stuff, science | No Comments »
From Nicholas Carr’s “Remembering to forget” (Rough Type: 22 October 2008):
Slowly but surely, scientists are getting closer to developing a drug that will allow people to eliminate unpleasant memories. The new issue of Neuron features a report from a group of Chinese scientists who were able to use a chemical – the protein alpha-CaM kinase [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, politics, science, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Things He Carried” (The Atlantic: November 2008):
Because the TSA’s security regimen seems to be mainly thing-based—most of its 44,500 airport officers are assigned to truffle through carry-on bags for things like guns, bombs, three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers, Snapple, and so on—I focused my efforts on bringing bad [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Stephen J. Dubner’s interview with Bruce Schneier in “Bruce Schneier Blazes Through Your Questions” (The New York Times: 4 December 2007):
This is true in many aspects of our society. Here’s what I said in my book, Secrets and Lies (page 389): “As technology becomes more complicated, society’s experts become more specialized. And in almost [...]
Posted on December 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security | No Comments »
From Anna Gosline’s “Death special: How does it feel to die?” (New Scientist: 13 October 2007):
Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grâce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, people [...]
Posted on December 8th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, science, weird | No Comments »
From Carl Zimmer’s “The Return of the Puppet Masters” (Corante: 17 January 2006):
I was investigating the remarkable ability parasites have to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. It’s [...]
Posted on November 24th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science, weird | No Comments »
From Steven Pinker’s “What the F***?” (The New Republic: 9 Octobert 2007):
The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science | No Comments »
From William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 1 (III: 1):
GLOUCESTER:
… such is thy audacious wickedness,
Thy lewd, pestiferous and dissentious pranks,
As very infants prattle of thy pride.
pestiferous: 1. Producing or breeding infectious disease.
2. Infected with or contaminated by an epidemic disease.
Related posts
Talbot describes his son’s valiant death
1 Henry VI: Talbot’s deer metaphor
1 Henry VI: Talbot threatens Bourdeaux [...]
Posted on January 15th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature, word of the day | Comments Off
So a bunch of us are talking at the Central West End Linux User Group meeting. Somehow the topic of surgery during World War I comes up.
Robert: What was really bad was that those guys were operated on without any anaesthetic.
Me: Huh? Doctors had anaesthetic then.
Robert: They did? What?
Me: Ether.
Robert: Huh. How’d they deliver it?
Me: [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: overheard | Comments Off
From Robyn Williams’s “How to Keep Your Brain Young” (The Science Show: 24 September 2005):
Ian Robertson: Seven steps for keeping your brain functioning optimally when you’re older, but not just when you’re older but throughout life are: One, Aerobic fitness – amazing effects on the brain. Mental stimulation, both general mental stimulation and there are [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, science | Comments Off
From Alan Wolfe’s “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern” (The Washington Monthly: July/August 2006):
If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government–indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government–is the [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: politics | Comments Off
From Daniel Engber’s “How Much of Me Is Burned?” (Slate: 11 July 2006):
In the 1950s, doctors developed an easy way to estimate the ratio of the area of a patient’s burns to the total area of his skin. The system works by assigning standard percentages to major body parts. (Most of these happen to [...]
Posted on July 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, science | Comments Off
From James Wolcott’s “Debbie Does Barnes & Noble” (Vanity Fair: 22 August 2005):
In terms of production techniques, two years mark key inflection points in porn. The first was 1982, when X-rated producers abandoned celluloid for videotape. The other pivotal year was 1998, when Viagra was introduced. Performance anxiety, begone!
Related posts
Why do Marlboros have red tips?
When [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, technology | Comments Off
From Carolyn Kleiner’s “The Demon of Andersonville” (Legal Affairs: September/October 2002):
During the last 14 months of the Civil War, nearly 13,000 Union prisoners of war died at the Confederate prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia – more than at Antietam, one of the war’s bloodiest battles, and more than at any of the other hundred or [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | Comments Off
From Emily Bazelon’s “Grave Offense” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
In 1810, there were five medical schools in the United States, in 1860 there were 65, and by 1890 that number had doubled.
Related posts
Why courts don’t use legal-size documents any longer
Why the US toppled Iran’s government
Why the US toppled Guatamala’s democratic government
Why the US toppled Chile’s government
Why [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, science | Comments Off
From Emily Bazelon’s “Grave Offense” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2002):
In December 1882, hundreds of black Philadelphians gathered at the city morgue. They feared that family members whom they had recently buried were, as a reporter put it, “amongst the staring corpses” that lay inside. Six bodies that had been taken from their graves at Lebanon Cemetery, [...]
Posted on May 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, law, science | Comments Off
