Anne Wojcicki, wife of google co-founder Sergey Brin, has been getting some publicity recently for her work as co-founder of 23andMe, a silicon valley startup that will sequence 500,000 of the 3 billion single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that make up the human genome for the price of $1000 and your spit. The idea is to…
I have a problem with bullets in animals that will be eaten, and it’s not the anti-hunter argument you might expect. It’s a selfish problem. I imagine the bullet introducing toxins into the body upon piercing the skin. Hot metal shards, oil residues, powders from the gun barrel etc. and my fear applies to more…
I wonder if people who regularly donate blood are less likely to die from massive blood loss in an accident because their bodies are accustomed to 1. fabricating blood in response pint sized blood loss and 2. functioning with a lower than desirable volume of blood for brief periods. Of course, no one can survive…
Last night I had a nightmare that I had homework assignments due in a few hours and instead of working on them I was getting drunk at a bar. It was a nightmare in two senses. First, academically it’s bad decision making, and second, I don’t want to dream about school while I’m on break….
On certain instruments, the time between the musician’s action to play a note and when that note is heard isn’t negligible. For example, when I press a piano key, there’s some milliseconds between when my finger first touches the ivory and when the hammer strikes the string. Does the brain compensate for this delay when…
Similes are like other things….ahahahaa! So something has struck me about comics. It’s happened recently with two, Shoe and Doonesbury, shown below. The width of each frame in a strip is limited, so if a character is watching tv, they must be drawn in close proximity to the screen. The artist could choose to take…
1. Why does waiting a few days to check email result in a confidence that when it is checked, there will be something good to read? Basic odds, I guess. More junk but also higher likelihood of receiving something of interest. It’s a curious, sad, and funny phenomena. 2. Why, when looking at a digital…
You know how there could be a circumstance where someone rides the city bus on a daily basis to their house and they live 3 blocks south of the closest bus stop? Well, let’s say the bus travels in a northerly direction, so it passes their house before it can let them off. Wouldn’t it…
What’s up with toothbrush bristles dyed blue? The so-called “indicator”? “Hello, toothbrush strategic management personnel? I’m quite capable of knowing when I need a new toothbrush without relying on an indicator fading in color.” They must be getting a payoff from someone in order to offset the increased production costs associated with an extra “blue-dye”…
You know your classes are tougher when you’re allowed to use notes, textbook, graded homework, basically ANYTHING, during the exams.
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