New element Discovery: Cs

A new Trace Element was discovered today - Common Sense (Cs) has been part of the human psyche and mythology throughout history, but proof of it's existence has long been debated. However, thanks to the work of scientists and particle acceleration based elctron spectroscopy, scientists have been able to find the rare element.

Unlike many other elements, Cs cannot exist beyond a single ppm of an object. The scientific team that made the historic discovery, Wundaer, Aldoe & Herzfott, discovered that they were able to determine the measure of the deficiency of Cs by bombarding an object with a short lived synthetic element Ss (affectionately called "the Stupids") and determining the uptake amount.

This measurement is referred to as the number of WAHs.

As one WAH is equivalent to one part per billion, it has created the common misconception of the absence of the Cs element.

A common Human being, for example, is said to have a Cs deficiency of between 3 to 12 WAHs.

More research is planned and government grants are being sought to determine public benefits to the research.

[Reposted from xntrek]

TED Talk : What we learned from 5 million books

An extremely entertaining talk by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel who show us how playing with Google Labs' NGram Viewer is an addictive tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

[Reposted from xntrek]

Eugenics influenced Melbourne ...

Eugenics was the political correctness of it's times in the 1920s and 30s before it came out of style with WW2 and the holocaust. It still helped shape the socioecopolitical environment though ...

Victoria's first director of education, Frank Tate, a eugenicist, adopted many of [Richard] Berry's ideas. Tate supported a multi-streamed system of secondary education in which students at the age of 12 would be funnelled into vocational or academic schools.

In Victoria, a system of technical schools was established mainly in the northern and western suburbs in the 1920s. This was because Tate believed that the working class was genetically fit for a vocational education, but not an academic one. As his friend Berry said, ''You can't put a brain where there isn't one.''

The Age : A theory out of the darkness

[Reposted from xntrek]

RIP BISCUIT

See the full gallery on Posterous

09.10.2000 - 07.09.2011

In our hearts and in our arms from the beginning to the very end.

He was loved and he will forever be missed though never absent from our hearts or thoughts.

[Reposted from xntrek]

Furry shaped heart strings ...

Biscuit, our little eleven year old Persian is very sick. He was very lethargic, hadn't eaten or drunk anything in a few days and has lost over 700grams. When we saw the the vet today at 5pm, he tells us that he thinks it's likely kidney failure or something else just as serious that has a rapid onset and that Biscuit has a 50/50 chance of not surviving the next few days ...

I already was not coping with that news too well.

Then over the course of this evening - he got worse. He kept losing strength until he couldn't walk and then he started twitching ... a sign of possible convulsions and the horrors that such a condition brings. So we took him down to the Emergency Animal Vet Hospital where he is checked in and spending the night while they drip fluids into him and run further blood tests.

We are hoping to give him a fighting chance, and we are hoping he has what it takes to pick up ... but I have to prepare myself that he isn't coming out of this.

I don't want to put him down, but I don't want him to suffer either. 

Knowing where that line rests is just as painful as seeing him deteriorate so quickly in just a few days.

 

[Reposted from xntrek]