Geb’s World

This video shows the sky-blue ancient sea ice being revealed as an ice shelf 5 times the size of Manhattan collapses into the sea, caused by the 3 degree rise in average temperatures in the Antarctic. Beautiful stuff, but sad when you think about the dramatic climate changes this portends.

The New York Times reports that rich people live longer, on average, than poor people (79.2 versus 74.7 years). Research suggests the following reasons:

• Doctors can detect and treat many forms of cancer and heart disease because of advances in medical science and technology. People who are affluent and better educated are more likely to take advantage of these discoveries.
• Smoking has declined more rapidly among people with greater education and income.
• Lower-income people are more likely to live in unsafe neighborhoods, to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior and to eat unhealthy food.
• Lower-income people are less likely to have health insurance, so they are less likely to receive checkups, screenings, diagnostic tests, prescription drugs and other types of care.

The wealthy in the US do just a touch better than the average life expectancy in France and Greece (78.8 and 78.4, respectively) and about equal to Iceland (79.4), while the poor are in the range of South Korea and Kuwait (74.4 and 74.5, respectively) [source, 2000 data]. Long-lived countries are led by Japan and Andorra (80.7 and 83.5 years, respectively). Short-lived countries are led by Mozambique and Zambia (37.5 and 37.2 years, respectively).

That just doesn’t seem fair.

I am impressed by the level of seriousness and decorum our representatives are able to bring to important matters of war oversight while they eat chips (funneling crumbs from the bag into their mouths) and slurp their sodas.

A great victory for pastafarians everywhere.

“May you be touched by his noodly appendage.” Ramen.

A google article today talks about how you can do a more efficient job search by subscribing to feeds from Craigslist, for example.  That way you can respond quickly to new opportunities.  Sounds like a great tool for graduating students!

The article also mentions some other helpful RSS feeds, like for the weather and investments, but the job search struck me as particularly helpful.

Jerry makes a good argument about the danger of teaching programming superficially with no reference to pointers and memory.  This will be the first year in which EPS II skips any coverage of pointers, in an effort to make the course easier to handle.

The trouble, I think, is that we are trying to do too much in the first programming course, not that memory should not be covered.  We also need to keep in mind that students are not going to become professional programmers on the basis of this single course. This course marks the beginning of their adventure, not the end.

The originally cited article (STSC CrossTalk – Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? – Jan 2008 ) refers to computer science education, which I think is a higher standard than the education of all engineers who use computers as one of their tools.

However, this is the first year that we are thinking of removing pointers.  The hope is that we will be able to cover algorithm design and implementation more thoroughly without losing the students at that critical juncture when they have all the basic pieces.  The approach may backfire, but it is certainly worth taking a look.

Apparently a new drug funded by DARPA removes the cognitive impairment effects in sleep-deprived monkeys.  After being kept awake for 36 hours, the monkeys sniffed a little hormone (orexin A) and their performance on cognitive tests match well-rested monkeys.  I wonder if this will turn out to be the wonder drug abused at universities.  In the meantime, it will be of great benefit for all the people with sleep disorders or people who need to stay alert for long periods (esp. pilots and soldiers).  I imagine that until they test this on people, it will be difficult to know if there are other side effects.

The U. of Iowa website now claims that my friend Cliff Missen is a remarkable person.  An I thought he was just special (ed).

Another potential robocamp project

also from Make.