Oh, wonderful:

A preliminary study from a group of researchers in Quebec suggest that working on a computer may have an additional impact on our waistlines: taxing mental effort appears to cause people to eat significantly more food, even though it doesn't burn many more calories than sitting around and relaxing.

On Monday, I will be attending a class at OU on brain development and attachment. Taught by a child psychologist I greatly admire. Who studied under Anna Freud ( you know Sigmund Freud, the father of psychology? Yeah, his daughter) and with Mary Ainsworth.

And I get to go to the class for free (!), just because I have a cool job with cool people that thought I might find it interesting. If only they knew. They invited me and I walked away feeling like I just won the lotto.

I can't tell if I am excited because I get to go back to class or because of the content of the class itself.  I know, I know, NERD.

Dr. Cox talks about his work and the importance of the Large Hadron Collider in an accessible way. He's been called a rock-star physicist and you can see why in this video from TEDTalks:

So about three more new categories to sort out all my thoughts...

Politics

Philosophy

Science - will usually be a summary and a link to an article.

...and the newest Lyrics. Which will contain original song lyrics.

With their stony silence in the midst of Russia’s brutal attack against the Republic of Georgia, the organizations that spearhead the contemporary “peace” movement have spoken volumes about the true nature of their core motives. They are united, above all else, by their unwavering conviction that a racist, imperialist United States is the chief wellspring of evil on earth—guilty of unspeakable and unrivaled atrocities, past and present, foreign and domestic.

Dr. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, posted a video from NVIDIA's NVISION show where the Mythbusters made a computer that could paint a rough duplicate of the Mona Lisa in .8 seconds with a large series of paint ball guns. This is nothing short of spectacular.

Supposedly, this is all part of a demonstration on how GPUs are better than CPUs because they can do more faster. Something about a parallel processor, which I guess means that its running more operations on different "stations" or in different systems at once towards a single project. I'm assuming by the demonstration, where a CPU flies, a GPU teleports.

Anyway, here is the video:

Crossposted at DailyKos

Many issues are confronting Sarah Palin since John McCain haphazardly picked her for his running mate.  The media has been filled with reports of her being under investigation, having misrepresented her support for the "bridge to nowhere", hiring a lobbyist to secure earmarks while mayor of her village and Governor of Alaska, this has dominated mainstream media coverage since she was chosen.  However except for a few generalities, relatively little has been discussed regarding her extremist views on social issues.  Her stances on abortion, gay rights, and climate change have barely filtered through and it’s obvious that this is exactly how the McCain Campaign wants it.

For the first time in almost a century, an entire month has passed without a single sunspot being visible on the sun's surface. The event is significant because sunspots are caused by solar magnetic activity, and solar magnetic activity is increasingly believed by climatologists to be one of the primary factors influencing the earth's climate. It is not uncommon to see 100 or more sunspots in a single month, but during the first seven months of 2008, the sun averaged only three spots, followed by the total disappearance of spots last month.

A giant particle collider will start work on this coming Wednesday, smashing subatomic particles to create a "mini" big-bang.

"Everyone is looking at the start up of the Large Hedron Collider (HRC) but Cern (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) has many other  research programmes with important uses, said Paul Collier, who runs the main control room at Cern.

The leading scientist (well...no: actually "columnist") Armando Iannucci, comments:

"Anyway, this Large Hadron Collider will create a mini-Big Bang and some people are very, very worried there's a chance that it may also create a small black hole that will start eating Planet Earth inside out pretty sudenly.

If you listen carefully you can hear a distant rumble from over the horizon. It's the sound of sociologists advancing slowly towards our online data trail, about to release the mother of all data analysis campaigns that will rain from the internet like a storm from above. New York Times had a fascinating about online social networking tools, discussing how different forms of social relationships are being formed through the use of 'broadcast to subscriber' tools like Twitter and Facebook.

These articles pop up quite frequently, discussing how young people live in a 'post-privacy' world, or how our personal lives become increasingly public to our friends and acquaintances, but they rarely mention the ways in which these social networks can be used to reveal and exploit the dynamics of social power.

Sociology gets a bad rap in science as being 'wooly' or 'vague', but it's often not to do with the methods its uses, but with the way of gathering data.