Marciepooh

Baby sea turtles don’t really need our help being adorable, but remarkably, scientists have figured out a way to make the tiny shelled reptiles even more mind-numbingly cute: by hypnotizing them.

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Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "The 5 most typed words in Academia" - originally published 2/3/2016 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

So this may be fun for some of you.

Last night, I was looking for a new sweater online, and this picture came up in the search results:

There is so much … wrongness … in this picture, I began to wonder: what’s they guy’s story?

Like, not the model who’s getting paid for the gig — good for him. I mean, the fictional guy who is wearing this … thing.

You get  up to 150 words to tell his story, if you want to do that. Mine is on the other side of the thingy.

The trick was to make a statement without standing out. He needed to blend in, while occasionally drawing someone’s attention. He needed to be vaguely remembered, and that was all.

A new haircut, new shades, a sweet pair of pants that fit just right, carefully-chosen accessories … Blake was ready.

He walked onto the deck at the club, casually avoiding eye contact, purposely walking without purpose. A guy in popped collar Izod lifted his chin at Blake. The arms of a cable-knit sweater made a knot on his chest. The caps on his teeth were beautiful.

Blake returned the silent greeting, and continued past him, making his way to the bar, where the largest cluster of people stood, waiting.

He subvocalized to the advance team, “I am inside the human compound. They do not suspect me.”

The reply resonated in his aural implant: prepare for detonation.

For years, the term “Anthropocene” has been used to informally describe the human era on Earth. But new evidence suggests there’s nothing informal about it. We’re a true force of nature — and there’s good reason to believe we’ve sparked a new and unprecedented geological epoch.

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We lost the Queen of Niskayuna tonight. Emmy had been having some health issues for a while, and while we were in Florida this past weekend she wasn’t eating for the pet-sitter. We tried yet another new version of the new diet food today, with only limited success. And this afternoon, she fell going up the stairs, then again on the deck.

Our regular vet was near closing time, so they recommended going to a different veterinary hospital in the area, where they could do x-rays and ultrasounds as needed. And those revealed a large mass in her abdomen, from tumors in her liver and gall bladder. We might’ve been able to eke out another few weeks, but the only reason would’ve been to maybe have a slightly happier goodbye, and she was just too miserable to put her through that.

I spent a good while at the vet’s sobbing, because she was a great dog, and the best Emmy ever. And now I’m looking back at some very old pictures and remembering a dozen years with Her Majesty. This snowy photo from 2003 has always been one of my favorites:

(Her normal collar was red, but when we first got her, she had a habit of chewing through them, and thus there was a brief stretch when she wore a blue collar, because the pet store didn’t have any red ones that day…)

Because I’m usually the one behind the camera, I don’t have all that many photos of me and Emmy together. This is one of the best, from March of 2008:

I had vaguely meant to do a picture for the photo-a-day project using the camera remote to get the two of us together; now I’m kicking myself for not getting to it soon enough.

Anyway, she was a great dog, and lived to a ripe old age by canine standards. We had twelve fun and eventful years with her, which is at once more than you can expect, and not nearly enough.

And I’m pretty much a wreck right now, so don’t expect much from me for a while.

2002

I've been leading geology field studies trips to lots of places in the American West for 27 years and started to take digital pictures in 2001. I sometimes struggle to find new things to photograph when I visit a place for the 27th time, but in some cases it is not a problem. There are geologic changes that happen on a yearly basis, and with thirteen years of photos, the changes become obvious. This is an update from a post in 2013, and I'll probably continue updating for the foreseeable future.

2004

Highway 25 in the California Coast Ranges connects the town of Hollister with the access road to Pinnacles National Park (formerly Pinnacles National Monument). Along the way the highway crosses the San Andreas fault in a section where the fault creeps an inch or so each year. Most years we've stopped to have a look at the effect the movement has on the pavement. In 2002 and 2004, the damage was obvious.

2008

By 2008 someone had patched the road, and no fault motion was evident.

2009

Little damage was evident in 2009 either. But by 2010 cracks had begun to appear as the fault stressed the pavement.

2010

The fact that the fault creeps in this region is a good thing. It means that stress is not building along the fault surface, but instead is being released gradually. The sections of the fault to the north and south of the creeping section are locked by friction, and are building up the ominous stress that will eventually produce quakes with magnitudes in the range of 7.5 to 8.0. The quakes are coming and we need to be as prepared as possible.

2012

By 2012, the road had been completely repaved, and  yet the shearing was already evident.

2013

It became even more pronounced by 2013 and in 2014. Just by chance, the person working as a scale was the same individual as in 2004. I've got some great people who volunteer and make these trips possible

2014

Today we stopped at the fault crossing again. The fractures are moderately larger. They'll need to start thinking of road repairs before long.

2015

These little changes that happen at a rate visible in human lifetimes add up to huge changes when multiplied by thousands or millions of years. The nearby eroded volcano of Pinnacles National Park has been displaced 195 miles (315 kilometers) in the last 20 million years or so by movement along the San Andreas.
Until next year!

Another company is learning about the fine points of Section 333 of the Communications Act, which prohibits willful interference with any licensed or authorized radio communications. This time, it’s the folks who provided the Baltimore Convention Center’s in-house WiFi service who were caught by the FCC trying to block individual WiFi hotspot users from going online. Meanwhile, Hilton is also being slapped with a proposed fine for its failure to comply with an investigation into its alleged hotspot blocking.

Virginia-based M.C. Dean is a huge contractor for electrical and communications systems, and provides telecom services, including WiFi to the Baltimore Convention Center (BCC), where exhibitors were charged several hundred dollars if they wanted access to the BCC WiFi network.

But some exhibitors get better wireless data pricing through — or have needs that are better met by — the use of WiFi hotspots that connect to cellular data networks.

According to a newly released FCC notice of apparent liability [PDF] the commission received a complaint on Oct. 23, 2014, from a company that offers competing WiFi service, alleging that M.C. Dean’s system was sending out “deauthentication frames” to inhibit hotspot users from maintaining a connection between their hotspots and their other devices, thus preventing them from working properly.

The complainant alleged that M.C. Dean’s actions were identical to those that had earned Marriott a $600,000 fine only weeks earlier.

FCC investigators visited BCC three times in the weeks that followed, first confirming that their independent WiFi hotspots worked outside the convention, but not inside, then confirming M.C. Dean’s use of deauthentication frames to cause these disconnects.

When confronted by inspectors, an M.C. Dean staffer acknowledged the blocking but said that visitors still had access to the BCC’s free WiFi network. But the FCC notes that this access was only available in the public lobbies of the BCC and not on the exhibitor floor, where M.C. Dean charged anywhere from $795 to $1,095 for access.

The company later confirmed that it had, since Oct. 2012, been using deauthentication tech to block non-M.C. Dean WiFi access at the convention center.

While one might shrug off the company’s crass attempt to cash in from convention attendees, the FCC notes that there is evidence that M.C. Dean’s auto-blocking system reached beyond the walls of the BCC, meaning the company was screwing over people — and web-connected buses, cars, and trains — who had nothing to do with the conventions.

M.C. Dean tried to defend the illegal hotspot blocking by saying its intended purpose wasn’t to gouge exhibitors or drive out competition, but to “detect and prevent malicious attacks on the wireless network and improve network security and reliability.” However, the FCC says the company provided no evidence of how blocking WiFi hotspots was going to achieve that desired end.

The company also argued that it didn’t do anything horrible because it had whitelisted a handful of pieces of equipment from the auto-blocking system, but the FCC this is just more proof that the company was deliberately blocking the rest of the users.

Then there’s M.C. Dean’s claim that all was okay because it left unblocked a total of two of the dozens of available WiFi channels. This argument did not win over the FCC, which writes that “M.C. Dean offers no evidence that any device that was blocked by M.C. Dean would be capable of automatically finding the one channel in each band that was left unblocked. Such automatic capability does not appear to be standard among Wi-Fi devices and, if it were, it would still force all such devices to share a single channel that could become highly congested and perhaps unusable.”

Finally, M.C. Dean tried to make the case that its blocking of third-party hotspots constituted allowable “network management,” and was not malicious. Again, the FCC disagreed, saying that the company “sought to cause, and in fact did cause, harmful interference to lawfully operated third-party networks… M.C. Dean knew that its system would cause interference to other Wi-Fi devices – in fact, that was the company’s goal.”

The FCC is now proposing a fine of $718,000 against M.C. Dean.

“Consumers are tired of being taken advantage of by hotels and convention centers that block their personal Wi-Fi connections,” said Travis LeBlanc, Chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau. “This disturbing practice must come to an end. It is patently unlawful for any company to maliciously block FCC-approved Wi-Fi connections.”

In related news, the FCC has slapped Hilton Worldwide with a proposed $25,000 fine for allegedly obstructing the commission’s investigation into claims of WiFi blocking.

Since Nov. 2014, the commission has been trying to investigate complaints that multiple Hilton properties are blocking visitors’ personal WiFi hotspots.

Rather than provide all the information requested by the FCC about all locations involved in the complaints, the hotel company only answered questions about a single Hilton property in Anaheim, CA. Furthermore, notes the FCC [PDF], “Those answers were incomplete and inadequate even for that one property.”

The FCC says it then sent multiple warnings about the inadequacy of Hilton’s response, but has thus far only received “limited information regarding the WiFi blocking systems utilized at a small number of additional Hilton properties and again failed to answer many of the questions.”

Thus, the commission seeks to levy the $25,000 penalty against Hilton for “apparently willfully and repeatedly violating” the FCC order. If the fine isn’t enough to convince Hilton to turn over the requested information, the commission says it is prepared to take further actions against the hotel chain.

“To permit any company to unilaterally redefine the scope of our investigation would undermine the independent search for the truth and the due administration of the law,” explains LeBlanc.

If pumpkin spice, pumpkin spice latte, and caramel apple are the flavors of fall, red velvet is the flavor of Valentine’s Day, and key lime pie and s’mores are the flavor of summer, what is the flavor of winter? Is there one? M&Ms have traditionally sold bags of cherry or mint flavored candies near Christmas, but now they’ve moved on to hot beverages. The flavor for Christmas is… café mocha.

It’s good that we’ve straightened out this mystery. What seasonal and holiday flavors will marketers come up with next? We thought that the holiday flavor phenomenon had peaked after Peeps milk, but apparently not. Personally, I’m holding out for carrot-flavored Easter treats.

SPOTTED ON SHELVES: Milk Chocolate Cafe Mocha M&M’s [The Impulsive Buy]

While we’re sure there are a lot of very experienced, bright and imaginative adults out there designing toys, who knows what a kid wants better than a kid (see: Big)? That’s why IKEA is straying from the traditional, realistic stuffed animal and instead, offering plush toys straight out of the imaginations of a few lucky children.

IKEA’s fundraising efforts this year through its Soft Toys for Education line led it to tap directly into the minds of kids, taking 10 winning entries and turning them into real stuffed animals.

Each toy purchase will donate €1 toward children’s education projects via Unicef and Save the Children.

As one might expect, the winners are pretty much the best thing ever, and will likely make you wish you were six years old again, with a huge, new box of crayons at your disposal. Here are a few more (full list of winners here and their real-life counterparts here), try to contain your squeals of delight:

(h/t AdWeek)

This past weekend, a large portion of an Australian beach suddenly collapsed into the ocean. Initial reports indicated it was a sinkhole, but geologists say it’s more likely to be the result of a unique near-shore landslide.

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Parents who were shocked (shocked!) to find that Welch’s fruit snacks—despite being compressed into the shape of tiny, tiny fruits—were not actually fruit-like at all but something closer to fruity candy, have brought a lawsuit.

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JAY LEO

 

Thanks to Kris S. for the late night nightmares.

*****

Thank you for using our Amazon links to shop! USA, UK, Canada.

The image here of a pancake cooking isn’t particularly interesting in its own right, other than as documentation of our weekend ritual at Chateau Steelypips. Saturday and sunday mornings, Kate sleeps in while the kids watch cartoons and I cook pancakes for them. SteelyKid absolutely drowns hers in maple syrup, then refuses to eat them, while The Pip regularly wolfs down two plain pancakes, eating with his hands:

As I said, this image isn’t especially interesting, but it’s here mostly as a teaser for a different thing, namely this thermal-imaging video of pancakes cooking:

You can see the initial pour, the slow warming up, and then the flip. Because what’s the point of cooking breakfast and owning a Seek Thermal imaging camera for an Android phone if not to combine the two for nerdy breakfast fun?

If you don’t have the patience to wait through that whole video, here’s a much shorter clip of me testing the pan by sprinkling water into it:

This is one of the classic demonstrations of the Leidenfrost effect, where cold liquids on hot surfaces survive for a while as droplets supported on a cushion of instantly-vaporized liquid. You can see that in the thermal video, where the drops stick around for a bit; they actually don’t skitter around quite as much as normal, possibly because the pan is a little too hot thanks to me mucking around with the camera.

So, anyway, there’s your photo of the day, which is mostly an advertisement for your thermal-imaging video of the day. And now, I get to go coach SteelyKid’s soccer team, whee!

A new report is cautioning parents about the risks of seemingly harmless liquid hand sanitizer, after an increase in calls to poison control centers about children who’ve ingested enough of substance to make them dangerously drunk.

Since 2010, poison control center hotlines in the United States have seen almost a 400% increase in calls related to kids under 12 consuming hand sanitizer, CNN reports, citing new analysis by the Georgia Poison Center.

The high alcohol content in liquid hand sanitizer — ranging anywhere from 45% to 95% alcohol, compared to wine and beer at 12% and 5% alcohol — can easily cause alcohol poisoning with just two or three squirts, experts say. Children may become confused, vomit or experience drowsiness, and in extreme cases, a child might stop breathing.

“Kids are getting into these products more frequently, and unfortunately, there’s a percentage of them going to the emergency room,” said Dr. Gaylord Lopez, the center’s director.

He said 3,266 hand sanitizer cases involving young kids were reported to poison control centers in 2010. Last year, that number reached 16,117.

Lopez sent a letter to Georgia’s school systems last week warning parents about the dangers of kids drinking hand sanitizer, explaining that some do it intentionally to get drunk, but others might try it on a dare from friends.

Also, it often looks tasty: for example, a six-year-old girl was recently brought to the hospital, unable to walk and slurring her words, after ingesting some strawberry-flavored hand sanitizer at school. Her blood-alcohol was .179, about twice what’s considered legally drunk for an adult.

She had to be watched overnight for signs of brain trauma, as the alcohol made her fall and hit her head.

“That was very scary,” her mother said. “It could have been very lethal for my child.”

Experts recommend tha tparents and teachers keep hand sanitizer away from where children can get it, and monitor them when they do use it. Nonalcohol-based products or sanitizing wipes are also a safe alternative.

More children getting drunk on hand sanitizer [CNN]

Elite Northeastern private college tuition and fees (1989-1993): ~$80,000

Gold class ring from elite Northeastern private college: ~$500

Colorful Rainbow Loom bracelet from your seven-year-old daughter: Priceless.

SteelyKid made this bracelet the other day at her after-school day care, while demonstrating to her friends that she could knit the rubber bands together with her fingers. She “got a little carried away,” and as a result it’s too big for her. “But it fit one of the grown-ups, and I said ‘Hey, I bet it would fit my dad!’ So I want you to have it, Daddy.”

So, I have a spiffy new bit of jewelry.

What difference does a food label make? A whole heck of a lot, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Which means if your product doesn’t abide by federal guidelines, it can’t masquerade as something it’s not. As such, the FDA is warning the makers of “Just Mayo,” a vegan-friendly spread, that it can’t call itself mayo because mayonnaise contains eggs, which its product does not.

Back at the end of last year, Hellmann’s maker Unilever backed off on a lawsuit it’d filed against Hampton Creek over the mayo/not mayo issue, noting that it yanked the suit “so that Hampton Creek can address its label directly with industry groups and appropriate regulatory authorities.”

Eight months later, the appropriate regulatory authorities have come a’knocking, by way of a warning letter from the FDA to Hampton Creek, dated Aug. 12 and posted online on Tuesday. The letter addresses “Just Mayo” and “Just Mayo Sriracha” products.

“The use of the term ‘mayo’ in the product names and the image of an egg may be misleading to consumers because it may lead them to believe that the products are the standardized food, mayonnaise,” the FDA said, which must contain eggs by definition.

“Additionally, the use of the term ‘Just’ together with ‘Mayo’ reinforces the impression that the products are real mayonnaise by suggesting that they are ‘all mayonnaise’ or ‘nothing but’ mayonnaise,” the FDA adds, though again, the products aren’t technically mayonnaise. They also include “contain additional ingredients that are not permitted by the standard of identity for mayonnaise, such as modified food starch,” the agency notes.

The FDA also takes issue with Hampton Creek’s claim that Just Mayo is cholesterol-free, and points to statements the company makes on its site about heart health, including, “When your heart is healthy, well, we’re happy. You’ll never find cholesterol in our products.”

“Adjacent to this statement is a heart-shaped symbol with a smiling face,” notes the FDA. “Together these statements and heart symbol are an implied health claim that these products can reduce the risk of heart disease due to the absence of cholesterol.”

However, the FDA says, Just Mayo contains too much fat to make such health claims.

The agency instructs Hampton Creek to ensure its products comply with regulations and gave the company 15 days to respond to the letter.

When reached for comment, a Hampton Creek Foods representative told Consumerist there was no statement to share at this time.

Candy with pumpkin spice flavoring? That’s so very 2013. The flavor wizards at M&M/Mars have gone beyond the tepid cinnamon-ish flavor of their attempt two years ago, and have now added what we’re guessing is a faint hint of coffee flavor to the mix for pumpkin spice latte M&Ms. Yes, this is real.

A reader of The Impulsive Buy spotted them at Target, which probably means that they’re exclusive to that retailer. We’ve also seen this strategy used successfully by Nabisco in selling their Exotic Oreo flavors. Another roving snack reporter spotted M&Ms with pecan pie flavoring at Walmart.

There is absolutely no reason why you couldn’t visit your favorite coffee shop and order a pumpkin spice mocha, also known as a pumpkin spice latte M&M-flavored coffee beverage. Or espresso and chocolate with some pumpkin syrup in it. I guess. At least that would have caffeine in it, which these candies do not.

On the other hand, many Target stores have Starbucks outlets instead of snack bars, meaning that you could have the pumpkin spice latte candies with a pumpkin spice latte.

SPOTTED ON SHELVES: Pumpkin Spice Latte Milk Chocolate M&M’s [The Impulsive Buy]

There’s been a hilarious meme on Twitter the past couple of weeks that follows in the footsteps of #OverlyHonestMethods: #FieldworkFail. If you’ve ever gone out in the field (i.e., not in a lab or office) to do your research, you know that there are many opportunities for things to go wrong. Particularly if you travel to remote locations, work with animals, or rely on finicky equipment to get the job done. (Or, in my case, when you work with volcanoes.) A number of media outlets picked up some of their favorite tweets, and I’m happy to say that two volcanologists made it on many of the lists: myself and Alison Graettinger, who’s a postdoc at the University at Buffalo.

The first time I hiked to active lava flows in HI, I melted the soles of my boots. Then I went through water and they shrank. #fieldworkfail

— Jessica Ball (@Tuff_Cookie) July 30, 2015

Her tweet came with a great photo, too.

Finding out the ground was not as stable as appeared #Askja #Fieldworkfail camerawoman took pic instead of helping pic.twitter.com/k3n9Y5Unne — Alison Graettinger (@AlisonGraetting) July 30, 2015

I should have included explanatory photos with mine. Here’s the boot-melting hike in Hawaii:

And I believe the end of the boot-shrinking hike (after I had already gotten them wet):

When I went to REI to replace those boots, I had a very serious conversation with a sales rep about how well Vibram stood up to high temperatures. (Shopping for field gear is pretty darn fun when you’re a volcanologist. “How hot can I get these boots before the soles melt? Do these respirators filter hydrogen sulfide? Is this helmet going to hold up if I hit it with a rock?”)

Lest anyone think that the #FieldWorkFail hashtag contains only the extremes of misfortune, let me assure you that fieldwork definitely doesn’t look like one of those Discovery Channel shows. There are lots of often funny ways that things can go pear-shaped. And of course, it’s important to document them with photos.

Sometimes the porters who are cutting the path ahead of you are a lot shorter than you are.

Occasionally your field vehicle encounters serious rocks.

You shouldn’t necessarily trust your advisor when he says “it looks shallower over there.”

It’s really, really important to wear gloves on lava flows.

Choosing your outcrops carefully is also a consideration for pleasant field-tripping.

And sometimes, even if you are tough geologists, it’s worth it just to give up when the weather insists on obscuring the pertinent features in your mapping area.

For those who are interested in curated lists of the most glorious #fieldworkfails, here’s all the media coverage I could find:

• The Atlantic: Gluing Yourself to a Live Crocodile and Other Mistakes
• The Washington Post: Scientists share their funniest blunders with #FieldWorkFail
• Gizmodo: #FieldWorkFail Proves Science is a Horrifyingly Messy Process
• Good: #FieldWorkFail Lets Scientists Share Their Hilariously Less-Impressive Moments
• Imgur: Field Work Fails
• The Huffington Post: #FieldWorkFail Hashtag Tells The Hilarious Stories From When Science Goes Wrong
• The Guardian: Scientists share their embarrassing #fieldworkfail stories
• The Daily Mail: ‘I accidentally glued myself to a crocodile’: Scientists reveal most embarrassing #fieldworkfail mistakes on Twitter

It’s hard to beat “I accidentally glued myself to a crocodile”, TBH.

Source: Scienze Geologiche

I immediately fell in love with this mapping concept from Scienze Geologiche that I saw on Facebook this morning. All I can say is "Bravo". I pay homage to a brilliant idea with my own offering on the Western United States according to Geologists. It lacks beer. Sorry!


California needs a map all its own, though.

Have you ever been squeezed into an airplane seat and then looked behind you to see you’re in front of a small child who has plenty of legroom? In a car, you’d be able to slide your seat back a few inches to give you some extra space, but without cramping the kid behind you. A new patent aims to put that same idea into practice on commercial aircraft.

Of course, it’s not as simple as just having seats that can slide back and forth. Otherwise, we’d all just be slamming our seats all the way back in a futile, greedy attempt to maximize legroom.

And if the seats in any given row were no longer aligned, that would be a safety concern, as it could make it more difficult for middle- and window-seat passengers to exit into the aisle.

That’s why this patent from Florida-based B/E Aerospace doesn’t just imagine a system for adjustable seats, but discusses the need for a sensible way of managing the seating arrangements.

One point of the invention is “to provide a method of seating passengers according to height, and then adjusting the spacing of the seat to accommodate the height of the passenger in each seat.”

According tot he patent, passengers’ respective heights are measured at check-in.

“Once most passengers are checked-in, the seating on the aircraft may be adjusted to better accommodate tall and short passengers,” explain the inventors, who give the example of putting those who fit into the top 5% of height for the average male get seated behind a row of people who are, at most, only 30% that of the average adult female. The seats for the small, presumably child, passengers would be moved up to accommodate the legroom for the taller travelers behind them.

“Even a relatively small incremental increase in seat spacing for the tall passengers can provide additional comfort with no loss of comfort to the much smaller passengers seated in front of the tall passengers,” reads the patent.

And rather than a labor-intensive system of manually operated anchors and latches, B/E Aerospace proposes a system that could be operated via a tablet (or similar device) by the cabin crew.

“An attendant walking through the aircraft with the tablet can initiate the adjustment as well as verify or make corrections to the adjustments,” the company explains.

While this concept allows carriers to keep the same number of seats in their cabins, we’re having a hard time imagining the tech being used for more than a few rows. In the above example, it presumes not only that there are enough small children on a plane to fill rows of their own, but also that these kids’ parents would be okay with being seated separately from them because of their height.

A more likely use for this sort of system would be for an airline that sells premium seating and wants to be able to adjust the number of extra-legroom seats it has available. For example, a plane going from NYC to L.A. would probably have plenty of passengers willing to pay extra to spare their knees during a 6-hour flight, but when that plane leaves L.A. and makes the shorter trip to Las Vegas, it might have trouble selling all those premium seats.

It’s certainly an interesting idea and one that will probably show up in some form in the years to come.

[via Skift.com]

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