Voice-activated texting is just as bad for driving as doing it with your thumbs

Posted by David Brooks    |    Tuesday, April 23, 2013

It’s every bit as dangerous to speak into a mobile device that translates words into a text message as it is to type one.

That's the conclusion from a study by Texas A&M; university, reported in today's Washington Post

As has been proven in studies of cellphone conversations, researcher Christine Yager said drivers engaged in any form of texting were distracted by the communication effort.

“Whether you’re talking on cellphone, whether you’re trying to send a message, whether you’re typing it with your hand, speaking it, driving is not a simple, mindless task,” she said. “So any of these types of activities that are not about driving have the potential of seriously taking your mind off what you’re doing in operating that vehicle.”

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Can robots be abused? How about Lego robots?

Posted by David Brooks    |    Monday, April 22, 2013

Can you abuse a robot? Is it bad if you do?

These interesting questions were pondered in a 2008 experiment that parallels the infamous Milgram Experiment in which volunteers were led into shocking a subject. It got participants to "abuse" a Lego MindStorms robot. "The results show that people have fewer concerns about abusing robots than about abusing other people" - which is good, I think.

I learned of this very odd experiment through the delightfully odd Improbable.com blog, which any thinking human should peruse reglarly. Read the item here.

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On Earth Day, let's celebrate places that the environmental movement saved

Posted by David Brooks    |    Monday, April 22, 2013

It's Earth Day. so instead of the usual hand-wringing and self-righteous wet-blanket-ism that is environmentalism, let's do a little celebration, courtesy of Slate. They've got a nice piece about seven places in the U.S. that were saved from wicked ugly development by the last four decades of the eco movement.

None are in New England - the closest is Storm King Mountain New York, which was going to be flooded for a hydropower project - but they are all reasons to celebrate.

Here's the list, which also includes San Francisco Bay, Dinosaur National Monument and the C&O; Canal.

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There are limits to do-it-yourself: 'Build your own coffin' workshop flops

Posted by David Brooks    |    Sunday, April 21, 2013

A natural-burial advocate in Waterville, Maine, decided to teach people how to build their own coffins.

Alas, as the Morning Sentinel reports, nobody showed up:

"Americans are really good at ignoring the fact that they're going to die," Lakin said from his home workshop on Barnet Street.

Lakin makes four different models of pine coffins, all constructed with wooden pegs and wooden or rope handles, making the entire box biodegradable. He said a pine coffin buried three feet in the earth will degrade within a year.

A moment's wander with Google found a Jaffrey NH funeral home, Cournoyer Funeral Home, that gives some instruction in home burial and natural burial - not a topic that most morticians love, because there's little profit in it. Here's their page; it's quite interesting.

Turning Leaf Home Funerals in Plymouth is an advocacy group that discusses the topic, with advice on issues including "transporting the body to the crematory of cemetery in a home vehicle instead of a hearse" and "keeping or bringing the body home for any legal mandatory waiting periods or visitation period to be kept cool without using large refrigeration units."

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That funny/quirky coffee made from excreted coffee beans is putting pressure on the animal that excretes them

Posted by David Brooks    |    Friday, April 19, 2013

Photo from http://coffee.wikia.com/wiki/Kopi_Luwak_Blog
Civet poop, with undigested coffee beans.

Back in 1995, an Ig Nobel award was given to Luak Coffee, made from coffee beans that has passed through the intestinal tract of the luak, also spelled luwak - also known as palm civet, a fisher-like animal in southeast Asia. It was a funny award, because you were sort of drinking pooped-out coffee! Ewwwwwwww!

Now it seems the coffee has gone from extreme novelty to chic item, with a distressingly predictable result whenever humans start to consume a product in large numbers: The luak is being hunted, trapped and traded for the coffee, endangering it in the wild.

Improbable.com, the blog of the Ig Nobels, has a semi-apologetic item about the situation: Read it here.

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Can you shoot somebody else's cat on your property (and other Science Cafe questions)

Posted by David Brooks    |    Thursday, April 18, 2013

Great Science Cafe last night, as always. The discussion about the role of cats and wildlife stayed polite - it got a little edgy when the question of declawing cats came up - and produced a couple of interesting points. Here are a few:

One audience member, who prefaced the question by noting "I'm not advocating this, I'm just wondering!", asked whether it was legal to shoot somebody else's cat if it's on your property, threatening wild birds or animals. None of us knew, although other laws might have an effect - it's illegal to discharge a firearm pretty much anywhere in Nashua, for example. I'm trying to find out more.

Putting bells on your cats to warn prey doesn't work, partly because cats are really good at moving without shaking whatever they're wearing, and partly because birds and animals don't associate bells with danger, so they probably wouldn't be warned even if one rang.

Veterinarian Anne Richards responded to questions about whether feral - wild - cats are better hunters than domesticated cats with a story about a cat she adopted in college. It was "the fifth or sixth generation" of cats which had been raised entirely in the laboratory, and yet it instantly went into hunting mode when given the opportunity and proved to be a trained killer, so to speak. Don't think "my cat's been indoors all it's life so it won't hunt if I let it outside".

About half of the crowd owned cats, and they all kept them entirely indoors. That's a good thing: If you have cats, you should keep them inside, too.

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Science Cafe tonight: "Cats or catastrophes? Are our pets a problem for wildlife?"

Posted by David Brooks    |    Wednesday, April 17, 2013

This month's Science Cafe NH is tonight (Wed., April 17), discussing cats, both domestic and feral, and their effect on wildlife. Are they a real problem here? If so, what should be done about it - what *can* be done about it?

We have two biologists and a veterinarian involved in catch-spay-release cat programs, and I expect some lively discussion.

Here's the ScienceCafeNH site. My column this week advances it.

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Scientific American looks at how an IED bomb is made

Posted by David Brooks    |    Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Scientific American has an article about the mechanics of making bombs like the ones that detonated during the Boston Marathon. They did not use C4 or other high-grade explosives. You can read it here.

From the story:

Most improved explosive devices include the following components: a cheap cell phone, electrical wire, a fuse, batteries (AA or 9-volt), electrical tape and a thyristor (a solid-state semiconductor device). This last piece provides the option of letting you wire into the positive and negative diodes of the speaker on the cell phone board.

Two common ways to complete the circuit between these components is to use the vibrating mechanism on the cell phone or the speaker—this could be either the speaker used to make your phone a speaker phone, or the speaker that you put up to your ear during a normal conversation. We found that the speaker phone has more power going to it and was more commonly used. When the phone is called, it activates the ringer, which makes the connection between those two components and kicks off the signal to detonate the explosive.

The typical makeup when you find these things will be based on the contents that the bomb maker had at their disposal and what it is they are trying to do. Over in Iraq, we had a lot of what are called explosively formed penetrators, where whole IED is designed to explode up under a vehicle to create the greatest destruction possible. In something that is meant to detonate in a crowd of people, a bomb maker would pack into the IED whatever they had at their disposal—such as nails or ball bearings.

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