dynagirl

Black Hole in Perseus is making the lowest infrasound ever. Ghosty!

I tried this spooky music creep out at work once using a tone generator. I don’t know if it worked – not being able to hear infrasound and all – but I did notice the department head pacing more than usual. I’ll have to try it again, maybe for Halloween.

I’m gonna make my students taket this in the fall…. The second paragraph is interesting; I’ve noticed that myself. I was just telling someone that if they really wanted me to learn math and algebra in high school, they should have been teaching me knitting and sweater design at the same time. Take the test yourself.

Miriam, you show a slight right-hemisphere dominance with a moderate preference for auditory processing, an unusual and somewhat paradoxical combination of characteristics.

You are drawn to a random and sometimes nonchalant synthesis of material. You learn as it seems important to a specific situation, and might even develop a resentment of others who attempt to direct your learning down a specific channel.

Your right-hemispheric dominance provides a structure that is only loosely organized and one which processes entire swatches of reality, overlooking details. You are emotional in your reactions and perceptual more than logical in your approach, although you can impose structure and a language base when necessary.

Your auditory preference, on the other hand, implies that you process information sequentially and unidimensionally. This combination of right-brain and auditory modes creates conflict, as you want to process data more rapidly than your natural processes allow.

Your tendency to be creative and free-flowing is accompanied by sufficient ability to organize and be logical, allowing you a reasonable degree of success in a number of different endeavors. You take in information methodically and systematically which can then be synthesized rapidly. In this manner, you manage to function consistently well, although certainly less efficiently than you desire.

You prefer the abstract and are a theoretician at heart while retaining the ability to be practical. You find the symbolism in a great deal of what you encounter and are something of a “mystic.”

With regards to your lifestyle, you have the mentality which would be good as a philosopher, writer, journalist, or instructor, or possibly as a systems designer or social worker. Perhaps most important is your ability to “listen to your inner voice” as a mode of skipping over unnecessary steps to achieve your goals.

Via Very Big Blog

Why the head on a Guinness is cream colored while the liquid is almost black. I’d better make sure his conclusions are reproducible…

Kick-ass gallery of chemical reactions in Quicktime.

Comprehensive and fascinating article about synaesthesia over on Kuro5hin. We were talking about this yesterday on a long car trip. Photons have wavelengths, and sounds have wavelengths — so theorhetically one could find the analagous frequency and hear what blue sounds like, and see what a sound looks like. Quantum physicsists has shown that all atoms and molecules (and therefore all things) also have wavelengths, though they are too small to really notice. So therefore the molecules that fit into our olfactory receptors have wavelengths, and so we could theorhetically find the wavelengths of those molecules — and find photonic and sonic analogues for those molecular wavelengths, and hear a banana.
This brought up the question of synaesthesia; more specifically do synaesthetes already process these frequency analogues? Maybe not, because they’d have to have the exact same sensory response to specific stimuli. If I could be a synaesthete for a week I would. Although it would probably be better that if I could do that, I didn’t operate heavy machinery at the time…

Crab vs. Pipe. Eww, ewww ewww! 1/10th of an inch.
Via Phancy.

This “problem” is much more easily solved with flirting, flowers, dinner, and shiny jewelry presented by a (preferably good looking) interesting — and interested — conversationalist. Duh.
Hrmm. Think of all the great ads the diamond cartels could write to combat such crap.

Newly found Comet Kudo-Fukikawa should be visible to the naked eye on New Year’s Day. Cool!

A happy brain is a learning brain. Bring on the crosswords!

The Six Beer Theory.

Peeps, hang on to something: The Earth’s magnetic poles might be ready to flip.

The Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Fair is this weekend in Amherst, WI. Can’t find a link.

Do you know what time it is?

A long thread over at MeFi has me wondering about humor. Why do we laugh? Laughing is really wierd. It’s not even spelled right. Laughter is also a very common criteria for a good relationship – how often do you hear a newly-in-luurrve person say, “well, s/he makes me laugh”? What is the purpose of comedy in society? Do we tell gallows jokes to make ourselves feel better in dark times, same as how cats purr when they’re ill? And what’s the deal with schadenfreude?
How Stuff Works looks like a good place to start today’s research project…

But was it the Lake
Michigan Triangle that caused Sean’s disappearance? That would help explain
his mysterious reappearance three years later, from Equador, which is no where near Port Washington, which is where his boat was found.

The science of schmooze.

Paper
batteries: 5 week old news but it’s still so dang cool that I have to point
it out.

The nuts are out in force today.

3724 hours of SETI
processing and still not one alien for me. Dammit! Of course, the SETI Songbook is making me awfully suspicious that SETI is actually run by the aliens as a front.

PZT
paint! Materials tech is where it’s at. Computers are getting to be olde skuel.
Too bad they didn’t have this for the Hoan.

Nanotechs
overrun by “giant” bugs…. do not look at this while eating.

My cats may not be able to recognize themselves in the mirror, and a male cardinal
will fight a mirror thinking it’s reflection is a competing male, but dolphins know who they are.

Seeing-eye tongues. Um, cool.

This is for all my whacked friends who believed the FOX television show that “proved” that the moon landing was faked. They should know better, anyway – we have the transcript of the communication to Houston. Duh.

By the way, yesterday was the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight. Basically, he was “strapped inside a tin can attached to a bomb.” Now that’s cajones. Or stupid. But bully for him. I remember the first Shuttle flight, and I even remember watching the Enterprise being flown piggybacked to an airplane to Florida. Joel and Robert and I watched it over and Joel’s grandparents house. We watched Cosmos religiously (haha good joke there, eesh) and were out looking at the stars every clear night. (Of course, it was Iowa, in 1977, and there was a lot more dark sky.) I wonder what it was like to be the first person in space. Wow.

Wave-form patterns apply to cars. This is an old link from Metafilter, but I tried making anti-traffic this week, and it worked.