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Around The Web Audio/Video

Microwaves = Fun

Microwaves Ruin Everything

Awesome little video of various things exploding in a microwave. I’ve always wanted to try the Ivory Soap one. Ivory allegedly has little air bubbles, which when in the microwave heat up causing the moisture to turn to gas. That causes it to expand and appear like a foam.

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Around The Web

What Happens If You Put Your Hand In The LHC

Large Hadron Collider Cutaway Crossection

Ever wonder what would happen if you put your hand or other body part in the Large Hadron Collider and the scientists turned it on? Well nobody actually knows, and it seems none of the scientists really want to find out. Their analysis of the question however is quite interesting.

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Around The Web Security

Caffeine Algebra

This is a very interesting tidbit from LifeHacker about caffeine:

The effectiveness of caffeine varies significantly from person to person, due to genetics and other factors in play. The average half-life of caffeine—that is, how long it takes for half of an ingested dose to wear off—is about five to six hours in a human body. Women taking oral birth control require about twice as long to process caffeine. Women between the ovulation and beginning of menstruation see a similar, if less severe, extended half-life. For regular smokers, caffeine takes half as long to process—which, in some ways, explains why smokers often drink more coffee and feel more agitated and anxious, because they’re unaware of how their bodies work without cigarettes.

Assuming you know some of the variables at play here and track over an extended period (at least 1 month) so that you derive a baseline, you can essentially use algebra to solve for what you don’t know about a person, in particular for a woman based on their observable behavior regarding caffeine consumption and reaction. I recall reading between ovulation and menstruation it’s about 35-40% longer or roughly 9-10 hours. The half-life of a pregnant woman is 9-11 hours [cite].

In practice this would require some dedication as you need to derive a baseline and it would still never be truly accurate, but interesting regardless. I’m sure you can add other statistics and metrics to help improve the accuracy but again it wouldn’t be terribly accurate. Regardless I bet it would surprise some people.

It just shows how easily information is revealed through our mundane activities regardless of how well people conceal it. Psychology, chemistry, medicine, and security all in this one beverage consumption.

I’m sure you can come up with a more male specific scheme as well as many more gender neutral schemes. I just ran across this more female specific example and found it rather interesting.

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Mozilla

Cache 2.0

Perhaps this will eventually make way into Mozilla at some point. It’s a great read. Perhaps it could manage disk space vs. performance much better than we currently do?

Could make Fireffox feel faster.

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In The News

Designer Virus

Creating a designer virus, testing it in a dish and computer models: $200,000.

Realizing that virus has the potential to fight HIV. Priceless

Amazing story here. Hopefully some day I’ll be able to link back to this post with the title “HIV Cured”, or something to that effect.

Absolutely amazing. Lets all keep our fingers crossed that they figured it out!

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In The News

Height matters

According to this Study, tall people make more money than short people.

“Each inch in height amounted to about $789 more a year in pay, the study found. So someone who is 7 inches taller – say 6 feet versus 5 feet 5 inches – would be expected to earn $5,525 more annually, he said.”

Great. Now we are going to see dozens of lawsuits defending short people (well, dumb people who blame it on being short). And the NAVCP (National Association for Vertically Challenged People).

Perhaps this is why Gary Coleman lost the California Election to Aaanold, the Kindergarden Cop? Perhaps it’s position, not just money.

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In The News

And how you you sleepy?

Good read.

Damn interesting. I don’t know what to make of it. But pretty interesting.