Link Banana

Apparently the heat of chili pepper is determined primarily by it’s risk of infestation. The pepper pods of plants in climates where seed-destroying fungi grow well will be hotter where such fungi are rare.

I wasn’t aware of the massive unpopularity of semicolons among male literary types; apparently only the effete are supposed to use them.

Ben McIntyre, writing in the Times of London a couple of months later, added to the collection of semicolon snubbers: Kurt Vonnegut called the marks “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King, said McIntyre, “wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.”

The Large Hadron Collider has already begun some test runs, and will soon be getting down to real science. Cosmic Variance offers a list of what the device is looking for and an obviously arbitrary estimation of how likely it is to find it. Everyone’s favorite possibility:

Stable Black Holes That Eat Up the Earth, Destroying All Living Organisms in the Process: 10^-25%. So you’re saying there’s a chance?

(via kottke)

The psychologists said [taekwandoe] competitors wearing red were awarded an average of 13 percent more points and the points seemed to increase after the blue athlete was digitally transformed into a red athlete and decrease when the red competitor turned blue.

I remember something similar going around about red cars getting more traffic tickets, but Snopes claims that that was false.

(via clusterflock)

Two interesting tidbits:

• Primordial Mars was like primordial Earth.
• The European Space Agency offers some beautiful photos the Echus Chasm. The chasm was made by liquid water at some point in the past. (via Wired Science)

An unexpected editorial about a disaster highlights an unexpected fact:

One inevitable measure of a mountain is simply how often climbers escape with their lives. By that standard, K2 stands almost alone in the world. It is a lesser peak than Everest only in height. In every other respect, it is a far more arduous climb: steeper, colder and more isolated.

Many more people have died on Everest, but only because so many more climbers of every skill level have undertaken it. The risk of failing — and dying — is far greater on K2, as the mountain proved again this week when 11 climbers were killed, nine of them after an icefall swept away the fixed ropes they needed to retreat down an icy chute called the Bottleneck.

Having just recently watched Frontline’s “Storm Over Everest” the even greater danger of K2 wouldn’t have occurred to me.

Every once in a while I like to see stories about high-seas piracy. I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t because of fictions of peglegs and eyepatchs.

In any case, the Canadians have stepped up and are providing a frigate for safe passage of much needed food shipments from the World Food Program through the pirate-infested waters and to the famine-stricken country.

If I were ever to get serious about getting into shape, I’d probably start with this BuzzFeed page.

It’s a momentous date for number of reasons. The three most prominent:

1. The Olympics begin. That’s a link to a Big Picture post.
2. Russia and Georgia are in the midst of an “undeclared war” over the breakaway region of South Ossetia. This had been speculated about for a while — The Economist even ran an analysis piece on their website today about what trouble such a conflict would cause. Passport has a wrap-up.
3. It’s the 20th anniversary of the biggest pro-democracy demonstration in Burmese history. That one, like the recent “Saffron Revolution”, was pretty handily suppressed. (Link goes to The Irradday’s special issue, via Passport.)

From the annals of the slightly absurd:

Rwanda’s government ruffled some French feathers yesterday with the release of a 500-page report alleging that senior French military and political leaders had prior knowledge of the country’s 1994 genocide and that French peacekeeping troops actively participated in the killings. Among those accused are the late former President François Mitterand and former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

And the reason to doubt:

Given that the Rwandan government began work on the report just a few months after President Paul Kagame was accused by a French judge of assasinating the Rwanda’s former president — the event that precipitated the genocide — the report is going to be read with a pretty large grain of salt.

The New York Times reports that Americans eat 1.8 more pounds of food — for a total of 18.2 — per week than they did in 1970. The chart shows that we’re eating more or just about everything but dairy.

The percentage changes at the bottom of the graphic are the most interesting: fresh spinich, cream cheese, and corn sweetners (HFCS FTW!) are the biggest gainers. Veal, whole milk, and lard are the biggest losers.

(via kottke)

What your favorite genre of music tells us about you:

POP: Conformists, overly responsible, role-conscious, struggling with sexuality or peer acceptance.

HEAVY METAL: Higher levels of suicidal ideation, depression, drug use, self-harm, shoplifting, vandalism, unprotected sex.

DANCE: Higher levels of drug use regardless of socio-economic background.

JAZZ/RHYTHM & BLUES: Introverted misfits, loners.

RAP: Higher levels of theft, violence, anger, street gang membership, drug use and misogyny.

(via Marginal Revolution)

Today’s good news: a new study found that there are many more western lowland gorillas in Congo than anyone expected. I found this line somewhat ironic:

“The message from our community is so often one of despair,” he said. “While we don’t want to relax our concern, it’s just great to discover that these animals are doing well.”

Perhaps in part to validate their story predicting this occurance, Wired Science says that though China’s making a valient effort, air quality in Beijing isn’t really better. (Though, as anyone who’s been in a big city could have told you, rain and wind do a good deal to improve visibility.)

Proof that adults always underestimate the young. In this case, their racism (emphasis mine):

Over the course of the last few months, Rasmussen has been tracking attitudes about voting for a black candidate for President.  What they have been finding is that the public is gradually becoming more willing to support such a candidate, but what is most striking in the three surveys they have done is how constant and relatively great the unwillingness to support a black candidate has been in the age group you probably least expect.  According to the three surveys, 18-29 year olds are now relatively less willing to support a black candidate than voters from other age groups. While resistance to supporting a black candidate has dropped in every other age group since February, and overall stands at just 8%, it remains basically unchanged among the youngest voters.

Like, real jetpacks. (Although technically, it’s not a jetpack.)

On Tuesday, an inventor from New Zealand unveiled what he calls “the world’s first practical jetpack” at the EAA AirVenture, the gigantic annual air show here. The inventor, Glenn Martin, 48, who has spent 27 years developing the devices, said he hoped to begin selling them next year for $100,000 apiece.

(via Boing Boing)

UPDATE (7/30/08); Via BBGadgets, Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) makes a good point:

The bugbear with this type of vehicle isn’t getting airborne, it’s stability. He says that it can go to 8k feet for 1/2 hour. That’s theoretically. I see a device going 1 foot off the ground with 2 big guys guiding it. In fact, I’ve seen not a single untethered pic.

I’d love it to be true, but I see too many warning flags. Sounds like a money raising stunt. Every time one of these companies is about to run out of money, they hold a “demonstration” and make a prediction that they’ll be selling them within some short period of time. I doubt it. Moller’s been predicting that people will be flying to work in 10 years, for the last 40 years.

The reality of the price at the pump against the price of a barrel:

Analyses of gasoline economics show that when the price of oil rises, it takes up to four weeks for gas station prices to catch up, with most of the increase taking place within the first two weeks. But when oil prices sink, it takes up to eight weeks for the savings to be passed along to consumers. The phenomenon is known as “asymmetric price adjustment” (PDF) or, more informally, “rockets and feathers.”

PBS is planning to drop Mr. Roger’ Neighborhood from the list of programs it regularly beams to member stations (who themselves decide when and if to air it). This fact yielded a good bit of nostalgia among those over 20, and a petition based primarily on that nostalgia.

(via Metafilter)

I’ve documented before The Economist’s penchant for unusual economic indicators. The classic example, the Big Mac index — in which the price of the sandwich serves as a proxy for purchasing power parity (PPP), has been unveiled for 2008.

Perhaps more novelly, the magazine’s Africa correspondent, Jonathan Ledgard, offers the intriguing possibilty that sales of Coca-Cola are a signal of how peaceful and prosperous a given area of the continent is. (via Passport)

An under-understood truth:

Paul Krugman was observing that even though the political coverage is the part of the media that people like to talk about, it’s actually fairly marginal to the business. The New York Times is known for its hard news coverage, but he observes that from a business perspective it’s primarily a fashion and food publication that runs a small political news operation on the side. One issue of T Magazine, he says, pays for an entire NYT European bureau.

(via kottke)