“fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it”

via Lindsay Campbell, who makes the point that the faster you read the above text, the more accurate you get.

I was reading something about ferrofluid (don’t ask) and came across this funny footnote:

Thought process of the guy who invented coffee: “I have an idea. Let’s pick these red cherry things, then dry them in the sun for a week or two, then throw away the fruit and keep the seed, then bake the seed for ten minutes, then grind up the burnt seed, then pour hot water through it, and then drink the brown liquid.

Baby girl born with heart outside here body (she was holding it in her right hand).

I was going to be upset if The New York Times decided to hide this article under the Times Select. Alas… they did not.

Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia, has penned the most well written piece on science, for general consumption, that I have ever read. His illumination of the ubiquitous, but little understood (at least by science-phobic persons such as myself) E=MC² left me wishing that men and women of letters were regularly assigned by newspapers to demystify some of the underlying (and often taken for granted) systems that have a deep effect on out daily lives. And I don’t just mean science. For instance, I can imagine that many folks look at the deficit in much the same way they look at Einstein’s theory. They know what it is, but they don’t really understand what it means and how it works.

Thank you for not hiding this educational and vitally important article in the “secret garden” that is the Times Select.

Let me first come out and say publicly - I am for science.

But this sounds like a bad idea.

“As any field geologist knows, in order to understand the object you’re looking at, you have to reach out and give it a tap with your hammer,” said mission co-investigator Donald Yeomans, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the mission is being managed. “In this case, we’re going to smack it with an 800-pound impactor.”

The “it”, in this case, is a comet.

“There’s a betting pool within the science team as to what exactly will happen,” said Yeomans. “Most of the money is going on the idea that comets formed from agglomerating dirty chunks of water ice. Under that theory, we’d expect to see a large crater about the size of the Rose Bowl Stadium (in Pasadena, California).”

Has anyone made a bet that something unforseen and catastrophic will occur? This sounds too much like some kids putting a halfstick in a tree trunk to “see what happens”.

I do give a pound [1] to the NASA scientist that named the spaceship that will fire the rocket. NASA named it Deep Impact.

=-=-=-=-=
[1] To hit fists with your home dawgs (courtesy of Urban Dictionary)

I was reading an article in the Washington Post today about Alex Rosen, an 11 year old with hyperlexia, a condition whose features look like the opposite of the reading and learning disorder dyslexia. Hyperlexia is absolutely fascinating to me. Apparently this kid could read at the age of one, but is slow to understand social speech, which makes it difficult for him to understand what others are thinking. The results?

According to the Post:

The lessons they need to learn are not in books,” Rosen said of children with hyperlexia. “Is a joke funny the second time? Not if you tell it to the same person. It’s so difficult to teach someone to be a social human being.”Rosen teaches Alex to pay attention to slang, which is an important part of social communication, especially among children. Rather than fight his natural talent at reading, Rosen has used printed text as a means of communicating with her son. Alex still speaks very formally, mimicking the cadences of written speech. He never uses the interjection “like,” the way many youngsters do incessantly, and his sentences are always grammatical and complete.

These skills helped him run for student council president — and win. He is a fearless public speaker, and his mother had to tell Alex that other children are typically nervous in front of an audience.

But Rosen worries that Alex’s lack of insight into how other people think may leave him too trusting — his personality is as open as the books he loves. Deception is beyond him, which is why Rosen actually celebrates when Alex tries to manipulate her.

“I love it when you lie to me, Al,” she told him in the presence of a visitor last week. “Because it tells me you know what I’m thinking.”

Someday, Ilene Freed Rosen sighed, her guileless child would make a fabulous husband.

I don’t know anything about space exploration but did anyone see that bouncing bubble wrap they put around the rover that landed on mars? I was struck immediately by two thoughts. First, Wow, that is really cool. Followed immediately by, With all of our “technology”, this was the best idea for landing the rover NASA could come up with? I can just picture the engineer pitching the idea…

So, let’s wrap it up in a bunch of rubber and throw it at Mars. When it hits the Red Planet, it will bounce around for a while and hopefully the rover will remain intact.

It’s like the egg suspension contest from middle school, but the egg is worth millions (billions?). I wonder if there were rubber bands inside the rubber shell suspending the rover so it never touched the sides…

It would be really cool if planes landed like that…

To view a video animation of the landing (complete with bubble wrap) click here (Quicktime).

This is the scariest thing I never knew I had to be afraid of.

According to the BBC, there is a rare syndrome called Anarchic Hand that has been dubbed the Dr. Strangelove Syndrome. Afflicted patients have no control over their left hand. One patient repeatedly tried to strangle himself while sleeping.

Clay Shirky has written an amazing a fascinating article entitled DNA, P2P, and Privacy. I would try to explain it further but I would do it a great injustice.

Update: I overstated the quality of the article last night. I was a little tired, and as such, I didn’t make any comments when I couldn’t support my use of the word “amazing.” Instead of reading “I would do it a great injustice,” it should have read, “I cannot collect my thoughts to say anything intelligent.” Frankly, I enjoyed this piece because I hadn’t thought of DNA in this way before. Of course I know that DNA is “ultimate identifier,” but I never thought of DNA’s ability to synchronize data across disparate systems…