LarsonsWorld -- just another persons waste of time

The Crisis in American Walking: How we got off the pedestrian path -- Tom Vanderbilt / Slate

A few years ago, at a highway safety conference in Savannah, Ga., I drifted into a conference room where a sign told me a “Pedestrian Safety” panel was being held.

The speaker was Michael Ronkin, a French-born, Swiss-raised, Oregon-based transportation planner whose firm, as his website notes, “specializes in creating walkable and bikeable streets.” Ronkin began with a simple observation that has stayed with me since. Taking stock of the event—one of the few focused on walking, which gets scant attention at traffic safety conferences—he wondered about that inescapable word: pedestrian. If we were to find ourselves out hiking on a forest trail and spied someone approaching at a distance, he wanted to know, would we think to ourselves, “Here comes a pedestrian”?

... The United States walks the least of any industrialized nation. Studies employing pedometers have found that where the average Australian takes 9,695 steps per day (just a few shy of the supposedly ideal “10,000 steps” plateau, itself the product, ironically, of a Japanese pedometer company’s campaign in the 1960s), the average Japanese 7,168, and the average Swiss 9,650, the average American manages only 5,117 steps. Where a child in Britain, according to one study, takes 12,000 to 16,000 steps per day, a similar U.S. study found a range between 11,000 and 13,000.

Read on ...

He has foreseen this.

It is your destiny!

Join me, and together, we can rule the galaxy as father and son!

If you choose to jump instead,

I have strategically place mattress's to cushion your fall and have men ready to come to your assistance.

The galaxy is ours!

We're all mutants now -- There are a lot of us now, and most of us are a little bit off. -- Ars Technica

The field of study called population genetics has played a critical role in the development of modern biology, helping unite Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution into one coherent framework. In most genetics classes, though, it typically gets plowed through in a simplified form in a single lecture. I suspect this is because it involves a lot of math, and most biologists like being in the field precisely because it's generally possible to avoid all but the simplest math.

Nevertheless, population genetics has some critical insights to offer in the area of modern genomics, as evidenced by a paper that appeared in this week's edition of Science. Some population geneticists have looked into the results of the search for mutations in genome data. Their conclusion: the human population explosion has led to the appearance of many new, rare mutations in the human population, and it's throwing all the math off, which has some serious implications for medical research.

Read on ...

Tom Toles -- 04 May 2012

The Obama administration has proposed new standards that would for the first time ever limit the industrial carbon pollution from power plants that contributes to global warming.
The EPA’s new clean air safeguards will help improve the quality of our air and protect our children’s health, while also helping to spark new innovations in clean energy technologies.
But before the EPA can finalize these new standards, they are accepting comments from the general public.
Will you take a minute to express your strong support for these historic new clean air standards?

Take action here.

CowTown by Charlie Podrebarac -- 30 April 2012

I found this an interesting read.

Cloud wars: How Google Drive’s privacy policy stacks up against its rivals’ -- Washington Post

The Google Drive cloud storage service launched yesterday to much fanfare, but as with any new Google product, there are important questions about how the company will actually use personal data uploaded to the system. Google sells ads against your data, after all, and the more data you give the company, the more opportunity it has to screw up. That means the Google Drive terms of service and privacy policy are critically important, and there's been a lot of selective interpretation floating around the web in the past 24 hours — and a lot of comparisons to the privacy policies of competitive services like Dropbox and Microsoft's SkyDrive.

Read on ...

Prickly City by Scott Stantis -- 26 April 2012

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

-- Langston Hughes

A bit back, in one of those conversations that wanders around, and in an effort to show my great intelligence, I asked a buddy of mine how old the Peace Sign was. He thought really old. I knew it was actually from the 1960's and was related to the anti nuclear movement.
To show my actual stupidity, I couldn't remember the particulars. D'oh!

Thus --

is derived from the semaphoric symbols for N and D
standing for Nuclear Disarmament.