Category: Uncategorized

Ear candling, apparently, is an alternative medicine practice that is pretty much what it sounds like. One end of a candle is placed in the ear, and the other end is lit. Supposedly, this will improve your health by removing “toxins” from the body – but it turns out (perhaps unsurprisingly), that it’s ineffective and dangerous. From Wikipedia:

One end of a cylinder or cone of waxed cloth is lit, and the other
placed into the subject’s ear. The flame is cut back occasionally with
scissors and extinguished between two and four inches from the subject.

The subject is lying on one side with the treated ear uppermost and
the candle vertical. The candle can be stuck through a paper plate or
aluminum pie tin to protect against any hot wax or ash falling onto the
subject. Another way to perform ear candling involves the subject lying
face up with the ear candle extending out to the side with a 45 degree
upward slant. A dish of water is placed next to the subject under the
ear candle.

Proponents claim that the flame creates negative pressure, drawing wax and debris out of the ear canal^[4], which appears as a dark residue.

In October 2007, the United States Food and Drug Administration
issued an alert identifying ear candles (also known as ear cones or
auricular candles) as “dangerous to health when used in the dosage or
manner, or with the frequency or duration, prescribed, recommended, or
suggested in the labeling thereof” … “since the use of a lit candle in
the proximity of a person’s face would carry a high risk of causing
potentially severe skin/hair burns and middle ear damage.”^[9]

A strange practice. But then, I guess people do strange things all the time – and if the placebo effect makes you feel healthier, more power to you.
Here’s my question: who came up with this? Apparently, some ear candle manufacturers allege that the practice originated with the Hopi Indians, but Hopi tribal spokespersons deny any knowledge or involvement.

While this is not quite of the same caliber as the hologram technology mentioned yesterday, it’s still pretty neat:

As Google points out, today is the anniversary of the discovery of x-rays, without which modern medicine and airport security would be at a loss.

To observe this date, then, I recommend you take a look at the first image ever made with x-rays – it’s 115 years old.

This is an impressive development:

“We can take objects from one location and show them in another location in 3-D in near real time,” said optical scientist Nasser Peyghambarian,
and project leader from the University of Arizona in a press
conference Nov. 1. “It is no longer something that is science fiction,
it is actually something that you can do today.”

More here.

This reminds me of the fourth season of The West Wing, wherein a similar (albeit fictional) situation occurred.

A Democratic state senator who died last month was easily re-elected in California, denying the GOP the seat and probably forcing the governor to call a special election.

Sen.
Jenny Oropeza was leading Republican challenger John Stammreich 58.4
percent to 35.7 percent, according to the latest vote count, The Sacramento Bee reported.

If the results hold up, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will call a special election.

Oropeza, who represented a district in Southern California’s Long Beach area, died Oct. 20
at age 53 of complications from a blot clot in her abdomen. Because she
died so close to the election, her name stayed on the ballot.

See the whole story here.

Ever wonder what Theodore Roosevelt’s voice sounded like? Or Woodrow Wilson’s? Or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s? Check out this very interesting compilation entitled “25 Rare Recordings From Some Of The Most Important People At The Turn The 20th Century.”

Well, “won” may be an exaggeration, but apparently a certain statistical formula certainly helped. Curious? Read on:

A simple statistical formula successfully estimated the number of tanks
the enemy was producing, at a time when this could not be directly
observed by the allied spy network.

By 1941-42, the allies knew that
US and even British tanks had been technically superior to German Panzer
tanks in combat, but they were worried about the capabilities of the
new marks IV and V. More troubling, they had really very little idea of
how many tanks the enemy was capable of producing in a year. Without
this information, they were unsure whether any invasion of the continent
on the western front could succeed.

One solution was to ask
intelligence to guess the number by secretly observing the output of
German factories, or by trying to count tanks on the battlefield. Both
the British and the Americans tried this, but they found that the
estimates returned by intelligence were contradictory and unreliable.
Therefore they asked statistical intelligence to see whether the
accuracy of the estimates could be improved.

The statisticians had
one key piece of information, which was the serial numbers on captured
mark V tanks. The statisticians believed that the Germans, being
Germans, had logically numbered their tanks in the order in which they
were produced. And this deduction turned out to be right. It was enough
to enable them to make an estimate of the total number of tanks that had
been produced up to any given moment.

You can read the whole story here. Personally, I find this sort of thing fascinating. Scientists, mathematicians, and indeed statisticians made extremely important contributions to the Allied war effort, and while these contributions are easily overlooked and often forgotten, I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that the war would’ve gone very differently without them. Civilians cracked both the German Enigma and the Japanese cryptography, preventing thousands of Allied casualties. I’m very glad that, at long last, the scientists and mathematicians behind these efforts are finally getting the recognition they deserve. (Particularly Alan Turing, the father of artificial intelligence and computer science, who despite cracking Enigma was persecuted by the British government to the point of suicide because he was gay.)

(Click for larger)

It has been circulating the internet. The question is this: why would anyone need it? I guess there must be a reason they have it in stock…

“We’re staring,” reports The Weather Channel, “at a powerful storm that is poised to rake high winds,
severe t-storms, and, yes, even wet snow in parts of the Midwest.” Some are calling it a “land hurricane.” There are currently tornado warnings in 25 different spots across the path of the storm. From The Weather Channel:

Meteorologists know this will be intense due to expected lowest central
pressure of the low in western Ontario bottoming out in the neighborhood
of 960-970 mb.  This is a storm potentially as strong or stronger than
the infamous “Edmund Fitzgerald” storm in Nov. 1975 and an even stronger
version almost exactly 23 years after that in Nov. 1998.

(See the full forecast here.) Rather than “land hurricane,” the correct term for the phenomenon we’re seeing is (unlikely as it sounds) “bomb cyclogenesis.” As related by boingboing:

Basically, bomb cyclogenesis
is the formation of an over-land cyclone (“cyclogenesis”) in a
dramatically short period of time (“kablooey”). The phenomenon might be
involved in the formation of Atlantic Nor’easters, and was the force
behind some of the biggest blizzards of the mid-20th century. In fact, Minnesota Public Radio’s Updraft blog is going so far as to call this incoming weather system a “land hurricane”
(“telegram”). The Eastern side of Lake Superior is expecting 25-foot
waves this afternoon. Should be exciting. And we’ve all learned a new
word.

Bottom line: stay inside tonight. 

Last February, we blogged about the theory that the universe may not, in fact, be three-dimensional, but might rather be merely a holographic projection. Now, it seems that the Fermilab particle astrophysicist who proposed this theory is building a device with which to test it. From Fermilab’s blog:

Black hole physics, in which space and time become compressed,
provides a basis for math showing that the third dimension may not exist
at all. In this two-dimensional cartoon of a universe, what we perceive
as a third dimension would actually be a projection of time intertwined
with depth. If this is true, the illusion can only be maintained until
equipment becomes sensitive enough to find its limits.

“You can’t perceive it because nothing ever travels faster than
light,” says Hogan. “This holographic view is how the universe would
look if you sat on a photon.”

Not everyone agrees with this idea. Its foundation is formed with
math rather than hard data, as is common in theoretical physics. And
although a holographic universe would answer many questions about black
hole physics and other paradoxes, it clashes with classical geometry,
which demands a universe of smooth, continuous paths in space and time.

“So we want to build a machine which will be the most sensitive
measurement ever made of spacetime itself,” says Hogan. “That’s the
holometer.”

Read the whole article here, and be confused.