Necessary Roughness

two kingdoms, hundreds of thousands of miles

Archive for the 'technology' Category

I Can Haz Mad Typing Skeelz
Monday, April 7th, 2008

Diane Meyer at Respublica asks, “How fast can you type?” and passes along an online typing test. I was rated coming out of high school typing class at 60 words per minute, so I was a little surprised when I got:
102 words
Speedtest
The test was mostly short words and lasted just a minute, but I [...]

Google Goes Dark But Saves No Energy
Friday, March 28th, 2008

HT: Little Green Footballs
For Saturday, March 29, Google.co.uk has turned its background black in support of the charity “Earth Hour.” The charity wants people to turn off the lights for an hour, preferably at a time one would have them on: 8:00-9:00pm local time.
Google.co.uk is (and I suppose Google.com will be) showing either humor or [...]

High-Dose Animal Testing Admitted Unreliable
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Saccharin has been known for decades to cause cancer in laboratory animals. Your answer may rightly be, “So what?”
Gilbert Ross, M.D. writing for The American Spectator, reports that federal risk assessors no longer trust high-dosage animal testing to predict what will happen in humans.
Forty-plus experts in various relevant fields reviewed our publication and agreed [...]

The P-Chem Prof and the ChE Student
Sunday, March 16th, 2008

I remember a discussion in my Physical Chemistry II class at the then University of Missouri-Rolla (now MST). Dr. D. Vincent Roach had just finished a day and a half derivation of the ideal gas law from statistical mechanics — he went into a little more detail than Wikipedia. You may remember the final line [...]

But They -Burned- It
Sunday, March 9th, 2008

The Washington Post reports on the arson committed to homes in Echo Lake, Washington, by the Earth Liberation Front.
“McMansions and RCDs r not green,” the sign said, referring to rural cluster subdivisions, the zoning that preserves open space while allowing more houses.
Even though the homes were built to be environmentally more friendly, the ELF terrorists [...]