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Here's a Fox News segment on the Trophy Active Defense Systems, a division of General Dynamics. Although the video makes it look like it's all but installed on IDF vehicles, Defense Update throws some cold water on the rosy predictions, quoting US Army deputy for acquisition and systems management, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey A, Sorenson, who said the project is obviously not good to go. "If this thing was ready to go, my question would be, why wasn’t it on the particular tanks that went into Lebanon?" he said, noting that no Israeli Merkava tanks carried the Trophy system.
Oh yeah, another problem…
The New England Journal of Medicine weighs in on an increasingly pertinent question: Does a cell-based breakthrough belong to the cell donor or the people who harvested and developed it?
It's not as simple as it seems at first thought.
Slate published a short piece on a recent academic paper that suggested several possible correlations between the increase of autism and television watching.
I just glossed the article and thought seems far-fetched to me and moved on. Over at the Freakonomics blog, Steven D. Levitt did what he does so well: Examine the data and explore how it might yield false positives. I don't always agree with Levitt and Dubner's conclusions, but I love the way they approach data—they suspect it of trying to trick them, which John Atkinson assures me, is the only way to approach testing.
Read…
"So, what am I looking at?" she asked.
That's the Fatman iTube vacuum tube amp and docking station for your iPod. It's pretty cool, right?
"It's ugly."
Ugly?
"Yeah, I mean look at that metal bar holding the iPod in place, and why do the tubes have to stick out like that, and what's that big black thing to the left of the tubes? What is that thing? What am I supposed to do with it, and where am I supposed to put it???"
Interesting.
"Here: This looks interesting to me."
Have the changes in our diet in the past century constituted "a very large uncontrolled experiment that may have contributed to the societal burden of aggression, depression and cardiovascular death"?
The Guardian says it's possible.
Maybe so, says The Village Voice's Ben Zwickel. Perhaps a better theory is that he's "a canary in the coal mine of pop music, and when pop music's good—or interesting, at least—Yankovic has more to sing about."
Jerome Harris sends along a link to "White & Nerdy'"
Dial "M" for Musicology recounts the confrontation between champion of the world Mike Tyson and 77-year-old philosopher A. J. Ayer.
I've just recently discovered the blog We Are All Mozart, billed as "A project to create new works and change the perception of the music of our time."
I'm hooked. Here's a recent two-part essay on music and electronics:
"Turning the Knob"
"Tweak Me Up Baby"
At a get-together the other night, I observed John Atkinson squinting at his cell phone when he received an in-coming call, and parroted Jon Stewart's remark that the amazing thing about the Mark Foley scandal wasn't that there was abuse in the page system, but rather that a 54-year-old could text message.
This cell phone microscope is what John needed—and it's cheap!
Via Gizmodo.