Tag: duane storey Posts

There is a relatively new device called “The English Mosquito” which is being used in England to control where young people typically gather. The device works by emitting high-frequency sounds that only young people (typically younger than 20 years of age) have the ability to hear. Because it’s fairly annoying, it causes young people to eventually leave a particular area. Human right’s groups are obviously unimpressed with the blanket use of the devices: Aynsley-Green said about 3,500 of the devices are in use across England to split up gatherings of youth in areas such as parks and shops. “These devices are indiscriminate and target all children and young people, including babies, regardless of whether they are behaving or misbehaving,” he added. Apparently some people feel that having young people gather in a place like a park is a huge problem. I mean, it’s quite possible they might pull out a […]

As of October of 2007, Apple has sold approximately 120 million iPods worldwide. At approximately $250 each, that’s $30 billion dollars in revenue. It is without a doubt one of Apple’s crowning technical achievements, both for the ingenuity of the hardware and for the revolutionary integration with software on several platforms. And yet lately, as I’ve trekked the 30 minute walk between my home and work with my iPod blaring away, I’ve started to wonder what the impact of this technology really is. For starters, those of us who listen to iPods frequently are subjecting ourselves to potential hearing damage. Even at my age, I find myself frequently asking people to repeat themselves. I’ve also found that I have a great deal of difficulty hearing individuals in crowded places or bars with lots of chatter. And while my hearing has never been perfect (thanks to an uncle that went a […]

I get a lot of notifications in my inbox daily about scientific rumblings going on in the world, but this one caught my eye this evening. Some recent NASA data in the arctic region seems to point to a huge acceleration in the melting rate of the ice — should the melting continue at its current rate, NASA scientists project that it’s only a matter of years before the arctic might be completely ice free in the summers. An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years. Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four […]

A while ago I wrote an entry about Megan Meier, a 13 year old girl who was driven to commit suicide by means of a fake MySpace user account. Megan, Image from CNN A few minutes ago I read this article which indicates that no one involved in this tragedy will be prosecuted whatsoever. St. Charles County, Missouri, Prosecuting Attorney Jack Banas said an 18-year-old woman posed as “Josh” on MySpace to find out what Megan was saying about a neighbor’s daughter. The message said Megan was “mean” to her friends, Banas said. “There is no way that anybody could know that talking to someone or saying that you’re mean to your friends on the Internet would create a substantial risk,” Banas said. “It certainly created a potential risk and, unfortunately for the Meiers, that potential became reality. But under the law we just couldn’t show that.” But Banas said […]

Vancouver, being a coastal city surrounded by mountains, has one of the most moderate climates in all of Canada. The average temperature in the summer probably hovers around 20C or so, and in the winter, rarely drops below 0C. Last time I checked, only one out of every five Christmases in Vancouver is white. And despite the relatively warm temperatures here, walking the streets of this city in winter you’ll see the homeless struggling to keep warm, often forced to cover themselves with newspapers, cardboard boxes, or whatever damp clothing can be found in the dumpsters. Every night, they find whatever protection from the elements they can, wrap themselves up, and go to sleep.

In 1905, a research paper was submitted that forever changed how science views the world. In it, the author postulated that the laws of physics, which were at the current time regarded as universal, actually depended on the relative motion between the object and that of the observer. The consequences of that paper are far reaching, for it implies that even the passage of time itself depends on motion. That is, two clocks that are absolutely synchronized at rest will no longer be synchronized if the clocks are forced to travel at different speeds. That result, proven time and time again in many experiments, is woven into many current technologies, one of which is the GPS navigation system, where corrections must be made to the algorithm based on the relative speeds of the various satellites in orbit. What’s extremely interesting about this discovery was that it was not made by […]

‘Nuff said.