re: "remember that 40-50 years ago 'computers' for example needed an entire room, and were incomprehensibly weaker than a single computer chip nowadays. "

The full ranking and scores are here: [owe.6.co.ua] . The Nordic countries are on top on both the old HDI and new HSDI lists, because they're not only rich, healthy, and green, but they also look better than you. One surprise is New Zealand, which moved from 3rd to 2nd. Life is good in Middle Earth!

The world's highest observatory, the Tokyo Atacama Observatory ([en.wikipedia.org]), is solar-powered. The observatory is at 5640 m (18,500 ft) in the Andes in northern Chile, and currently has a 1 m infrared telescope. They plan to extend it to a 6.5 m scope. They built a photovoltaic solar array on the plateau…

It looks like NASA's Solar Probe is going to take SIX YEARS to actually get down into that close an orbit. It'll need 7 gravity assists from Venus to lose enough orbital velocity. It'll take about as long to get to the Sun as Cassini took to get to Saturn!

That presentation all by itself shows some of NASA's problems. It's so poorly laid out that you can't tell what it says. Look at that first page and see if you can find the actual conclusion. Is it "Falcon 9 would cost $3.977B based on NASA environment/culture. NAFCOM predicted $1.695B"? No, because that's belied…

As bad-assery goes, this is pretty minor compared to what he did later. Have a look at "Newton and the Counterfeiter" by Thomas Levenson, which discusses his time as Master of the Mint. He was in charge of actually coining all the money in England, and also of pursuing counterfeiters. That was a capital offense in…

I didn't mind the monsters or the found-footage effects or the relatively flat performances - those all worked fine for what they were trying to do. I liked it overall, and loved seeing the old Apollo footage again, especially the Earthrise.

The oldest major human organization is the Roman Catholic Church, and it turns out that they do have a long-term perspective on scientific research. They've been running observatories since 1774, and the current one, the Vatican Observatory [vaticanobservatory.org] has been going since 1891. It's mainly staffed by…

When Atlantis was docked with the International Space Station, there were 6 Americans in orbit: 4 on the Shuttle and 2 already on the station. The station only holds 6, and only 3 can come up at a time on Soyuz, of which at least 1 has to be a Russian pilot. That means there will always be at least 1 Russian on the…

You know, this isn't what I want from genetic engineering. I don't care about becoming slightly more bullet-resistant, especially if it means that no one of the opposite sex would ever want to touch me.

I haven't seen the movie and so feel free to indulge my super-intelligent ape sympathies. If I were Caesar, I would hide out in the Franco character's lab and cook me up some super-germs. Something that targets whatever the key genetic difference is between apes and humans. Something that makes humans really want…

The main kind of plankton that they're trying to fertilize with iron is called Prochlorococcus ( [en.wikipedia.org] ). It's the smallest photosynthetic organism known (less than a micron across), and wasn't even discovered until the 1980s. One of its discoverers, Prof. Sallie Chisholm of MIT ( [chisholmlab.mit.edu]…

Does Exxon count as a supervillain? They're clearly trying to make the Earth warmer.

There's also the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City CA [www.mjt.org] which specializes in the odd. You're never quite sure which exhibits are real and which aren't. Sure, the sculptures done inside the eyes of needles are exactly what they look to be, but was there really a folk superstition that it was…

A cool one that we may or may not have is magnetoception ([en.wikipedia.org] - a sense of the direction of the earth's magnetic field. Some birds definitely have it, and use it for navigation. Crocodiles have it, and people have strapped magnets on them to disorient them and keep them away from housing…

Does this also mean that mountaineers at high altitude can't whistle? The air pressure on top of Mt. Everest is about that low. As you ascend higher and higher do you get glummer and glummer for lack of whistling?

Last year actually set a record for the amount of time human beings spent in space, about five person-years. There are 6 people in orbit right now! They'll be 10 people up there when STS-135 docks. The Chinese are planning their own station up next year. Doesn't sound like the era is ending to me. When there's…

This looks like bad news whether you're a climate change denialist or not. We already know that there's been a huge kick to the climate system by the 30% increase in CO2 in the last 60 years. That's going to have an effect, full stop. This paper says that the effect can be faster and bigger than the models…

This is long before metal tools. How on earth did they cut out and shape these huge pieces of stone? Using just flint tools and maybe wedges it looks like it would take hundreds of person-years to carve these out. Can any paleo-masons out there answer?

Having one company control both the content and distribution of books is a truly terrible idea, and may actually be illegal. The Hollywood studios did this from the 1930s until the 1950s - they owned theaters and did production - until they were forced to divest their theater chains in the US by anti-trust…