Bob Novella has a great article discussing the improbability of actually being able to transport a person (or a hamburger).

This reminds me of some discussions we have in astronomy. When we discuss “a billion” to put it in perspective, a billion seconds ago was 31.69 years ago. A billion minutes ago was 1901 years ago. A billion hours ago was 114 thousand years ago. I kind of like to remember the number of seconds in a year as pi times 10^7 (31,556,926 seconds)… so, a billion years ago was a freak of a long time ago! A trillion is a thousand billion, and a quadrillion is a million billion. Just think, a quadrillion pennies stacked one on the other would reach out past the orbit of Saturn, almost a billion miles!

Anyhow, the human body has a heck of a lot of atoms, and he quotes from Laurance Krauss’ book on the Physics of Star Trek, invoking some truly breathtaking figures.

Consider one estimate of the information contained in a person in terms of position and orientation of all the atoms to the limit of the uncertainty principle. Physicist Laurence Krauss puts that at 10 to the 28 kilobits. That’s something like 12 billion billion million megabytes. This has been compared to 10 cm high 1Terabyte hard drives stacked up 100 light-years high. Even with compression we’d probably end up with a light year of hard drives. That’s a lot of hard drives.

Brian at Snapped Shot came up with this Wordle, based on the text of McCain’s acceptance speech. McCain is no “Great Communicator”, but he stayed on message and really emphasized two things, I think: “Country First” and “We’re here to fix what’s broken in Washington.”

Palin:

Obama:

Biden:

In a recent article, research is highlighted that shows the negative effect on diet of high-fructose soft drinks. I’ve been a proponant of this philosophy for years. If you are serious about losing weight, you seriously need to give up all soda, except for special occasions. Even diet soda.
[Read the article.]

(NaturalNews) The introduction of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in the seventies coincided with a marked rise in obesity in the U.S., leading to speculations that there might be a causal connection between HFCS consumption and weight gain (1). This seemed all the more plausible since HFCS consumption grew much faster than any other food intake.

I finished posting my California trip photos last night. Only a few dozen pictures, but here’s the link to the slide show.

• enclosure: http://avmedia.popularmechanics.com/audio/PopMechShow60.mp3 36749370 audio/mpeg

Adam Savage Podcast Interview

Here’s a little clip from a Popular Mechanics podcast interview with Adam Savage, co-host of Myth Busters. He talks about how science isn’t taught well in schools, and why that matters.

He is dead on correct about how we spend too much time teaching kids to pass tests (i.e. No Child Left Behind) instead of teaching them how to solve problems. We don’t foster creativity, instead we give them formulas and facts and tell them to memorize things. No wonder they hate math and science!

Here’s an article from Adam on Three Ways to Fix U.S. Science Education.

When Jamie Hyneman and I speak at teacher conventions, we always draw a grateful crowd. They tell us Thursday mornings are productive because students see us doing hands-on science Wednesday nights on our show MythBusters, and they want to talk about it. These teachers are so dedicated, but they have difficulty teaching for the standardized tests they’re given with the budgets they’re not given. It’s one reason the U.S. is falling behind other countries in science: By 2010, Asia will have 90 percent of the world’s Ph.D. scientists and engineers. We’re not teachers, but our show has taught us a lot about how to get people interested in science.