How Do We See Other People?

I understand that it’s easy to just see the downsides of people, everyone has flaws and obviously sometimes those flaws are expressed more strongly in some people than others; but I fear that sometimes people intentionally ignore the good sides of people. Perhaps this is an irrational thought, but it does concern me that cynicism is the default position for so many people; not that there’s anything wrong with looking at the negative in detail, but if you stare at it for too long, you might miss a couple of things.

Now I’m a natural pessimist, but I do try to see the good in everyone, even if sometimes it’s hard to find; if nothing else but to try and get the full picture, but I appreciate that in doing so I probably become one of those people that others instantly dislike, if I’m not there already of course.

I’d like to think that people can look past the bad aspects of my personality, but the fact that I have a rather overwhelming number of them probably doesn’t help my case, so in preparation for life perhaps I should have been handed a list of things to do and not to do, just to make my life that little bit easier.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to help being an unfunny, soppy know-it-all, but if I did, would people look at me differently or would they be eyeing my admittedly unpleasing face and thinking that something wasn’t quite right, perhaps in the same way that you look at hipsters to try and figure out if they actually need those thick-rimmed glasses or not?

I’m probably one of those people also who probably couldn’t come up with a list of upsides for themselves, but perhaps that in itself is an upside, it’s certainly a few flights away from narcissism but not putting a lot of value in yourself probably isn’t one of the sexiest traits you can possibly have.

Good News/Bad News: Biology Meets Technology

Or should it really be called good news this week? Because you know, I really couldn’t find two news stories I wanted to talk about this week. I do have a bad news item this week but it’s pretty minor and I’ll probably put it out there now, because I don’t really have a whole lot to say about it.

If you live in the UK (as I do), the promise of an ipad with 4G technology is… debatable…

Not because the ipad doesn’t have the technology to back up the claim, but because of two reasons that are more a question of functionality.

1) 4G systems aren’t widely available over here.
2) When they do they’ll probably work on a different frequency, and therefore will not interact with the ipads that are tuned to US frequencies.

So that sucks if you’re an apple fan/someone with lots of money to throw away.

Take a look for yourself, then we can have a discussion about why there is a product on the market that’s a giant iphone without the phone.

But if you’re excited about the future of tiny, tiny electronics I may have something nice to tell you in regards to utilising the piezoelectric effect and its effects at work on bacteriophages.

For those of you who don’t know what a bacteriophage is from the name alone, you’ll have certainly seen a picture of one at some point. These are viruses that use bacteria for reproduction and metabolism, and are essentially harmless to us because of this specialisation. They look (at least to me) like the Apollo 11 landing module, what with their bulbous heads and spindly legs.

Look them up, they’re awesome.

What’s very interesting, and what the American department of energy discovered, is that when a film of these viruses had an electrical field applied to it, the helical proteins covering the viruses responded by twisting and turning. An interesting phenomena you might say, and I would agree, however, the really cool part was that, using negatively charged amino acid residues they were able to increase the voltage of the virus, an act that was also observed when stacking 20 layers of these viruses.

So, and correct me if I’m wrong, this suggests that we may be able to utilise bigger voltages on a smaller scale using these creatures.

And that’s pretty damn cool.

Good News/Bad News: Save The Koalas & Sillicene

Hello and welcome to good news/bad news; a segment that I should probably stop introducing now it’s coming into it’s fourth/fifth/sixth week but that I refuse to stop explaining.

Every Monday I go through the news and find stories that I deem good and bad, report them to you in my own special way, and then spread some youtube love to perk you back up.

First up, the news that we may be on the way to manufacturing smaller and smaller chips to electronic devices, and much sooner than we previously thought we may be sliding down the slide of progress.

Still don’t know what I’m talking about?

Go to this link and catch yourself up.

What we have learned from the molecule graphene (a regular sheet-like structure of carbon atoms) may be applied to its elemental cousin silicon, which is in the same group on the periodic table (and therefore shares many chemical properties) as everyone’s favourite element. By utilising silicone, according to New Scientist, we may be able to more easily integrate this molecular structure into the previously established silicone-based chips.

That, my friends, is good news; although I am a little sceptical of the use of silicone just because it’s not as chemically ‘flexible’ as carbon. However, the results are looking pretty good so far.

Alas, the bad news is pretty tragic.

Take a look over here and cry your eyes out for the decline of Koalas, everyone’s favourite marsupial.

Don’t you look at me like that, kangaroo!

This is the sad news that parts of Australia (not the whole country) have now classed the humble koala as a vulnerable or threatened species. In fact, according to the BBC; in New South Wales and Queensland, population numbers have taken a 40% hit since 1990.

This does not mean that Koalas are doomed, but in certain areas of Australia there has been a big drop in numbers, and because they are both iconic and adorable, Australia has a duty to restore the koala kingdom to its former glory!

Hey, anyone want to see a koala running down a hall?

Good News/Bad News: Both Sexes to Live Long and Prosper… also One Direction suck

Welcome to this week’s… sorry, I mean last week’s good news/bad news, where I find news stories that both make me grin like a blissful idiot and make me want to shove my face into a wood chipper until my scowl emerges from the other end, bloody, covered in wood chippings and flung into a million little, fleshy pieces.

First, we’ve got some good news, news which may mean that equality is coming in a completely different way than we usually think of it when we talk like that. Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that women are going to be paid the same as men, it doesn’t mean that gays can now marry anywhere and everywhere and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t still policemen out to capture young, black people.

No, as much as all of those things would be nice we’ve got a different flavour of good news and that is that by 2030, thanks to advantages in medicine and healthcare, men may statistically come to live as long as women.

Yeah, that’s right ladies, now we are one step closer to gaining immortality!

Take a long look people of the republic of internet, because this could be awesome.

One of the proposed reasons for where the graph of life expectancy is heading is a drop in the number of male smokers, something which for some of us may be apparent from the people we know, young and old, and for some a source of confusion, as smoking is still the official activity of the young and tenacious.

The bad news here is incredibly different, and while I apologise wholeheartedly for the disparity, the utter unrelatedness, the nonconnecteditude of these two items…

I really hate One Direction, and apparently I should be a little cynical about some of their fans too.

Take a look here and see what I mean.

So as much as I despise gossip stories, I’m reporting this for the sheer extremity of 1D fans’ reactions to some lady on twitter, who just happened to be lip buddies with the ugliest member of the band.

I suppose if nothing else comes of this, at least after the things she’s been called she might no longer know what makes her beautiful anymore, and as we all know, that is the key to attractiveness in the eyes of the musical monstrosity that is One Direction.

Anyway, for some reason, even though the guy’s still under concerns about possibly having a sexually transmitted disease, fans called the woman a ‘fucking bitch’ and a ‘prostitute’.

Perhaps they should calm down and realise that if they threw a brick at their boyfriends’ faces; they’d probably look like Harry from One Direction as well.

Good News/Bad News: The Glacial Resist Stance (Part 2)

Welcome back to last week’s good news/bad news where I haven’t quite finished with you yet.

I think you will notice, if you look at the language used by my four different sources for this glacial bulk-up story that the more reliable sources don’t try to ‘forget global warming’, and to be honest, the fact that the Daily Mail can say things like this and still have the huge following that it possesses really makes me wonder about the state of society today.

What did nature have to say?

- “some glaciers in the Karakoram mountain range are growing despite a warming global climate”
- “the glaciers are indeed becoming heftier, if only slightly“

In fact the glaciers gained ice that would be the equivalent of 11cm of liquid water, and this is a good thing, this is good news. The fact that there are strongholds of ice in the world, however few, means that we may be a teensy, teensy bit less quickly screwed.

But when we have sources like the Daily Mail proclaiming that we should ‘forget global warming’ because of this? That will only inspire more apathy among its readers, inspiring less people to try and help the earth out while we still can, because you can guarantee when the time comes that it’s too late to save the earth, the Daily Mail will have a different headline to read. It’ll probably be something like ‘Science destroys planet’ where they take all blame from the media and blame scientists, muslims and immigrants for not saving the world fast enough and conveniently forget how often they discouraged trying to help the only planet we bloody have.

Have I mentioned I hate the Daily Mail?

Because I really hate the Daily Mail.

To lighten the mood however, I give you a video of homegrown labware being made in a 3D printer, custom labware for complex chemical reactions. I love this technology.

Good News/Bad News: The Glacial Resist Stance (Part 1)

Hello and welcome to last week’s good news/bad news, the segment where I find something fresh off the press that represents good and something that represents bad, all in my opinion and all without shame.

This week I have the same story from four different sources and I want to make it clear from this why the daily mail should be forced into bankruptcy, and if that’s not possible, for every copy, every building and every website associated with it to burst into flames.

Because this issue deals with issues of climate change, and the daily mail, being the propaganda paper that it is, has pretty much become our bad news for this week.

Let’s go deeper, shall we?

So…

In the blue corner, we have nature – the weekly journal of science!

In the red corner, we have the daily mail – the daily journal of bollocks!

In the yellow corner, we have BBC news – the taxpayer-funded, usually reliable journal of… news?

In the green corner? Well, whatever colour this corner is, we have the guardian, the usually reliable paper that houses Charlie Brooker, Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh on occasion, and therefore a paper which I have to try pretty hard to suppress my bias for.

From that alone, you should get a pretty good idea of how this may turn out, but the most important fact in all of this is the news item.

And that news item deals with the observations of a glacier on the border of Pakistan and China, a glacier that is apparently gaining ice.

Already I can hear you guessing which way the daily mail swung out on this one, and if you’ve already clicked the link you know how bad a job they did with their headlines this time.

‘Forget global warming, scientists discover glaciers in Asia getting BIGGER’ it reads.

And I facepalm so hard my hand practically cracks open my skull.

So, you decide which paper you think won this one out while I prime myself for the second part of this tomorrow, with this unaddressed letter to the daily mail.

Dear Daily Mail,

Here on earth, we have a process that we like to call ‘science’.

It would seem that you don’t quite understand how the process of science works, so let me hit you with some knowledge. One data point does not mean a well-established theory is wrong.

The evidence has to weigh out, and unfortunately for our planet, the fact this Asian glacier may be gaining ice does not overrule the many and more elaborate observations that support the theory that the climate of the earth is changing, and in fact, this glacier growth does not necessarily even dispute this theory.

So before you decide to be sensationalists, get your facts straight.

Because when it comes to matters such as the possible man-made destruction of our planet, we don’t need any more people to be stuffed with the false impression that climate change is pseudoscience.

Please stop publishing and kindly leave your offices to sit and weep in whatever circle of hell you left your intellectual and journalistic integrity in.

Yours sincerely,

Me.

Good News/Bad News: Tyson On Asteroids

I suppose this isn’t really news, but it came up when I looked at google news so I’m counting it for this week, I mean last week, and because of the mix of hope and dubious implications if we are held back by such simple things as funding priorities, Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s article in Wired magazine today shall be our stories for the day.

So, welcome to last week’s good news/bad news, where each week, usually a day late, I find some good news and some bad news to share with you, the good people of the internet and soothe you into taking your leave from this blog with something from youtube designed to make you smile.

It’s your job to decide whether I succeeded I suppose.

Take a lookie here for the article. As always Tyson is extremely eloquent and a riveting communicator of science.

In discussion about the threat of asteroids to the earth today, Neil Tyson mentioned three ways in which we could possibly prevent asteroid impacts. Stop me if you’ve heard this but it’s always interesting to me to ponder how we could save ourselves from destruction without the aid of Bruce Willis and Steven Tyler’s over-sized mouth.

1. Nuclear bomb

2. Neutron bomb

3. Gravitational tractor

The first involves blowing up the potentially deadly target, the second would alter the asteroid’s orbit through detonation and the third would attempt to alter the direction of the space rock with the gravity of a probe sent towards the asteroid.

The third seems like the best choice at the moment, although if the odds remain in our favour we will have no need to deploy any of these, so keep your fingers crossed and ignore those who would tell you that an impact is ‘due’.

The bad news I suppose is that, even if we dismiss the coastal damage that could be caused by the impact of Apophis in 2036 (if its trajectory happens to hit the right/wrong angle), that earth will in all fairness probably be hit by an asteroid long before it gets swallowed up by the sun expanding.

So if you were planning on staying alive for millions of years and being the captain going down with your ship, you’d better work out some way of increasing funding for these preventative measures.

Now since we’re in Tyson’s area now, how about some melodies from the man himself.

Good News/Bad News: Acid Wielding Racists & Dementia Research

Hello and welcome to last week’s Good News/Bad News, which has now appeared more often on a Monday than a Sunday, making me question whether or not today’s post is actually this week’s edition. Regardless, each week I find two news stories, one good and one bad, both in my opinion of course before you get snappy, and I warm you all up at the end with something a little friendlier than taking acid to the face.

But only a little.

Alright then. I know that recently I’ve been hating on David Cameron a lot so today I’ll take a break from that and actually reveal a news story where despite his plan to bastardise the NHS in Britain we have a good call on health issues from the government’s size.

It’s nice when you break the stereotype isn’t it?

So this is the news that as the cost of dementia to the NHS rises continually, there are new plans to increase the funding for dementia research to sixty six million pounds by 2015, compared to the 26.6 million figure from 2010, although I couldn’t find a more recent figure.

I think most people would find it hard to argue that funding for dementia research is a bad idea. This illness is hard on the people it affects and everyone around them and the more we understand about it the better prepared we will potentially be to deal with it.

No information on whether Cameron has a family history or not so I can’t remark cynically about vested interests as my political leanings are encouraging me to.

Take a look at the story here and see if you can find anything that I missed etc.

Next up, we have some bad news, bad news that suggests to me that we should be careful about who we allow to possess corrosive acids. Perhaps we shouldn’t let racists into chemistry departments? Perhaps I should get some acid for the woman in the car right outside of my window that’s in the process of parking in the perfect place for the sun to glare in my eye while I’m wiring this?

In Salford, a black woman pushing her baby along in a pram got acid thrown at her to make some nice hatred sauce to go with the racist and sexual comments directed at her.

The woman suffered burns on her chest and back but her baby and her face were not harmed, rendering my earlier comment redundant.

The white, balding man in his 40s with a burn-like mark on his lip who did it should be careful after this stupid decision because it is being treated as a hate crime.

Take a look for yourself here.

Personally, I really can’t understand what would compel anyone to do something so pointless, hateful and stupid. Not only was it reckless and bigoted but he gained nothing from this except for the possibility of going to prison and being known around the UK as a massive dickhead.

Well done you racist guy for becoming infamous in the correct use of the word.

And now for something completely different.

On Categories

Just a quick note, for all of you who haven’t check out my guest post over at teen skepchick that went up yesterday, I’m pretty happy with it and I hope that you will be too.

Also, I’ve started a segment I’m hoping to make regular: Good News/Bad News, the second part of which I posted yesterday to absolutely no views, so check it out.

When I get around to fixing the categories on this site, which I completely ruined a few weeks ago, you’ll be able to find it in the categories tab, and I’ll get around to that in the next few days, but for now I must leave you with the mess the category section has temporarily become.

But in the mean time, I shall take requests for categories.

Even if it’s freebird, stairway to heaven and smells like teen spirit, I’ll try to do at least one post for each suggestion, I’m always happy to hear from you, the two of you who read this and I’m even happier when there are more than two of you who read this, granted it’ll be easier for people to actually find the stuff they’re looking for when I fix the categories but I’m going to have to do at least one more piece of the four pieces of coursework I’ve been set to be completed just as I have an exam I need to revise for, *deep breath* before I can grant myself the few hours it will take to go through the 600 or so posts I have here and rearrange them into the semantic buckets they need to fall into.

For example, this one might fall into the category of… shameless plugging as well as blogs with basically no substance that still manage to gurgle out words until they brim over the three hundred margin.

Good News/Bad News: Badass Bears & Empty Wallets For Drivers

Hello again, welcome to last week’s edition of Good News/Bad News in which a day late I take a look at a story with a positive outlook for mankind, myself, yourself or the world and another story that makes me raise an eyebrow, froth at the mouth or puke on the carpet. But don’t worry, I’ll bring the mood back up with something heartwarming plucked from the very epitome of youtube finesse to avoid leaving you with that washed out feeling.

Please note that if you are offended by my stance on certain news stories, that I don’t care!

Alright, first up we’ve got some good news in the form of sleepy, sleepy bears.

Down in Minnesota, Wyoming, or should I say across to the left for a thousand miles, zoologists and medical researchers have observed the remarkable ability of hibernating bears to heal.

Now, before you try to cut yourself and send me a time lapse video of it healing back to try and prove a point, these bears are scary good at healing wounds according to this BBC article, and have even grown back new hair follicles and retained little scarring in their yearly nap they take.

One Professor David Garshelis was quoted as implying that if we can understand how bears heal this way we could potentially translate this into research for human regeneration.

Very interesting.

Now, for something that’s not so great. Here’s the bad news.

For people living in Britain, trying to avoid ‘falling behind our competitors’ may mean more tolled roads, resulting from a plan to privatise certain British roads despite warnings that more tolls may not make much of a dent in congestion.

So while we spend billions on military projects David Cameron is scratching his head wondering where the money is going, in response, instead of cutting operations to interfere overseas he’s decided to do something else that many voters disagree with and give more opportunities to milk their wallets while out on the road.

Well done David, for that wonderful plan, although I’d much rather it was the roads than the NHS.

Read the story here, complain in the comments section and if I’m actually wrong about something feel free to comment to, just not in as threatening a manner as the complainers.