Shelfari is a great site for sharing your bookshelf with friends. It’s an awesome way to discover new books, and see what your friends are reading. Check out my new profile and add me to your friend list.
https://www.shelfari.com/acorscadden
(mom, you should sign up for one of these accounts too…)
It is summer-time here in Victoria, BC, and we are getting a pretty good batch of nice weather. That means it’s steak time. I really like steak, but I also really like science, so I am usually still thinking about science while eating steak.
There has been advice around that recommends warming up a steak to room temperature before cooking it. I have always subscribed to this advice, and I am a little bit embarrassed to say that I had never really give it much thought before. The concept makes sense. I like rare steak, and I wouldn’t want the interior of that steak to still be cold after I barely cooked it.
After a quick recall of heat transfer equations, I remembered that most heat transfer rates have a factor comprised of temperature differentials in them. An equation for heat transfer rate in conduction follows:
Disregard everything except for the T1 and T2 at the top. T1 – T2 is the temperature differential between the two materials. In this case it is the temperature of the BBQ and the meat. Let’s assume that the BBQ is a constant 300 degrees C. Meat straight from the fridge is around 2 degrees, and meat left out in a room would probably be around 15 degrees. Meat straight from the fridge would have a factor of 298, and meat left out in the room would have a factor of 285. Because cooking a steak doesn’t take very long, I don’t think that the difference between these two factors would make much of difference.
time to go test this….
Last night on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed the author of “Absence of Mind”, Marilynne Robinson. ”Absence of Mind” is an attack on atheists that fly the banner of science. At the beginning of the interview, Stewart asked some fairly straight forward questions, but only received lace doily answers. It was obvious that Robinson didn’t really have a core thesis to her book, and she only made random claims that religion and science aren’t mutually exclusive. Upon initially not receiving any revealing answers, Stewart failed to ask any more deeper probing questions. In fact, he did the opposite. He started to agree and sympathize with her. This lead to one of Stewart’s worst quotes of the evening:
The more you delve into science, the more it relies on faith.
Stewart was referring to antimatter, inferring that one needs faith to believe in antimatter. There is actually a lot of evidence that support’s antimatter’s existence. Faith is not required to believe in antimatter.
Robinson fails to see the simple fact that religion and science are mutually exclusive by definition. Religion relies on faith, and science relies on evidence. It is impossible to be a religious scientist. If someone claims they are, they are neither truly religious or a true scientist.
After listening to Robinson’s interview, I would not recommend buying her book, as it would most likely be a waste of time.
Link to the interview for Americans
Link to the interview for Canadians
…sorry to everyone else…here’s google
Since I signed up for my first Google account, which was sometime in 2006, Google has kindly been keeping track of my web history. As of today, I have performed a total of 20900 Google searches. That averages to about 14/day. In practice, I would have performed many more searches than that, for Google’s web history only keeps track of the searches made while I am logged in. I am rarely logged into my google account when I am on the computers at school, at friend’s places or on my phone. Also, when I first got my Google account I didn’t stay logged in all the time, so Google’s web history wouldn’t have known about a lot of my searches.
The calendar over to the right shows the Google searches that I have made last month. Most days I am performing between 50-100 searches, and I am breaching the 100 search/day mark on several days.
…yea…I probably spend too much time on the interwebs….
I realize that picking on creationists is almost too easy, and that I do it too much here, but sometimes it is just too hard to resist posting videos like this. Watching these kinds of videos triggers a bunch of mixed emotions in me. I normally start off laughing at the beginning, then shift to being angry, and then end up feeling sad for the children at the end. This really has to be considered child abuse.
check it out….
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