The del.icio.us automatic blog posting that usually produces the daily links dump posts here has been broken during the recent ScienceBlogs upgrade. The links dump posts from last Thursday on didn’t happen, but we’ve kludged up a way to get that material back. These are the links that should’ve posted on Friday the 24th:
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Jay Pasachoff leads another eclipse expedition taking students to China. And manages not to mention any of them by name in the press release.
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“Now it is a truth universally acknowledged that any single author in possession of insufficient sales/celebrity* must be in want of someone to blame. And the handiest scapegoats, after the gods, the times and the essential unworthiness of the world to receive mine or anyone else’s pearls of insight and artful prose, are, of course, each author’s publisher.”
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“I think there a few really basic things that professors who make significant use of lectures in their teaching can do to improve them, whether or not they use any kind of presentation technology. “
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“Separating carbon dioxide from its polluting source, such as the flue gas from a coal-fired power plant, may soon become cleaner and more efficient. A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher has developed a screening method that would use ionic liquids – a special type of molten salt that becomes liquid under the boiling point of water (100 degrees Celsius) – to separate carbon dioxide from its source, making it a cleaner, more viable and stable method than what is currently available.”
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Congratulations to Dr. Dre.
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“Extracting clean, fresh water from salty water requires energy. The reverse process–mixing fresh water and salty water–releases energy. Physicists began exploring the idea of extracting energy from mixing fresh and salty waters, a process known as salination, in the 1970s. They found that the energy released by the world’s freshwater rivers as they flowed into salty oceans was comparable to “each river in the world ending at its mouth in a waterfall 225 meters [739 feet] high,” according to a 1974 research paper in the journal Science. But those who have chased the salination dream have collided with technological barriers.”
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“Brandon del Pozo is a captain in the NYPD (now working for Internal Affairs on internal police corruption cases, but with plenty of experience as a beat cop in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and as a police instructor too). He is also a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at CUNY. He has sent us a post with a different perspective on police discretion and the Gates arrest than that of my last post. We are publishing his post in the interests of furthering serious debate.”
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“I am about to actively try to dissuade you from writing a few different kinds of books because they have historically sold poorly, will continue to sell poorly, and if your book falls into one of these categories it is going to sell poorly, regardless of how awesome you think it is.”
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“This century, nearly all of the great satellites, observatories, computer simulations and experiments that are returning tremendous amounts of scientific data about the Universe — from our own Solar System to the farthest reaches of space — are run by huge teams of scientists, not just a few individuals. So for the greatest discovery of the 2000s, I choose the most important satellite, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP. “
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“At risk of being the buzzkill distracting from all the cool space travel history and heated debates about NASA’s future, I think it will be interesting to do a little bit of the math behind basic rocketry.”
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“With enrollment through the roof, any fallow space on campus is at a premium. Suddenly, spaces that have been kept open ‘just in case’ of future expansion is on the table. And long-standing historical gentlemen’s agreements about who controls what are abruptly up for grabs. Through trial and error, I’m slowly discovering a method for handling these.”
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“The lawsuit, which did not include a dollar amount sought, will bring into focus how the N.C.A.A. handles player images, especially after players leave college and are no longer bound by N.C.A.A. rules, and its vast licensing deals, which are estimated at about $4 billion. None of that money goes to the former players whose images, jersey numbers and likenesses are used. “