Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

For the 800th anniversary of Maimonides’ death, JNUL has made a collection of manuscripts available on-line.

Today is the 800th anniversary, in the sense that it has been precisely 800 solar years since the sad event, which occurred on December 13, 1204. You may object that today is in fact the 20th, and you’d be right. But when looking at a date from before 1582, one must always consider the possibility that it is a Julian date and not a Gregorian one. The Julian calendar had drifted 7 days by 1204; I’ve corrected for the drift.

How did I know the date was Julian? I checked it against the Hebrew date of his death, 20 Tevet 4965. You can do the same thing at this handy calendar site. This year the 20th of Tevet will fall on January 1st.

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This one is from sf-f.org: a neural network grown in a petri dish learned to fly a jet simulator. I don’t think it can land, though, so we’ll have human pilots for a few more years yet.

The 2004 Geminid Meteor Shower peaks today. Look south toward Gemini either before dawn Monday or around midnight Monday night/Tuesday morning.

Geek link of the day: free programming books (via Weblog Tools Collection)

I firmly believe that the best things in life are sugar, salt, and fat. Sugar is the gas that makes your body run, salt is an essential mineral without which you’d keel over, and fat…well, fat just tastes good. Salt gets a bad rap, though. We wince in horror when Emeril tosses a handful of it into his latest recipe, we scold people who eat it straight from the shaker (take my word for it on this one), and we feel potato chip guilt—because we know the lowly potato chip is nothing more than a vehicle for the administration of the forbidden mineral.

But I’ll never turn down a potato chip again, because salt is actually completely harmless for the majority of munchers. Earlier this year, JunkScience reported on the Federal government’s ongoing and groundless
Salt Assault. I just spotted the news in their 2004 Junk Science Awards, where the salt assault placed at #9. Here’s the blurb, in their own words:

In early 2004, a panel of the National Academy of Science‚Äôs Institute of Medicine urged that the recommended daily allowance of sodium be drastically reduced by almost 40% and that the average American‚Äôs actual sodium consumption be slashed by more than 60% — even though 10 major studies conducted since 1995 have all concluded that lower sodium diets don‚Äôt produce health benefits and may pose risks for some. Why the extreme recommendation? Political correctness run amok. Read more…

I think I’ll break out the chips to celebrate.

[Update: I posted a longer version of this entry at GNXP, with a bonus link to Emeril’s malassadas recipe.]

Alert system of the day: The Onion’s Iraqi Terror Alert System

From SpaceWeather.com: early Tuesday morning the Moon will eclipse Jupiter. The occultation will be visible from the eastern two-thirds of North America.

Via Improbable Research: Jarl Flensmark postulates that schizophenia is caused by high heels. Yet another reason to wear your Birkenstocks.

SpaceWeather notes that Halloween is a cross-quarter date, one of the days that falls exactly between an equinox and a solstice. The other three are Groundhog Day (Candlemas or Imbolg), May Day (Beltane), and August 1st (Lammas).

The cross-quarter days establish offset seasons, sometimes called the solar seasons. Solar Winter starts today and ends, hog willing, on Groundhog Day, with the solstice in the middle. But in my experience, August 1st is still high summer. Halloween, while a chilly, wet day, is unlikely to produce snow, while the groundhog is frequently snowed in in his burrow come Groundhog Day. I’ll stick to the modern seasons.

Via GNXP: hobbits have been unearthed on the island of Flores. Here are some links about them.

• Cave dig unearths world of the ‘Hobbit’ [Telegraph UK]
• A stranger from Flores [Nature]
• Little lady of Flores forces rethink of human evolution [Nature]
• The Flores find [Nature]

Update: There’s plenty of hobbit fun and puns on slashdot.

I heard about learned helplessness from a Metro column on the Red Sox, back when they were down three games and looking, well, helpless. I was curious, I googled, and this is what I found:

• Learned helplessness - a basic introduction, with the ubiquitous story about the dog in a box.
• Eliminating Helplessness - an application of the idea to classroom teaching.
• Learned Helplessness: A Critique of Research and Theory - for every theory, there’s a debunking.

Pretty picture of the day: a new Apple mini-store

I blogged at GNXP about recent IQ news. If you’d like more medical anomalies, here’s an article about ‘truth wizards’, human lie detectors.