‘We’ll soon know what historic Martian data NASA is sitting on…unless it isn’t.’ (CNET). I am eagerly awaiting the early December announcement. I’m predicting NASA will confirm the detection of organic compounds in the Martian soil. Attempts at deflecting what they have so far let slip are just that.

A question for any readers who might be in the know: a space vehicle is sent to another planet to scan for organic compounds. What do you have to do to disinfect it from traces of earthly organics to avoid a false positive? Is the trip through the void of space enough? What has NASA done?

“We all want more pals, but a Scottish survey suggests you should think twice before accepting your mom’s friend request.” (CNET).

‘The girl who feels no pain was in the kitchen, stirring ramen noodles, when the spoon slipped from her hand and dropped into the pot of boiling water. It was a school night; the TV was on in the living room, and her mother was folding clothes on the couch. Without thinking, Ashlyn Blocker reached her right hand in to retrieve the spoon, then took her hand out of the water and stood looking at it under the oven light.” (NYTimes).

‘When Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger told NPR earlier this week that the Mars rover had found something that “is gonna be one for the history books,” most of the speculation centered around the possibility that the surface probe has discovered evidence of organic life on the Red Planet.

Perhaps, but we won’t know the answer until next month when NASA said it will spill the beans about the “historic” data from a recent Curiosity soil sample-collecting foray that the mission’s “science team is busily chewing away on,” as Grotzinger put it.

One thing’s for sure—the space agency that seemed on the verge of irrelevance in the public mind just a couple of years ago is back to playing the public relations game like nobody’s business.’ (ThinkDigit News).

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‘Apparently in China, bad genes are grounds for divorce — and six-figure fines. “Failed relationships can get ugly,” says Ji Lin at the Irish Examiner, but the weird, sad tale of Jian Feng and his wife “really gives meaning to the old cliché.” The story starts out conventionally enough: Feng, a resident of northern China, met and married a beautiful woman, and they had a baby girl. That’s when things reportedly got, um, ugly. Feng was “so sure of his own good looks, so crushed by the wrinkly ugly mess that was handed to him in a swaddle, that he decided to sue his wife because the awful looking baby was totally her fault,” says Madeline Holler at Babble. And then things went from ugly to crazy: He won.’ (Yahoo! News)

‘ “It started,” he says, “by accident.” As a young, idealistic psychology student, Olivera interned at El Borda in the early nineties. “I found a lot of my friends and family kept asking me what it was like in there,” he explains. “I decided to let the patients tell them.” He started a radio workshop. Not as strange as it sounds in a psychiatric hospital that offers tango workshops, circus workshops, a patient-run bakery and an artist’s cultural center where the community and university students also come to paint. I have fallen down the rabbit hole.’ (The Atlantic).

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Epidemic of “…a trendy form of retribution in a country in which fidelity is a strongly appreciated value…” (Guardian).

‘We may finally have proof that there are aliens among us. Using a complicated system unknown to us humans, aliens appear to have managed to beam their image onto the spectacular Northern Lights sky.’  (Yahoo! News UK)

‘The internet is a new lifeform that shows the first signs of intelligence. So says brain scientist and serial entrepreneur Jeff Stibel.’  (BBC)

‘A South Pacific island, shown on marine charts and world maps as well as on Google Earth and Google Maps, does not exist, Australian scientists say.’

(BBC News)

‘Look past the award-season hype and the current bounty of decent, good, great movies, and one thing becomes clear: We live in interesting narrative times, cinematically. In “Cloud Atlas” characters jump across centuries, space and six separate stories into a larger tale about human interconnectedness. In “Anna Karenina” Tolstoy’s doomed heroine suffers against visibly artificial sets, a doll within an elaborate dollhouse, while in “Life of Pi” a boy and a tiger share a small boat in a very big sea amid long silences, hallucinatory visuals and no obvious story arc. In movies like these, as well as in “The Master” and “Holy Motors,” filmmakers are pushing hard against, and sometimes dispensing with, storytelling conventions, and audiences seem willing to follow them. The chief film critics of The New York Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, consider this experimental turn.’ (NYTimes)

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‘Using brain scans, scientists are trying to find how great freestyle rappers drop dope lines. Discovery News reports on a study conducted by researchers the voice, speech and language branch of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Here’s the paper: “Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap.” ‘ (Boing Boing)

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“After using it for over a week now, it’s hard to come up with a lot of nice things to say about the Surface. Don’t get me wrong, there are some solid things here. But by and large, it’s a strange, buggy, and clunky product that I simply can’t imagine many people buying after the initial hype wears off.” (TechCrunch).

“Before coffee houses were homogenized into interchangeable Starbucks, and sucked dry of atmosphere and character, the espresso bar was a meeting place for Beats, musicians, writers, radicals and artists. Each coffeehouse had its own distinct style and clientele, and provided a much needed venue for the meeting of minds and the sharing of ambitions over 2-hour long cappuccinos.It was the arrival in London of the first espresso machine in 1952 that started this incredibly diverse sub-culture, which became a focus for writers like Colin Absolute Beginners MacInness and pop stars like Tommy Steele, Billy Fury, Cliff Richard and Marty Wilde, who frequented the famous 2-i’s cafe. This beautiful, short film serves up a frothy serving of London’s cafe scene in 1959, long before Starbucks ruined it all.” (Dangerous Minds)

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From the article:  “One batch fell into the hands of some enthusiasts who cleaned them up, transferred them to a digital format, and began distributing immaculate copies to the vast network of Deadhead tape collectors.” I was one of about ten tape-traders, calling ourselves, the “Unindicted Co-Conspirators”, who handled the distribution of a number of these shows, through a series of postings to the rec.music.gdead Usenet group under the title, “What’s Become of the Bettys?” I was really a small-timer in the tape-trading community until then, and I no longer recall how I got tapped to be a part of that group, but it was a great time. (New Yorker)

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Follow Me Here… turns thirteen today. (I know this because I got a text message from my calendar app reminding me to send FmH a birthday greeting.) This is the age, according to Jewish law, when a young man becomes accountable for his actions and become a “Bar Mitzvah”. If FmH were female, this would have happened a year since, as a “Bat Mitzvah” occurs when Jewish girls become 12, and it means the same as it does for boys — a rite of passage from being considered unable to properly understand things to being considered old enough to begin to understand and thus for boys and girls alike to be treated more like adults. So I guess there is no excuse anymore. I will try to act responsibly…

In any case, thank you all for continuing to be a part of this journey and helping to make this a vibrant conversation. Many happy returns to us all.

Is there is one post from the time you have been reading FmH which you would single out for distinction?

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“During the day after the 2012 presidential election we took note of a spike in hate speech on Twitter referring to President Obama’s re-election, as chronicled by Jezebel (thanks to Chris Van Dyke for bringing this our attention). It is a useful reminder that technology reflects the society in which it is based, both the good and the bad. Information space is not divorced from everyday life and racism extends into the geoweb and helps shapes its contours; and in turn, data from the geoweb can be used to reflect the geographies of racist practice back onto the places from which they emerged.

Using DOLLY we collected all the geocoded tweets from the last week (beginning November 1) with racist terms that also reference the election in order to understand how these everyday acts of explicit racism are spatially distributed… So, are these tweets relatively evenly distributed? Or do some states have higher specializations in racist tweets? …” (floatingsheep)

Exclusive account from conservative site Breitbart News about the massive failure of ORCA, the program on which the Romney campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort depended. The informant does the math and figures that it may have lost the election in some of the swing states. As Richard Metzger comments on Dangerous Minds,

“The reichwing is still trying to wrap their heads around, not just why Romney lost, but why he failed even to match John McCain’s tallies in 2008. I tell ’em: HEY, IT WAS GOD’S WILL.”

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Diagram of ABO blood antigen system

“…Here, a person’s blood type is popularly believed to determine temperament and personality. “What’s your blood type?” is often a key question in everything from matchmaking to job applications.

According to popular belief in Japan, type As are sensitive perfectionists and good team players, but over-anxious. Type Os are curious and generous but stubborn. ABs are arty but mysterious and unpredictable, and type Bs are cheerful but eccentric, individualistic and selfish.

Four books describing the different blood groups characteristics became a huge publishing sensation, selling more than five million copies…” (BBC News via Boing Boing)

NOAA explains why we don’t try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them.

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“Tyson teamed with DC Comics to track down a Krypton-like system that matches hints from the comics. He found a fitting red dwarf in the constellation Corvus (the crow) in the southern sky, a mere 27.1 light years from Earth.

Tyson even gets a cameo in Action Comics #14, “Star Light, Star Bright,” when Superman makes a visit to the astrophysicist’s planetarium. The Man of Steel attempts to track down the location of his former home, which was destroyed shortly after he left, according to Superman mythology. The story’s timing should be just right for the light from the planet’s destruction to reach Earth.

“As a native of Metropolis, I was delighted to help Superman, who has done so much for my city over all these years. And it’s clear that if he weren’t a superhero he would have made quite an astrophysicist,” Tyson said in a release about the new comic.” (Crave – CNET)

“These are baby bats — embryos actually. They remind me of those See No Evil, Say No Evil, Hear No Evil monkey pictures I saw growing up, but these little guys are much, much cuter. And, of course, being bats, the hearing thing doesn’t apply. Bats don’t hear with our kind of ears, so of course, there’s no covering-ears-up picture. That wouldn’t make bat sense.

This photograph was taken by Dorit Hockman of Cambridge University. It’s the 20th place winner in the Nikon Small World 2012 Photomicrography Competition.” (Hmmm : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR).

“Trapped by European-style Socialism—And I love It!” Claire Lundberg, a freelance writer and consultant who lives in Paris with her husband and one-year-old daughter, declared Friday in a column on Slate, the U.S. online magazine, “The coming presidential election represents a choice, says Mitt Romney: a choice between evil European-style socialism and good old American can-do capitalism. As a new mother in France, I’m here to argue that he’s wrong. Neither candidate represents actual European-style socialism. And it’s a damned shame they don’t. The women of America would have a much better shot at having it all if they did.” (NYTimes)

Abstract: “It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains–that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1376114/pdf/jmedeth00282-0040.pdf).

Looking for a picture of a tongue in a cheek…

“…[N]on-voters are an invisible enigma: no one talks much about the appallingly low turnout in this country, except to mention it in passing. So documentary filmmaker Errol Morris The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, provocateur and social critic, decided to discuss the issue with over 50 people under the age of 40. The result is the short film above, teasingly titled “11 Reasons Not to Vote?”What Morris found confounds the faithful—the junkies scowling into their microfiche readers. Non-voters, and the undecided, can take a larger view; as Morris points out in his accompanying New York Times essay, non-voters not only comment on the fact that no major party candidate has discussed issues so many people care about—poverty, climate change, the drug war, the dysfunctional prison system—but non-voters realize that if no one’s talking, nothing will be done. Some of them may be cynical, but many more may justly say they’re realists. Perhaps it’s us, the voters, who are dreamers…” (Open Culture).