You Are 65% Left Brained, 35% Right Brained

The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning. Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others. If you’re left brained, you are likely good at math and logic. Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet. The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility. Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way. If you’re right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art. Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.

Also, there were quite a few choices about which I was unsure. I think it would be more accurate if they put in a third option for “roughly equal” (e.g., the geometry versus algebra question–I’m good with both).

Via Alan Boyle, here’s an interesting article at the Gray Lady about sexual desire. This part rang true to me:

The results suggest that having a good set of sexual brakes not only dampens the willingness to commit rape or sexual abuse, but the desire as well, giving the lie to notions that

Planet Gore is live blogging it.

We’re on break now until 10:50 AM PDT (actually, MST, but same thing), when Charles Miller will speak on what looks to be a proposal to actually resurrect a NASA-like entity. But meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg makes an interesting point about Al Gore and the Warm-mongers:

It’s funny, the same people who insist that dissent is the highest form of patriotism when it comes to the war, suddenly think you’re a moronic bastard or environmental traitor if you want to debate global warming a bit more, even when the solutions being discussed could cost

Louise Riofrio is having problems with academics. Check out the previous two posts as well for the whole story.

Al Gore is going to testify on global warming today, in about half an hour. Bjorn Lomborg will be on the second panel. Unfortunately, they won’t be debating each other, which is something I’d pay to watch. I think that Gore would get eviscerated.

[Going to check the schedule]

It’s going to be carried on CSPAN3, if you don’t have the bandwidth.

[Checking DirecTV schedule]

Dang. I only get CSPAN and CSPAN2.

Here’s an interesting article on precursors of morality in apes.

[Via Alan Boyle]

This post by Ron Bailey on whether or not parents might do things to help ensure that their offspring are straight reminds me of this post of mine from a while back:

Suppose we find that there is something different about the brains of gay men and women (a proposition for which there’s already abundant and growing evidence). If we can come up with an affordable, painless therapy that “fixes” this and converts them from “gay” to “straight,” should we a) allow them to take advantage of it, or b) forbid them from doing so, or c) require them to? And should “straight” (i.e., exclusively heterosexual) people be allowed to become gay, or bi?

These are the kinds of issues that separate me from conservatives.

Here’s a guy who wants to solve global warming by mimicking volcanoes:

For two years after Pinatubo erupted, the average temperature across the Earth decreased by 0.6C.

The volcano’s location close to the equator helped make Pinatubo the perfect model for explaining how sulphur in the stratosphere could reduce global warming.

Instead, controversially, he wants to duplicate the effects of volcanic eruptions and create a man-made sulphur screen in the sky.

His solution would see hundreds of rockets filled with sulphur launched into the stratosphere. He envisages one million tonnes of sulphur to create his cooling blanket.

A million tonnes. This would be a great market for suborbital vehicles.

If you can deliver a ton per flight, that would be a million flights. Let’s say that the marginal cost per flight is a hundred thousand or so (I think we can do a lot better than that). That would be a hundred billion dollar program. That seems like a bargain compared to many of the nostrums currently proposed. And boy would it give us a flight rate.

Of course, someone over at Free Republic pooh poohs it, because he doesn’t understand the concept. Even if one were to use a Titan (can’t be done–they’re out of production), the payload he quotes for it is to GEO. Just tossing stuff up in the atmosphere, you could probably get a hundred tons at a time. In fact, even if they were still in production, a Titan would be the worst conceivable choice for this mission. Deltas would make a lot more sense–clean propellants, and new vehicles with a high-rate production line, and their upper-stage performance issues would be irrelevant, since they wouldn’t need one. But it would be crazy to do it with expendables of any kind.

With suborbitals, I’d think you could do a hundred flights a day out of a given spaceport. If there are a ten spaceports scattered around the world, that’s a thousand flights per day. At that rate, you’d get the stuff up in three years.

Eric Scheie wonders why the global warming scolds don’t scold us about eating meat.