Snowflakes photographed by Kenneth Libbrecht.

More. How to photograph snow.

While this site has much to offer readers with an interest in music, psychodrama and abandoned mental hospitals, it’s possible I’ve neglected any engineers and physicists among us. To remedy this mortifying oversight, here’s a little thought experiment, courtesy of Sam Hughes: 

A plane is standing on a runway that can move (like a giant conveyor belt). This conveyor has a control system that tracks the plane’s speed and tunes the speed of the conveyor, relative to the Earth, to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction).

Now comes the question.

Will the plane be able to take off?

The answer isn’t quite as obvious as one might assume. Needless to say, a detailed pondering ensues.

Update: Because you know you secretly want to, How to Destroy the Earth. 

This is oddly charming. James May meets an upgraded ASIMO robot – one being trained in object recognition. What struck me about the clip isn’t so much the robot’s ability to discern types of object and note their similarities, though its abilities are impressive. It’s the fact that watching ASIMO in action elicits a distinct urge to treat it as a child. 

(h/t, The Thin Man)

Space station toilet malfunction. 

“It failed late yesterday,” NASA spokesperson John Ira Petty said of the Russian-built space commode in televised commentary from Mission Control in Houston. “Russian specialists are troubleshooting. The problem appears to be a [gas] separator issue. In the meantime, the crew has been instructed to use the toilet in the Soyuz [TMA-12] spacecraft.” NASA has paid $19 million for a second Russian-built space toilet, which will be delivered alongside other life support, exercise equipment and sleeping quarters during a November shuttle mission. Having two working main toilets is vital for the space station, which is expected to double its crew size to six astronauts next year.

I know, I know. I must resist the urge to post distasteful bathroom items.

A while ago, in the comments following this, I wrote:

It occurs to me that the implications of social construction can appeal to rather unsavoury motives. If a person’s tastes and disposition are primarily socially constructed, that person can also, presumably, be remade to suit society and its representatives. Such high-minded Agents of Society might even become “engineers of the human soul,” to borrow Stalin’s phrase. The idea of innate disposition and talent is in some circles quite contentious, not least with regard to intelligence and its unequal distribution. This seems to cause unease in ways that, say, the unequal distribution of musical or athletic talent does not. It also undermines many conceptions of egalitarianism, which is probably why it causes such a fuss.

And it does cause a fuss. It’s possible, for instance, to find people who are (or will be) employed precisely because of their well above average intelligence performing extraordinary contortions to deny the existence of the intelligence they possess. Some, like Joseph Kugelmass, an English graduate student at the University of California, say things like this:

The abstract personal definition of “intelligence,” reified in our minds thanks to IQ tests and their derivatives, is a source of social ills and should be abandoned. It impedes and confuses pedagogy, underwrites racism and sexism, inhibits culture, and trivializes political debate… To claim that intelligence exists as a phenomenon, but not as an inherent personal quality, is the same as arguing that race or gender exist as social phenomena but not as simple, natural facts. […] Intelligence, like all essentialism, is a technology of power. It reinforces privilege and hierarchizes speech. It cuts art and language off from its inspirations, aping capital by circulating language through a series of useless oppositions… and non-signifying refinements of craft.

Setting aside the tendentious postmodern framing, dutifully regurgitated, note how the objection to intelligence as a personal attribute is asserted rather than argued and is essentially political in origin.

With the above in mind, here’s a short TED lecture from 2003, in which Steven Pinker addresses the political appeal of the “blank slate” theory, its prevalence, and its shortcomings. Topics touched on include ideological taboos, experience versus theory, and the self-inflicted disrepute of literary criticism.

Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, is well worth reading.

Related: On Stalin’s dislike of genetics and the idea of human nature.