How does a former math teacher in Texas keep winning the lottery?  Joan Ginther has hit four Texas Lottery jackpots and raked in $21 million since 1993 ($5.5 million, half of the Texas Lottery…

Nobel laureate J. W. Szostak delivered an interesting lecture on his experiments relating to the origins of life. His research group has set itself the goal of just getting some kind of protocell…

"Eighty percent of success is showing up" W.Allen

The Falkland Islands' own Sasha Arkhipkin (whom I missed meeting on his last trip to California--sorrow!) has discovered that males of a particular deep-sea squid species have penises as long as…

The ChatterBox Index Index to articles published in the ChatterBox. The ArcticGlaciersThe AntarcticArticles about iceArctic Ice May 2010Arctic Ice May 2010 - UpdateArctic Ice June 2010 Arctic Ice…

In the wake of the PepsiGate scandal at Scienceblogs.com, which apparently everyone except bloggers there saw coming (1), one person comes up with the obvious 'money corrupts all' argument, but is…

Recently I had a chance to visit the grave of my departed Professor Dr Karl-Hermann Neumann with his son Mr Rolf Neumann in Giessen Germany. Professor Dr Neumann worked with Professor F. C. Steward…

Just a quickie here. So I'm reading a comic book, Marvel's "Ultimate Galactus". In it, a godlike being named (in Kree... not Cree, but Kree) Gah Lak Tus is attacking the Earth, sending superpowered…

I thought the 'PepsiGate' issue, as former Scienceblogs folks termed it, was overblown.  As I discussed in Symbol Stacks And Science Communication, it wasn't the first time they did it and…

Kathleen and I have been spending a fair shake of our time looking through the interwebz at the whole Judge Rotenberg Center issue. There are hundreds of pages of materials to go through, and heck…

'Show her your love is as bag as the whole solar system' sounds like a schlocky sales pitch, right?  Well, it is but the Laura Cesari, a.k.a. Chain of Being, Solar System Necklace is just too…

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University, the Internet will do more social good than…

This is a post that has nothing to do with physics or other sciences, for once. I just report here my thoughts as a father upon allowing my 11-years-old son to go spend a day to the beach alone with…

If you pass your ball to others to score a goal you win the match. That one has seen yesterday and that one will see today and in next week also. I have already told who the winner will be . Now you…

Though I have been gardening less and getting back to freelance writing, my wondering about invasive species has been growing like a weeds, like Creeping Camanula perhaps. Creeping Campanula (a.k.a.…

If you follow social media, you may have been alarmed by claims that today is the day Doc Brown traveled to at the end of Back to the Future, that comedy classic from 1985, approaches. To sum up the…

Another Poetic Interlude Language is my first love. When I discovered the joy of the scientific method I applied it to language. The study of linguistics can be incredibly boring or a source of great…

When some members of a discussion group asked me to write a small course on Hilbert spaces, I decided to define that Hilbert space over the quaternions. Futher I wanted to indicate the relation…

One who works as a team and that one has seen in the footwork of Germany.

A Brit Celebrates July 4th I've only been writing here for just over a year.  From day one I have been made to feel very welcome, and I want to thank everyone here and all of my readers for that…