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An Open Letter to Nancy Mace: Go to Hell—or Propose Single-Stall Bathrooms. Sarah McBride show some backbone.

Let’s get something straight: your obsession with trans people using bathrooms is a distraction...

We Need A Million Person March

Nearly 30 years ago, Minister Louis Farrakhan called for the Million Man March—a gathering of...

Does Chat GPT Think, Is AI Research Physics, And Are We In A Universe Based On Voxels?

The answers to the title questions are, No, Yes, and why not.  What I have been doing instead...

A New Theory of Everything That Sets Scalars Equal To Tensors Looks Like Nonsense.

If your theory of everything has tensors set equal to scalars then it is wrong. Simply put...

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Hontas FarmerRSS Feed of this column.

My research focuses on astrophysics from massive star formation to astroparticle physics. Born and raised in Chicagoland I have lived in Bellwood, IL since 1984 and attended public schools here... Read More »

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This afternoon I will attempt to stream the transit of Venus live on an embedded stream on this website. 

Meanwhile here are some resources on observing the transit.  



First a personal opinion, don't bother with using a so called "pinhole projector".  The image of the sun projected is a point of light, you are then looking for a tiny tiny point of dark on a tiny point of light.  


The technique I will use is to use a telescope with the eyepieces removed to project an image which a webcam can then focus on.  NEVER LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN ESPECIALLY THROUGH A TELESCOPE WITH YOUR EYEBALLS.  It could well be the last thing you ever see. 

The issue of how dense the dark matter is near Earth is far from settled. Recent work by Moni Bidin, Carraro, Mendez and Smith holds that the density of dark matter near Earth is 0.04 gigaelectron volts per cubic centimeter, the work of Bovy and Tremaine says it should be more like 0.3 gigaelectron volt per cubic centimeter. The problem is that Bovy and Tremaine make a basic logical error at the outset which invalidates what on the face of is otherwise a masterful work of theoretical astronomy/cosmology. Unfortunately that logical error of circular logic falsifies their counter argument.

It seems that one Toby Cubitt,  a quantum physicist, has done research which proves mathematically that physics is hard.  Well no duh.  Physics is the subject sane people avoid in college.  Compare the conceptual complexity of Louis DeBroglie's work on the wave nature of "solid" material particles to a study of Dr. Shaquille O'Neal Ed.D. on how bosses use humor in the workplace.  

Windows 8 will be the biggest thing in the world of Windows since Windows 95.   That is my prediction based on months of using it in virtualization and now natively on my convertible tablet PC.  In short it is a marked improvement over Windows 7.   The metro application framework, I predict, will lead to the old desktop paradigm being obsolete in the next  5 years.    (Other operating systems are moving towards this too.  Mandriva Linux and it's  ROSA desktop are a step in the same direction.) 

Occupy Hilbert Space is a quirky event proposed by a Facebook friend of mine.   A Hilbert space is a formal mathematical construct in which the information about a physical system is represented by vectors.  In physics we most often encounter the concept of Hilbert spaces in Quantum Mechanics.  They are not limited just to quantum mechanics.  For my submission I will show that we are all occupying a Hilbert space right now.   

Niel Bates describes it like so. 

News like today's new evidence for a standard model light* (~125 Gev) Higgs particle does much for theoretical physics.  In one fell swoop many theories can be ruled out.  While at the same time other theories gain direct support.  Still other theories, and the theorist who propose them, are vindicated for putting their faith in the standard model.  This model that has worked perfectly in every test it has had for 30 or so years.  One area which this will affect in the latter way is that of quantum gravity.