Despite the glib use with which people invoke the idea of freedom. Freedom is a scary concept. The ability to do absolutely anything one wishes is simply overwhelming. Of course, in practice this isn…

As I promised a week ago, I am posting answers to a few of the 42 questions which constituted the first part of an the exam selecting experimental particle physicists for the INFN (the italian…

Have a really smart kid who loves big trucks but you can't stand loud, growling voices with too much reverb in stadiums?   You're in luck.    MANTRA (The Manufacturing Technology…

Paperless office?  An optimistic pipe dream.    We use more paper documents than at any time in history despite the prevalence of the Internet and digital technology.    Part…

If you read internet science in 2006, you'd have thought former president George W. Bush's limitations of use of embryonic stem cell lines had killed science.  In reality, embryonic stem cell…

Look what I found on Quark Expedition website! http://www.blogyourwaytoantarctica.com/blogs/view/257 In a nutshell, Quark is sponsoring a competition to send someone on an eco-cruise of Antarctica in…

What seems to be the problem in recognizing these words as being separate concepts?  Everytime I look there's another abuse of the word "selfish" when "self-interest" is intended.  Ranging…

Stephen Meyer, Signature in a Cell, Part Two.  The central argument of Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in a Cell, is that coded instruction sets in DNA, just like computer code, require…

A Science Of Human Language - Part #10 In this part of the series, commenced here, I give some concrete examples from various languages of how words can cue the category from which other words were,…

Tangential Science: it's not necessarily science, but it's still funny. 1. The Japanese have responded to the persistent outrage of Greenpeace over their whaling efforts by seeking to enrage the anti…

This is not much of a surprise: In six out of ten countries including Argentina (57%), China (72%), Great Britain (62%), India (77%), Mexico (65%) and Spain (61%), the majority of people who had…

Although possessing an undeniable bias against consciousness and mood altering drugs, courtesy of the 1960s and 1970s, I was curious to see what progress had been made utilizing these same substances…

I'm out of town today, so I'm doing a break from my usual work.  Instead, I thought I'd share these tales of geek love.  First up is a nice fluff piece by Ashley Nelson, 4 Reasons Why Women…

Colonial Williamsburg is basically a theme park about colonial days in America, the time in the 18th century before and around the establishment of the United States. It can be somewhat kitschy[1],…

House of StrawUse six straws to create the classic house shape (a rectangular body with two straws forming the roof, all laying flat on the table). Bet that you can make four equal triangles by…

Astronomers have unveiled a new atlas of the inner regions of the Milky Way - that's our home galaxy, if you're from someplace else - and it's peppered with thousands of previously undiscovered dense…

Do friends wear the same clothes or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, part of the reason they became friends or, once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each…

For some thousands of years “logic” was viewed as the “theory of inquiry” – “inquiry into inquiry” if you will. This was almost certainly the case with Plato, definitely the case with Aristotle, and…

Ecological Niche Modeling is a great tool for conservation biology, phylogeography and evolutionary biology. However, as Jeff Lozier and colleagues point out in a paper in the Journal of Biogeography…

New Global Best-Seller "The Terrorist Hunters" is a new book by Andy Hayman, C.B.E., Q.P.M., former Assistant Commisioner of Scotland Yard, and one-time head of the Yard's head of Special Operations.…