Random Thoughts

Consensus Science In a democracy you can vote without needing to give reasons. In science you have to give reasons or you aren't allowed to vote. Let me explain that. Suppose that I discover by experiment that splomks are vlatikers. My proof is that ...

Blog Post - Patrick Lockerby - Mar 13 2010 - 10:33pm

The Real Scuttlebutt On Sailing Slang

The Real Scuttlebutt On Sailing Slang There are plenty of sites around the web which will give you the origins and meanings of nautical slang. Mostly the wrong ones. Etymology is a science: you can't just make stuff up. What's the scuttlebutt? ...

Article - Patrick Lockerby - Mar 14 2010 - 2:53pm

Morning Science Quote

Morning Science Quote The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyag ...

Blog Post - Michael White - Mar 15 2010 - 10:40am

Babies More Into Music Than Speech

Babies may be born with a predisposition to dance and find music- specifically, rhythm and tempo- more engaging than speech, according to a study of infants aged between five months and two years old. While predisposition towards music may be innate, resea ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 15 2010 - 4:28pm

A Day On The Farm

There are far too many theories about the best way to teach kids. Dr. Seuss had the right idea: make it fun. It's good to have a child actually beg you to read something out loud. Never mind the Saggerbotham theory of linguistic competence or the Hi ...

Blog Post - Patrick Lockerby - Mar 15 2010 - 8:47pm

Young Britons More Likely To Take Up Smoking Thanks To Movies

Children in England see much more smoking in movies compared to their counterparts in the US and are more likely to pick up the habit as a result, finds research published in Tobacco Control. The UK film classification system, which rates more films as sui ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 16 2010 - 11:48am

Easy Credit Caused The Recession And Eased Its Impact

Questionable lending helped sink the U.S. economy, but also provided a lifeline that kept countless firms afloat and averted an even deeper recession, according to research by University of Illinois finance professor Murillo Campello. The research was cite ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 16 2010 - 1:30pm

The Say of the Week

"A male astrophysicist talks physics to the astronomers and astronomy to the physicists, but then he meets another astrophysicist, and they discuss women." Unknown ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 16 2010 - 5:51pm

Conversations with Cleverbot.

Part One? Just for giggles one day I went over to Cleverbot.com to have a little chat with what is proportedly the "latest and greatest" AI on the internet. There was a rumor going around that it had "gone crazy" and I wanted to see wha ...

Blog Post - Brian Taylor - Mar 19 2010 - 8:50pm

The Quote of the Week: Audio and Video Quarks!

The replication of fermion generations is one of the outstanding puzzles in particle physics. Could there be also a fourth generation of quarks and leptons? There is no convincing theoretical or experimental reason why not. In some grand unified schemes c ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 21 2010 - 5:07am