The most crucial to happy gambling generally (apart from being prepared for losing, since you create a losing copy of yourself with certainty) is your Happy-Enough-Ceiling, where if you reach it, you…

We all pay our electric and gas bills in winter with more urgency than in summer because cold can kill you.  Without both electricity and gas modern furnaces will not function.  So we pay…

In 1923, Frank Silver and Irving Cohn published a song that became a major hit for the Billy Jones Orchestra, with the signature line “Yes, we have no bananas; we have no bananas…

In the United States, we just had another Supermoon, and at the end of this month we will have a Blue Moon (the second full moon in a month) with a lunar eclipse, which is pretty special. Though…

Mental Health Warning: Many World/Mind (MW/M) descriptions may aggravate mental conditions; suicidal ideation has been recognized as a pitfall along the path of Zen-like wisdoms by a wide range of…

I was born and have lived in Venice for over 51 years now (omitting to mention some 2 years of interruption when I worked for Harvard University, 18 years ago), but this has come to an end on…

A new "raw" trend has made its way into the paper of record for anti-science woo and miracle vegetable fads - the New York Times. Along with articles about astrology and acupuncture, they have now…

With tax cuts in 2018, the federal government is going to either increase the deficit or cut spending. And conservatives argue spending should be cut. Will that impact science? It certainly will, but…

Since science is both corporate and political in the modern era (the private sector and government each fund about half of basic research in the U.S.), if you defend science you are implicitly…

Life is a gamble, every day, all day, in a most greedy casino with unwritten rules and players rewriting the rules, re-interpreting them if you accidentally won too much without having the right…

This is awful. A science writer and video producer who decided Christmas Eve is just the right time to publish a video claiming FALSELY that a small nuclear exchange of 100 nuclear weapons would…

Scared by the void of Christmas vacations? Unable to put just a few more feet between your mouth and the candy tray? Suffocating in the trivialities of the chit-chat with relatives? I have a solution…

Meleah Geertsma, a senior attorney in the midwestern US for Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) - yes, they have so many attorneys they have titles like "Senior" and for geographical regions -…

If you have a lot of assets to split, and splitting is easy, it's also easy to create ultimatums. When America was a poor country, people stayed together longer, families lived near each other,…

The U.S. National Aeronautics Space Administration NASA has selected two finalist concepts for a robotic mission tentatively set to launch in the mid-2020s. The two finalists pared down from 12…

In the previous post I discussed the generalities of "diboson production" at the LHC. Dibosons are pairs of elementary bosons - the photon (carrier of electromagnetic interactions), the W and Z…

Cosmic rays from supernovae can influence Earth´s cloud cover and how that influences climate could be useful for making better models. A new study shows how atmospheric ions, produced by the…

Evidence shows that banning scientific words does not stop them from being used.   Today in many reports the Trump administration banned the use by the CDC of the words or phrases,…

After one quite frantic November, I emerged victorious two weeks ago from the delivery of a 78-pages, 49-thousand-word review titled "Hadron Collider Searches for Diboson Resonances". The article,…

Too much caffeine is bad for you. It's very risk to buy powdered caffeine for that reason. But it's addictive and people do it. Likewise, too much nicotine is bad for you and you can't shouldn't buy…