Random Thoughts

FBI Releases Images of Two Suspects The FBI today released images of two males suspected of planting the Boston Marathon bombs. Shortly afterwards the FBI website crashed, no doubt due to demand for…

Apres un long silence Apres un long silence, dont je ne chercherai pas a m'excuser,j'ai le plaisir de vous communiquer ... After a long silence, for which I will not try to apologize,I am pleased to…

To those who follow my twitter account: my account was hacked over a week ago, and only today could I get it back to work (the twitter support team is not -hehm- a prize-winning one). So while I am…

When I was a kid, I would happily play around with both words and numbers – I still do. Both have their aesthetic appeal. Whether it is constructing and deconstructing mathematical puzzles or cryptic…

I've determined that I won't write blogs about dumb science unless I encounter at least three in a row.  I probably won't actually adhere to that, but it seemed like a convenient excuse to write…

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been chosen as Pope Francis, leader of the Holy See in Rome. That's all well and good, it's nice that heavily-Catholic South America is getting its due and I found…

Are you a science undergraduate or graduate student (or even a post-doc) who has discovered you love science but aren't crazy about the idea of doing research in a narrow field?  Science is a…

I believe in the wisdom of crowds. If I take one PhD in science and ask them to guess the number of pennies in a jar, it's not going to be close, but if I ask 1,000 regular people to guess, the mean…

Legislation to restrict guns is a lot like legislation to restrict abortion - it's a tough sell at the federal level because of that pesky Constitution so it requires a friendly court and and a lot…

Next Sunday Italians will vote to change the composition of the two houses of parliament: the "lower" Camera dei Deputati and "upper" Senato della Repubblica. And as often happens with Italian…