Researchers recently decided to see how many Lego bricks end up stuck together after they've all been spun, naturally. To see what "complexes arise" when you tumble those bricks they created "a primitive analog Monte Carlo agent." Monte Carlo procedures are ways of using algorithms to map everything that might happen in a complex event, then determine from that which events are most likely to happen. Spin enough bricks and you could chart the probability of which bricks get stuck together. So they put a whole bucket of old Lego bricks (from the late 1960's and the early 1970's) into a Miele(TM) washing machine. The bricks were treated for 70 minutes, at 40 degree Celsius, without speed spinning at the end, without washing powder.

Self-regulation does not always work. If someone finds an exploit then not using the exploit becomes a competitive disadvantage, and there is nothing inherently ethical about having all of your workforce go on unemployment.  As finance markets have shown us, ethical self-regulation will not occur, and as Cathy O'Neil at MathBabe shows, that is unlikely in the world of Big Data either.

Imagine if there were a simple single statistical measure everybody could use with any set of data and it would reliably separate true from false. Oh, the things we would know!That is unrealistic, of course.Yet statistical significance is commonly treated as though it were a magic wand. Take a null hypothesis or look for any association between factors in a data set and abracadabra! Get a “p value” over or under 0.05 and you can be 95% certain it’s either a fluke or it isn’t. You can eliminate chance! You can separate the signal from the noise! You can declare that Republicans are anti-science and Democrats have prettier daughters!

The round wheel was invented because, you know, hauling stuff from place to place on circular things made travel a lot smoother. Imagine putting a wagon on triangles, you would be bouncing and jolting the whole time. And, really, that's the only thing I can't do with triangles. Circles are smooooth.We know round wheels work, so why would anyone do what that oft-used cliché says you should not do and reinvent the wheel?Because that's math, it doesn't have to be real. Math is a language so mathematicians can travel through time and make me invisible too - just like science fiction writers can. That doesn't mean they will.

Caitlin Shetterly’s long feature, “The Bad Seed: The Health Risks of Genetically Modified Corn,” in Elle—a magazine with more than 1.1 million monthly readers—was particularly appalling.http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/08/can_gm… cracks are showing. Journalists are shucking off the easy allure of Scare Journalism and arguing for the science side is Amy Harmon http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/sunday-review/golden-rice-lifesaver.ht...

There's no question that if someone asks me what is the best way to make coffee, I am going to tell them with my Chemex. All of the expensive machines in the world can't match this elegant feat of simple engineering.But I am not a coffee snob. Well, sort of not. When Keurig was still just a leased restaurant machine, they had no home version for their single-cup pods, I bought one from a restaurant sale. It was pretty expensive then but today you can get a home machine for around $150. So I was being a little coffee snobbish avant-garde in buying the machine in the first place but now I am the anti-snob, because single cup machines are gauche and a single cup brew from a pod is what I drink in the morning.

Monsanto has given up trying to introduce modern food science to Europe and that has been a windfall for legacy methods of genetic modification.Now, BASF and DuPont are eating into continental market share using mutagenesis, which mimics the sun’s irradiation of plants, to create herbicide-resistant crops. It's obviously nothing new, before activists discovered worries about precise genetic modification they expressed no concern at all about the older mutagenesis techniques that produced thousands of varieties of lettuce, oats, rice, and other crops.

Modern science is comprised of cold, objective, Spock-like, reason-based, data-driven searchers in a quest for the truths about natural laws.Ha ha ha.In reality, science overall is much like it has always been. It is composed of some charlatans chasing the latest popular tripe, some who are in it for the money, some who are terrible and some who are great. Just like any other job. But a modern mythology has been carefully crafted and if you are competing for taxpayer money, it helps to promote the belief that your way is more ethical, noble and pure than science done by the private sector.It makes for a tidy narrative. And a completely fake one.

The British Library, videogame festival GameCity and software company Crytek, recently launched the “Off The Map” competition, where participants would have to turn historic maps and engravings into a 3D environment using Crytek's CRYENGINE software.
Contestants could elect to depict Stonehenge, the Pyramids at Giza, or the Tower of London.
Six second-year students from De Montfort University in Leicester went one better - instead of just the Tower of London before 1666, they rendered shops and stalls, sooty back alleys and wharves, gallows and church cemeteries, London Bridge and Pudding Lane, where the fire originated. Even the sunlight has an aspect of historical grime to it. 

In its short existence, No Child Left Behind, which was voted into existence in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion, accomplished a lot. Girls and boys achieved parity in math for the first time in history, test scores for minorities went up across the board - but it had to die.It mostly had to die because a Republican had signed it and President Obama, the successor to President Bush, dutifully honored the national teacher's unions once he realized how national politics works. Prior to a looming reelection he had been endorsed both merit pay and No Child Left Behind.Its successor, because teachers said they do not like 'teaching to the test', are Common Core standards.  And they are taking education from flawed to worse.