In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
NJIT math professor Bruce Bukiet wrote an article here on his Markov process predictions for the baseball playoffs. That wasn't something new, he is in his 13th season of doing just that, often to maddening success.How did he do this time? The Pirates didn't advance, the Cardinals are now facing the Dodgers, but otherwise he nailed it, with the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers getting ready to square off for the pennant. The math doesn't always work; last year his numbers said Detroit would win the World Series. Nope, Giants again, my gut beat reason and sanity.
If you live in America and hadn't heard, the government is in a shutdown. We've had a full plate of political theater, with armed stand-offs at veteran's memorials and the National Zoo's Panda Cam going dark, presumably to convince us that government is funded on a daily basis - except for all those exempt and 'essential' employees, which number in the millions.If you are asking, no, science is not considered essential to either party, that is why 97% of NASA is on vacation during this budget posturing.
In 1968, after CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite
formally came out against the Viet Nam war, President Lyndon B. Johnson was
apocryphally to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
When you think about science leadership, you don't often think about United Arab Emirates. Dictatorships don't lend themselves to quality basic research but when they put their minds to applied research and development, and a lot of money, good things can happen.While environmental activists wish we were a little more dictatorship-oriented when it comes to banning cars, like the Chinese did before the Olympics (for everyone but elites, anyway), plenty of scientists might like to have a more dictatorial, mission-based approach to research in the US, like we had with the Manhattan Project and the NASA Moon landing.
If you visit the outside of a meeting regarding biology and policy today, you are sure to see protesters who all insist that they should be voting on the science. They have reached their own consensus and their consensus is that biologists are just tinkerers who are out to create a scientocracy not bound by morality or ethics or anything beyond the cold pursuit of violating nature.
Speculation is rampant that the discovery of the Higgs boson will get a Nobel prize.
Internet algorithms have done lots of wonderful things but can they help you live your life? In the past, algorithms helped you find better encyclopedia answers to questions, but that is very 1990s. Google is not a search engine company now, they are an ad company that has a search engine front-end and their searches end up at Wikipedia or About.com so you're better off just going directly to those. Modern algorithms are instead recommendation engines tailored to you.
I've often argued that California's biggest industry is hypocrisy - not just talking about freedom and liberalism while banning conduct elites happen not to like this year or reconfiguring voting districts so that there is no political opposition but that we claim to care about the environment.In reality, our dirty secret, that people either don't know or don't want to know but every policy maker is well aware of, is that garbage has been one of our biggest exports. We tax the public a lot to deal with recycling, and then pay companies a lot to handle recycling, and then those companies ship it to China as garbage.
It bugs me a little when 'time' is randomly called a dimension in casual talk. Since just after Einstein's relativity, we've been treated to the mathematical idea that time is its own dimension - though Einstein never said that.
In the beginning, Mother Nature created the universe and in it she put Quantum Mechanics.Mother Nature had formed out of the ground all the wild particles in the sky. She brought them to Quantum Mechanics to see what Quantum Mechanics would name them; and whatever Quantum Mechanics called each thing, that was its name. But it was not enough.Then Mother Nature said, “It is not good for quantum mechanics to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for her.” And so she created Relativity and a classical garden in which they could live.
Unless you are in a bar and have a bartender with a pour spout (in other words, a terrible bar), pouring a glass of wine is not an exact measurement. And at a private party or in someone's house, a 'glass of wine' can be more like three - if you master the psychology of wine glasses.We're in a world of over-labeling. Everything has calories printed on it, warnings about cancer and claims about gluten-free meat and GMO-free rock salt being healthier. The wine pour is the last open frontier where you can still game the system a little. No one uses a pour spout for wine. Seriously, if the bartender does that, leave.
The EPA's war on science and business is nothing new. What started four decades ago as an honest effort by the Nixon administration to protect the environment from an increasingly industrialized society has instead helped cause industry to vacate America whenever possible.
