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.
Quick, can you answer the question about the dog with the neuromuscular disease myasthenia gravis? If not, you'd be lost at Neurobowl, the highlight of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology.Poseurs need not apply. Though they all know the drinking game, these cats make fun of the medical riddles and the doctors on the TV show "House." Except for Olivia Wilde ("Thirteen"). They all like her.
There was a time when it was virtually impossible not to believe in God. That made sense; life had (and certainly still has) many mysteries and a divine hand made sense of an irrational world, at least in the sense that you could believe in one supernatural thing rather than many.But over time two important things happened that should have killed religion; the world got 'smaller' in the sense that a lot more information about people and cultures became available and science was able to explain a much larger, very fundamental and far-reaching set of things about the world in terms of natural laws.
It's an idea so brilliant, I wish I had thought of it (though that gimmicked Google street view art project Josh linked to made me a bit jealous as well) ... in preparation for the upcoming Star Trek movie you can make yourself into a Star Trek character. Is it perfect? Well, no, anything that requires some manual input in a system I don't yet understand will be quirky but that is mostly my fault. Side by side, the pic I gave them and what they said is my Star Trek character. Not too bad, actually, though I seemed to have set the width for the eyes strangely (you'll see what I mean if you try it).
A team of Oregon State University researchers say they have implemented a classroom-based intervention that reduces the amount of violent TV that children watch - by 18 percent among first- through fourth-grade children. And that's good, they say, because youth violence is a big issue, though not so much as 30 years ago when everyone assumed we would be living out scenarios from either "The Warriors" or "Escape From New York" by now.
You'll be forgiven if you didn't know Seki Takakazu's work on matrices came out years before Gottfried Leibniz; Japan wanted it that way. But out-Bernoulli'ing Bernoulli? He needs to get some respect for that and I am here to help.
Unless you are a true baseball fan, you have probably never heard of Bob Feller. Maybe you have heard of Nolan Ryan. They were classic power pitchers. They threw hard and they threw for strikes.Even if you are a baseball fan, unless you live and breathe the Detroit Tigers, you have probably never heard of Joel Zumaya.Right. Who? While playing in the American League Championship in 2006, he threw a fastball clocked at 104.8 MPH, the fastest in history. How can a guy who threw that fast not be on the cover of every Wheaties box in the civilized world? Because the following year he was 1-4 with a 4.28 ERA; hardly the stuff of legends.
Okay, I am going to do something that will cost me my Republican voter card - I am going to recommend we reopen a government agency, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA).
As I briefly laid out in The Science Of Baseball: Coefficients And Happy Haitians, people like home runs though baseball purists don't necessarily think much of them - unless their team gets one.
Important business has taken me out of sunny California and across the country to the slightly warmer March days of Florida; baseball spring training.I maintain an affection for spring training even though I no longer live in a winter climate where a few days of sunshine after 5 months of cold can truly be appreciated. But I spent my childhood in Florida, in a baseball haven aptly called Dodgertown, so cold climate or not baseball in spring is a necessary ritual. It gives me a reminder I haven't seen my family in a year and spring baseball is somehow both better and worse than regular season baseball, when it becomes more of a business and obviously played by the best of the best.
If you're in the racism industry, an icy chill has gone down your spine in 2009, with an African-American president and both major political parties run by black people. As always, a psychologist will find an answer for how society can do those things and still be racist; it turns out you will be less biased against people of other races in your social group but you will still be prejudiced against people of other races you don't have beer with. Likewise, if you voted for Obama he is not the black person you automatically dislike the way you automatically dislike all other black people.
If you read Geek Logik,you may have found, at least for a while, that you lost control over your own decision-making ability.
You may recognize the title most recently as a humorous jab at people who want to teach religion in science classes and, failing that, at least teach why they think there is a controversy. Of course there isn't any controversy at all. Biology is as imperfect as every science in existence and explaining the world we live in according to natural laws is tough because there are always new things to learn.The only place where rock solid 'proof' exists is in mathematics, which some people think is science. Yet even in mathematics there are disputes and one of them has long been Pi - or π, if you prefer. That's right, someone once may have insisted we teach the controversy about Pi, which is a delightful sort of irony.
