Wired: Satellite Photos of Haiti Before and After the Earthquake
There are a number of avenues through which you can contribute, should you choose to do so.
My only observation is that it seems Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson have chosen this moment to take dickishness to its highest level.
So we have dinner, take down a couple of plates, wash them, dry them, put them back. Have soup more rarely, take down a couple of bowls–big? small?–put them back.
And this is what I sometimes worry about: do I put them back on top of the stack? Do I put the bowls back in the empty front spot on the shelf? Because if I do that, then guess which dishes are going to get reached for the next time? That’s right, the same ones.
So do I rotate them, put the dishes away at the bottom of the stack? Because the glass dessert plates are underneath the glass dessert bowls, and that means lifting the entire thing up and/or out to put the plates underneath. And the dinner plates are kind of snug under a rack that holds the salad plates, not so easy to get–anyway, I’m rationalzing now; the reality is, I don’t really rotate the dishes that much. Not as much as I feel I should.
The Onion: World’s Physicists Complete Study Of Physics
“Yeah, that about does it for physics,” said IUPAP member Sukekatsu Ushioda, powering down Japan’s Super Photon ring particle accelerator. “All done. Math can pretty much take it from here.”
A typeface that abuses the three dimensions like the “impossible cube” and related drawings of MC Escher.
Bozo Condensates?
Can Obama Stop the War on Science?
One of our two great parties — and many, if not most, of the people who support it – decided some time ago that science was an enemy, and there’s little reason to think it will change its stance any time soon. That doesn’t mean that all Republican politicians are equally hostile to science. For instance, one suspects that a Mitt Romney administration would be somewhat less vigorous in its quashing of scientific advancement than a Sarah Palin administration. But as long as the GOP retains its current form, science will remain a political issue, with the partisan lines clearly drawn.
Mystery Behind Galaxy Shapes Solved
Short version: new model does a much better job of predicting the distribution of galaxy types. Score! Nothing bad there.
But the title of the article bugs me just a tiny bit. It gives the impression that we’ve utterly nailed it: Game over; bye, bye, see you later. But that’s not science, or at least “nailed it” means something different to a scientist, and from field to field. (In some fields, a factor of two improvement might qualify; in others it might mean more than an order of magnitude improvement in precision) I’m not intending to hold this up as an example of bad science journalism, per se. If it is, I don’t know how to fix it — editors need to exercise brevity in titles. But I fear that the un(der)initiated get a cumulative wrong picture of science, if they’re reading these headlines.
We usually don’t just pack our bags and move on to the next problem. Often the current problem still has issues to be resolved; I imagine in this case, the group will continue to improve it, or someone else working on one will do so, and work with better data that come along. This result, while having passed through peer-review, has to await an onslaught of feedback that might await. And it involves a model, like virtually all of science — these days, there are Global Warming discussions that imply that if it isn’t perfect, then we know nothing. The fear of uncertainty spreads, because impossible promises are implied by the absolute certainty of “the puzzle is solved.” Such arguments are crap, of course, but how do you recognize that if you aren’t aware of the subtleties of the situation?
Guns and roses: The photographer who literally shoots his subjects
Flavour explosion: Cherry tomatoes dipped in liquid nitrogen made for stunning results. The artist shot both red and yellow varieties
Sonar, aye.
I’ve been wretchedly sick the past week or so, with absolutely no desire to blog, but appear now to be on the mend. My appetite is returning (the loss of which is a sign that I am really ill) and I can actually concentrate on concepts again. And type (semi) coherently, which was an intermittent skill, at best. So I’ll be easing back into things.
I notice that Chad is upset about a bad Pew poll quiz question about GPS, and boy did it look familiar. It was — I grumbled abut it months ago