Aug 31 2005
What amazes me about humanity is our ability to come together as a species to understand our species. We are our greatest mystery. We perceive our surroundings, we adapt to many climates, we are capable of perpetuating a record of our species from generation to generation. It’s never been clear that any other species does [...]
Aug 31 2005
NPR commentator “Daniel Schorr had a thought-provoking piece tonight on the cultural and religious implications of the debate about injecting non-scientific intelligent design into U.S. education”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4826756.
Framing the “will of a designer” in the context of huge natural disasters, Mr. Schorr hits on an important philosphical question that you must face when you decide that a [...]
Aug 30 2005
Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a renowned astronomer, NOVA is exploring the origins of the universe and life in a series called “Origins”. I watched tonight’s episode on the origin of life and the debt we owe to the early and long rule of cyanobacteria. Fascinating. What I really enjoyed was the “comet impact” experiment, [...]
Aug 30 2005
This month’s issue of Physics Today contains an article entitled “Evolution Wars Show No Sign of Abating”:http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-58/iss-8/p24.html. It’s free on the web, for all you non-subscribers (and I know there are just a few of you!). It’s a nice, but (as usual) scary, overview of this confusing mess into which the U.S. has gotten itself. [...]
Aug 30 2005
A lot of scientists all over the world observed the physics of the hurricane that struck th Southeast this past week. Katrina’s largest damage resulted from the rain it deposited as it struck land and slowed.
“The BBC has a nice article reviewing the imaging and understanding of Katrina”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4197096.stm. In particle, I like the photo that [...]
Aug 30 2005
Whew. From the AP:
“According to preliminary assessments by AIR Worldwide Corp., a risk assessment company, the insurance industry faces as much as $26 billion in claims from Katrina. That would make Katrina more expensive than the previous record-setting storm, Hurricane Andrew, which caused some $21 billion in insured losses in 1992 to property in Florida [...]
Aug 29 2005
On NPR’s program “Marketplace”, physicist Lawrence Krauss read a “short essay on the importance of funding the physical sciences, and the danger of cutting that investment”:http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2005/08/29/PM200508295.html. He used the examples of global positioning and automobile computers, underpinned by the General Theory of Relativity and the theory of Quantum Mechanics, respectively. Without the groundbreaking work of [...]
Aug 29 2005
I’m not feeling particularly well today. For whatever reason, my stomach is giving me some trouble. Unable to sleep, I decided to post some great images of Hurrican Katrina from “weather.com”:http://www.weather.com last night (see below).
I’ve been thinking about a lot of things regarding this hurricane. I wanted to jot them here before I forgot. First, [...]
Aug 27 2005
I’ve had a listen to Kathleen Dunn’s conversations with Michael Behe, professor at Lehigh Unviersity, and Anj Petto, professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Wisconsin. The interviews occurred over two days, and I decided to listen to them all at once in order to get the whole picture. Here are my notes on [...]
Aug 26 2005
I’ve been longing for a chance to drum again of late. Well, for over a year, really. I’ve been saving for an electric drum kit. My “analog” one has no place it can be setup, so it’s been disassembled for years.
That said, it’s been years since I’ve been in a band. Thank God my [...]
Chirp, a microblog Going Up Alleys The Perils of the Ice Queen
