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. […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Kathleen Dunn, host of Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Conversations with Kathleen Dunn”:http://www.wpr.org/kathleendunn/, had two consecutive shows recently, the first with “a proponent of the intelligent design proposition”:http://clipcast.wpr.org:8080/ramgen/wpr/dun/dun050824e.rm and the second with “a biologist from UWM”:http://clipcast.wpr.org:8080/ramgen/wpr/dun/dun050825e.rm. I haven’t had a chance to listen, but I’ll be checking them out in order this […]
This week I had two immense pleasures. The first, in order of occurance, was the chance to present the case for a suite of non-standard physics (so-called “exotic” physics) to my BaBar colleagues. The second was to participate in a SLAC site tour for talented 16-18 year-olds from all over […]
My good pal Mandeep sent me a lovely blog article from “Jim Burklo, minister at the Sausalito Presbyterian Church”:http://tcpc.blogs.com/musings/2005/08/beyond_the_fish.html. Jim talks about how intelligent design is a discredit to both science and religion. Well, Jim puts it best so let me just quote him: But [intelligent design] isn’t a “theory” […]
In what appears to be quite a breakthough, “Harvard stem cell scientistsld by Dr. Douglas Melton, Kevin Eggan and others have claimed to regress an adult skin cell back to its stem cell phase by fusing it with an embryonic stem cell “:http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2005-08-22T055304Z_01_DIT221123_RTRIDST_0_SCIENCE-CELLS-DC.XML. While this may be the key to […]
In this, the third in a series of short essays about the structure of our universe, I will introduce you to a mysterious and elusive particle, the neutrino. This essay will do the work of three, since there are three different kinds of neutrinos. Their histories are closely linked, so […]
“The NY Times has a long article on the history and finance of the Discovery Institute, as well as its campaign to inject non-science into the science classroom”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/national/21evolve.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5089&en=24bc7c9c168ac8a8&ex=1282276800&adxnnl=0&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1124576825-jnRIYk4t25rJCvsuvxP4ww. Here are a few things I found fascinating and scary: * “When someone says there’s one thing you can’t talk about, that’s […]
The American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America, “have issued a joint statement on the teaching of evolution in the science classroom”:American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America (*on Wisconsin!*). It’s nice to see […]
This week, I and many of my friends and colleagues mourned the loss of the great Princeton theoretical physicist, John Bahcall. “The New York Times has a lovely article summarizing his contributions to U.S. and global science”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/nyregion/19bahcall.html?ex=1282104000&en=bb5de594ced89543&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss. John’s most famous insight was his very detailed model of the sun and […]