John on September 3, 2010
Stephen Hawking has a new book coming out in which he goes further than before in arguing the universe has no need for God: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” writes Hawking. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists why we exist. I’m sure there’s more to this quote, but as [...]
John on June 18, 2010
The Daily Caller has a report on a new National Science Foundation grant: a professor at UCLA has agreed to draw up a report that proves opponents of the Democrats’ health-care bill aren’t motivated by a sense of fiscal responsibility or a general distrust of back-room deals, but by race. The kicker? Taxpayers are funding the study. The professor is David Sears who, according to his UCLA faculty page is [...]
John on May 30, 2010
Okay, I don’t do this too often, but sometimes there’s just no substitute for crowd-sourcing, especially for something this arcane. I’m working on a paper about the realist/anti-realist debate in philosophy and how 20th century developments in physics have impacted the discussion. As often happens when I’m supposed to be working, I began daydreaming and was wondering why, in a 3-dimensional universe, the superscript to Einstein’s famous equation is a [...]
John on May 19, 2010
The NY Times reports on some big developments from the world of physics: In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat [...]
Morgen on April 30, 2010
For anyone hoping that Flash will ever be supported on Apple’s mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, etc.), Steve Jobs put the kibbosh on this possibility once and for all today: Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch [...]
John on April 28, 2010
From NASA’s new toy (a satellite called SDO – click for full size): According to the Daily Mail, that plume of plasma is big enough to contain 100 earths.
Morgen on April 18, 2010
Courtesy of NASA and Italian astronomer Marco Fulle. (Psalm 19:1)
John on March 30, 2010
From CNN: Perhaps the biggest difference between the male and female brain is that men have a sexual pursuit area that is 2.5 times larger than the one in the female brain. Yup, that explains a lot.
John on March 20, 2010
It’s well known that before going into politics Rahm Emmanuel was a ballet dancer. That fact probably has no connection to this new study: [I]mprovements in health care in wealthy western countries mean women do not have to worry about so much about the quality of their offspring – and so are picking more feminine looking men. [...]In countries with better health care, the more likely women would pick a [...]
John on March 20, 2010
Well, “on the way” may be a bit premature. But at least someone is theorizing it’s possible: Researchers at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), which is the research and development arm of the Ministry of Defence, claim it is possible to incorporate material known as supercapacitors into armour of a vehicle to turn it into a kind of giant battery. When a threat from incoming fire is detected [...]
John on March 10, 2010
Actually, I think this is more like a TurboProp Pack…but I’m not an engineer. The Telegraph reports: Glenn Martin, 50, has released details of the deal with an unnamed international aircraft company for the world’s first commercial jetpack. More than 500 Martin Jetpacks will be manufactured each year but there is already a waiting list of one year as commuters scramble to get their hands on one. The machine costs [...]
John on March 3, 2010
Big Hollywood links to this Variety story about the declining fortunes of Blockbuster video: Moody’s Investors Service has lowered shares of Blockbuster two notches closer to default, worrying that the company’s weak bottom line and heavy debt repayment schedule — to lower some $1 billion in debt — increases the likelihood of a distressed exchange. The Dallas-based company has been closing stores as more consumers switch to online rental services [...]
John on February 21, 2010
Is this the future of clean energy? Watch CBS News Videos Online I want one. A smaller one. If Bloom is looking for a test site, give me a ring.
John on February 16, 2010
Take a look at these photos from a mine in Mexico: There are a couple more here. I’ve never seen anything like it, though I’ve heard there are similar formations in New Mexico.
John on February 16, 2010
Turns out that old joke about getting old is scientifically true. It really is better than the alternative: One of the biggest puzzles in biology – how and why living cells age – has been solved by an international team based at Newcastle University, in north-east England. The Newcastle team, working with the University of Ulm in Germany, used a comprehensive “systems biology” approach, involving computer modelling and experiments with [...]
John on February 6, 2010
I’m always fascinated by these because the potential (pun intended) is so great. Two breakthroughs hit the papers today. First up a Japanese company claims they have found a way to extend the lifespan of Lithium-Ion batteries by 10x. As many of us know, current L-Ion batteries wear out after a few years and are expensive to replace. Next, a new type of plastic capacitor which, while not technically a [...]
John on January 28, 2010
iMussolini…It’s the digital equivalent of wearing a Che T-shirt. From Der Spiegel: It’s just a simple iPhone application. But it has proven enough to trigger a raging debate in Italy. After all, the app happens to offer the full text of over 100 speeches by the country’s Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. // // “This is really a flabbergasting phenomenon,” wrote one commentator Wednesday on the online version of the daily [...]
John on December 22, 2009
I like widgets for the sidebar. They’re handy. But the default “recent comments” widget that comes with WordPress (up to version 2.9 now) has some problems. The main one is that it displays the entire user name, followed by “on,” followed by the entire post title. Also, by default, both the user name and post title are links. The username links to his or her website and the post title [...]
John on December 8, 2009
Branson, you magnificent bastard. I was sold on this before, but now you’ve added the geek out factor: On a cold and windy night at the Mojave Air and Space Port, the VSS Enterprise was unveiled to the public tonight. Attached to its mother ship, the vehicle better known as SpaceShipTwo is expected to be the first commercial spacecraft when it enters service with Virgin Galactic. Here’s the ship: Here’s [...]
John on December 1, 2009
Interesting but not entirely surprising report from Wired: What may be the most thorough study ever of a single organism has produced a beta code for life’s essential subroutines, and shown that even the simplest creatures are more complex than scientists suspected. The analysis combined information about gene regulation, protein production and cell structure in Mycoplasma pneumoniae, one of the simplest self-sustaining microbes. [...] In the new studies, German and [...]
