First They Came For The Chemists…
A retired Massachusetts chemist had his home raided (without a warrant of course) and his property stolen by authorities. Why? Experiments. That’s right. He was doing experiments. Deeb is not accused of making methamphetamine or other illegal drugs. He’s not accused of aiding terrorists, synthesizing explosives, nor even of making illegal fireworks. … Pamela Wilderman, [...]
A Wrinkle in Time
Quantum physics, string theory, stuff like lasers and ball bearings–these are just a few things that I like to pretend I understand. Usually I just invoke the names of Stephen Hawking or Dr. Emmett Brown. If my audience is really smart I’ll make a reference to “e”, the loneliest of all the irrational numbers. I [...]
Chavez Brokers Deal For Hostages
From the Christian Science Monitor, two higher priority hostages have been released, and others may be forthcoming. The article doesn’t say what Chavez offered to secure their release. Interesting. Show of hands–who here thinks Chavez promised FARC something juicy (hmm…what could a militant group want?) in return for making him look like a hero and [...]
Global Warming–Don’t Just Suggest It…Prove It
I originally saw this article about the growing number of global warming skeptics in the scientific community. It contains some pretty interesting stuff and is worth a full read… The voices of many of these hundreds of scientists serve as a direct challenge to the often media-hyped “consensus” that the debate is “settled.” While there [...]
Language Evolution — Who Be Studying It?
Harvard’s Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel are applying mathematical analysis to changes in the English language to make predictions on how the language will evolve and what changes we can expect. Lieberman and Michel’s group computed the “half-lives” of the surviving irregular verbs to predict how long they will take to regularize. The most common ones, [...]
She Can’t Be Serious
Hillary Clinton’s latest idea… “I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time, so that when that young person turns 18 if they have finished high school they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to [...]
Big Hole in the Universe
From Space.com… The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it’s also strangely empty of the mysterious “dark matter” that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids [...]
He Plays, err, Blogs the Right Way
All the recent talk locally about proper link attribution prompted me to finish a post I started a while back about blogging and baseball. “Everything I need to know about blogging I learned from watching baseball”? Eh, don’t really like that title too much. Plus it sounds like link bait, and I’d never do that. [...]
Live Blogging of the South Carolina Debate Part II
After the break… Question 21: That’s funny that Gilmore lumps those three together. I like to do that with “Republicrats”. He is doing a great job of not naming names. And now he’s naming names. This could get good. Question 22: Guiliani is basically asking McCain to be his running mate. I guess he’s been [...]
Concensus versus Truth–Global Warming, Babe Ruth, and Rickey Henderson
The other day, a friend sent me an article from the KNS  about recent temperatures in East Tennessee, presumably trying to convince me that global warming is real and that the temperatures and phenomena in this area for the past 20 years prove it. All of this stemmed from a conversation we had a few days before [...]
