Jul 17 2008
We’re halfway thru the year! So how’d those New Years’ Resolutions turn out?
***edit***
Several people have complained that July 17th is not exactly halfway thru the year. I know July 17 is not the midpoint of the year. But today is the day I realized that at least half the year has gone by already.
Jul 17 2008
From The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin.
No wonder physics is so hard to learn. As it is usually taught to students, Newton’s physics does not make complete sense, for they are almost never told the whole story. Position, velocity, and acceleration are usually introduced as if they have simple and obvious meanings, but the do not. Even more difficult are the concepts of force and mass; the definitions given of them in textbooks are almost always circular. The students are seldom told that if they are puzzled it may be for good reason, or that the things that confuse them have been debated for centuries. Some figure it out for themselves. Many go away with an unjustified sense that they cannot learn science.
Jul 16 2008
Why is there so much anti-American sentiment in the world?
Rove is a criminal, on vacation.
Knowing about the economy is important if you’d like to be president, McCain.
No, I’m not a big Heinlein fan.
Rich people use drugs (poor, brown people go to jail for it).
Why having the legal protection of marriage is important for queer couples.
Jul 16 2008
From The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin.
In science, as in politics or love, one can have all the good arguments and still be in the wrong. When it comes down to it, what matters is not whose story is more logical or beautiful, but which leads to the greatest effect.
Jul 12 2008
From The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin.
Does the world consist of a large number of independently autonomous atoms, the properties of each owing nothing to the others? Or, instead, is the world a vast, interconnected system of relations, in which even the properties of a single elementary particle or the identity of a point in space requires and reflects the whole rest of the universe? The two views of space and time underlie and imply two very different views of what it means to speak of a property, of identity, or of individuality. Consequently, the transition from a cosmology based on an absolute notion of space and time to one based on a relational notion - a transition that we are now in the midst of - must have profound implications for our understanding of the place of complexity and life in the universe.
Jul 11 2008
So I’ve gone to the movies twice since I’ve been here. Generally, I would consider this a silly thing to do since going to the movies is so expensive. Not so here in nowhere, Michigan! A student ticket at the local theater is $3.50 and on Thursdays they have giant bags of $1 popcorn.
So far I’ve seen Wall-E
Jul 09 2008
Jul 06 2008
In order to avoid doing something about pollutants, the White House simply refused to open the email from the EPA. (via The Scientific Activist)
I really hope we don’t invade Iran. (via pebkac thoughts)
You know how US soldiers were tortured by the Chinese during the Korean War? Well, we’re using the same techniques on Iraqis. (via Gadfly)
The “good old days” weren’t good.
Beautiful Darren Waterson paintings at Le territoire des sens.
Yasumasa Morimura dressed like famous female movie stars and photographed himself. (via Manolo’s Shoe Blog)
Reminder from Angry Astronomer: prayer is bullshit.
Congress still pushes for abstinence only funding. The ACLU’s Caroline Fredrickson says it best:
It’s hard to imagine a good reason why, in these tight economic times, Congress would intentionally flush taxpayer dollars down the drain by spending them on disproven, ineffective abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. We are floored that they continue to ignore study after study, and the consensus of the public health community, all concluding that these programs censor vital health care information, teach gender stereotypes, discriminate against lesbian and gay teens, and in some cases promote religion in the classroom in violation of the Constitution.” (via Feministing)
Pharyngula links us to abiogenesis in a nutshell.
Jul 04 2008
From The Life of the Cosmos by Lee Smolin.
[T]here is no mystery or symmetry needed to explain why the air is spread uniformly in a room. Each atom moves randomly, it is just the statistics of enormous numbers. Perhaps the greatest nightmare of the Platonist is that, in the end, all of our laws will be like this, so that the root of all the beautiful regularities we have discovered will turn out to be more statistics, beyond which is only randomness or irrationality.
This is perhaps one reason why biology seems puzzling to some physicists. The possibility that the tremendous beauty of the living world might be, in the end, just a matter of randomness, statistics, and frozen accident stands as a genuine threat to the mystical conceit that reality can be captured in a single, beautiful equation.
