Category: Science


  • Some quotes I liked from this talk. “Emotions are not separate from reason. They are the foundation of reason as they show us what to value.” “The first gift or talent is Mindsight: the ability to enter into other people’s minds and learn what they have to offer…. Babies are born to interpenetrate into Mom’s mind and…

  • Noticed this one from PurpleCar. (I first noticed it through the TED Facebook page and meant to watch it, but for whatever reason did not bookmark it. So maybe better to say renoticed.) Roy setup cameras in his house to capture everything that happens around his son for the purpose of watching the influence of adults…

  • The New York Times article “Nuclear Agency Tells a Concerned Congress That U.S. Industry Remains Safe” had a curious statement from Gregory Jaczko, of the chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in front of Congress. “U.S. nuclear facilities remain safe,” Mr. Jaczko told two House Energy and Commerce subcommittees, which had originally planned to consider his…

  • Twenty-five years ago today my teachers had us all gather in a classroom. A teacher was being sent into orbit. The intent was for us to see a historic event. Instead we got to see even bigger history being made as the Space Shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launch. The disintegration of the vehicle was…

  • This interesting article on the need of more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates in the United States to compete with other countries strikes me as the kind of thing said to Romans right before the fall. Maybe also to the English just before World War I. Of course, predictions of the future are fraught…

  • Now Kepler has found the much-anticipated first rocky, Earth-sized exoplanet. It did it by staring for months on end at the same 150,000 stars in the constellation Cygnus. Kepler’s 1-meter-diameter telescope, hooked up to a sensitive light-measuring instrument, is capable of detecting the dimming of a star as a planet orbits in front of it—even…

  • In the furor over a bacterium using arsenic where normally it would use phosphorus, I looked up this quote. This has no direct bearing on the discovery other than why science is important. If we look with a perceiving eye upon the world of creation, we find that all existing things may be classified as…

  • This mention reminded me of a study where men experienced difficulties remembering the news when the speaker was a beautiful woman. Beautiful women should take up chess. Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark wrote a Stockholm University working paper in which they found that male chess players pursue riskier strategies when they’re facing attractive…

  • I found this article in The Economist reporting on a study regarding lies on conference calls interesting. David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analysed the transcripts of nearly 30,000 conference calls by American chief executives and chief financial officers between 2003 and 2007. They noted each boss’s choice of words,…