The Stories and Novels By Derek Ward
His article in Sci-Am is worth a read.
Shermer begins with saying the insanity taking place on college campuses can be laid at the feet of having no other ideologies to act as a reality balance. Locked in an echo chamber, it’s a race to the extremes – kind of like a primary race.
Then Shermer lays out that bias affects not only the descriptive terms used during studies (conservative values as indicators of mental disorders), but in how the data is interpreted.
RTWT
So, that’s where my brother and I got our sparkling blues.
Everyone with blue eyes alive today – from Angelina Jolie to Wayne Rooney – can trace their ancestry back to one person who probably lived about 10,000 years ago in the Black Sea region, a study has found.
Scientists studying the genetics of eye colour have discovered that more than 99.5 per cent of blue-eyed people who volunteered to have their DNA analysed have the same tiny mutation in the gene that determines the colour of the iris.
This indicates that the mutation originated in just one person who became the ancestor of all subsequent people in the world with blue eyes, according to a study by Professor Hans Eiberg and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen.
H/t Peter Grant (who you should be reading and buying his books)
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman, from the Rogers Commission Report on the Challenger disaster
Thirty years ago, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds into its flight. Seven were killed.
This is perhaps the first memory where I remember where I was when I heard the news. I was in sixth grade, coming back from PE, when a teacher burst into the hall to tell us what happened. We watched the coverage for pretty much the rest of the day. A friend of mine was in Nature’s Classroom and actually saw the Y-shaped cloud.
Image is from CBS news.
As if I didn’t love this company already for its shattering of taxi cartels, they are now going to be delivering flu shots on November 19.
Customers who normally use the Uber smartphone app to call for a ride will be able to request a flu shot — and a nurse in an Uber car will show up at their home or office in about three dozen cities across the country.
The charge is $10, but the nurse can give up to 10 flu shots at each location for no additional charge. So work colleagues can split the cost among themselves.
Unfortunately, it’s only one day, but I hope this is an annual program by Uber.
https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf
Doug Zongker of University of Washington, you are my hero!
P.S. There’s even a PowerPoint!
Science advances through tentative answers to a series of more and more subtle questions which reach deeper and deeper into the essence of natural phenomena.
Louis Pasteur
C’mon, we’re making a dry ice run!
I do so love science night with the nephew’s scout den.
Sewage sludge contains traces of gold, silver and platinum at levels that would be seen as commercially viable by traditional prospectors. “The gold we found was at the level of a minimal mineral deposit,†said Kathleen Smith, of the US Geological Survey.
Smith and her colleagues argue that extracting metals from waste could also help limit the release of harmful metals, such as lead, into the environment in fertilisers and reduce the amount of toxic sewage that has to be buried or burnt.
Bad jokes aside, this is actually an interesting concept. It also reinforces the concept that as the price for a commodity rises, human ingenuity will come up with new ways to access those commodities.
In this case, the commode. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself).
It’s easy to stand against a technology with a full belly and 20/20 vision.
Kevin Folta