Every person’s life is like a kaleidoscope. Some pick up another’s life, hold it to the light and all the glass chips fall this way or that. And the person sighting through the cylinder puts it down and turns away, saying they’ve seen it all, when in fact, they’ve only seen one facet, one pattern in another’s life. Thus some remember only one thing or two about the life of another...

Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning and we’ve got another scrub. In this case it was an equipment issue with the failure of a Liquid Hydrogen valve to report proper closing. Obviously when it comes to Liquid Hydrogen you do NOT want to mess around with possible problems. Having volatile fuels leaking out at launch leads to some very messy outcomes. Right now they are on a 48 hour hold to check things out....

Ted Talks: Eric Giler wants to untangle our wired lives with cable-free electric power. Here, he covers what this sci-fi tech offers, and demos MIT’s breakthrough version, WiTricity [Wikipedia entry] — a near-to-market invention that may soon recharge your cell phone, car, pacemaker. Endgadget: What started out as an MIT project two years ago has now progressed into a full-fledged company —...

Guest Book Review: The Day We Found The Universe by Marcia Bartusiak Reviewed by Ron Beasley Astrology began to morph into astronomy in 1543 with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’ “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres.” It was here, much to the dismay of theologians, the Earth lost its place as the center of the universe. The transformation was complete about 60 years later when Galileo...

The new issue of Foreign Affairs is hot off the presses. Its cover package includes three articles about global warming that are well worth reading. The focus here is entirely on how to solve the problem. This is a discussion of the politics, not the scientific debate behind it. First up is Michael Levi, who provides a very sobering look at how hard it will be for this year’s Copenhagen conference (the...

Jonah Lehrer is a fascinating fellow. A contributing editor at Wired, he’s the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist and How We Decide. I became familiar with him through his work on WNYC’s Radio Lab. Today he got to thinking about mirror neurons: Mirror neurons are a classic illustration of a scientific idea that’s so elegant and intriguing our theories get ahead of the facts. They’re...

Noam Cohen, writing in the NYTimes, reports that when Wikipedia’s volunteer editors gather in Buenos Aires for their annual Wikimania conference this week, a hot topic will be a new editing procedure: Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia’s contributors into two...

As many of you may know the space shuttle is scheduled for a Monday evening/Tuesday morning (depending on your location) launch. I have been a space nut since I was a little kid and if I could have my wishes I’d probably be on the shuttle myself. But failing that I am incredibly proud and inspired by the fact that one of the astronauts on the current mission comes from my hometown of Stockton, California....

I always make a practice of buying and reading the local newspaper(s) when traveling. Today’s Los Angeles Times had an interesting, timely and probably controversial Op-Ed, titled “Just the ‘facts’ fails us all.” Naturally, it deals with the current healthcare debate, but it also discusses a broader, more complex issue: The media, journalism and “the truth.” I am not a journalist—I did take...

Another beautiful image of the day from NASA, combining data from two different space-based telescopes. – Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice. —

Comments that follow an article in a newspaper/magazine/blog generally indicate the quality of its readership. The Economist magazine does get an impressive array of views. I offer below the views, tied in a string in a random fashion, of different readers under the article “Losing Afghanistan?” Reader No. 1: “The real purpose of the (American) occupation is to extend and entrench western...

I’m late to this story, via TechCrunch: Flickr really stepped in it this time. And they’ve sparked a free speech and copyright fascism debate that is unlikely to cool down any time soon. Sometime last week they took down a photoshopped image of President Obama that makes him look like the Heath Ledger (Joker) character from The Dark Knight. The image was created and uploaded to Flickr by 20 year old...

Suzanne White, my favourite Chinese astrologer, is an American with a no-nonsense approach that’s a hallmark of her style even when she writes on non-astrology subjects. Here I am referring to her two posts: “Why Do Americans Fear Socialism?” and “Don’t Speechify. Teachify.” White’s first post, and here it goes: “I don’t want to ‘become a socialist’...

Recently, I posted about being uneasy with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, specifically regarding the use of composite materials. Today NewScientist has a short article that gives a clue as to why there have been so many delays: Why large carbon-fibre planes are still grounded Clearly, composites are a work in progress. The trouble, says aviation engineer Philip Irving at Cranfield University in the UK, is that...

Technology Review on a robot experiment that shows how “deceptive” behavior can emerge from simple rules: Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have found that robots equipped with artificial neural networks and programmed to find “food” eventually learned to conceal their visual signals from other robots to keep the food for themselves. The results...

NASA has posted the first infrared image taken with the newest weather satellite, and it is amazing. Hurricane Bill is visible in the full disk view of the Earth, and the photo shows how huge these storms are. — Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice. —

It’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. John Battelle: True, to a point. What it really is, is the release of how we already communicate, but now at scale. It’s not a shift in *how* we communicate, it’s a step function in our *ability* to communicate. There’s an important difference there. One could argue that means a fundamental shift, but such a statement can be easily...

Kevin Rudd’s government is in a celebration mode following Australia’s twin victory in finalizing 20-year-long liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply deals with India and China. A sales and purchase AUD 25 billion agreement between ExxonMobil and Petronet LNG of India signed last week is the “dawning of a new trading partnership.” Under the agreement, Exxon Mobil will supply about 1.5 million...

News that scientists have demonstrated the possibility of fabricating DNA is bound to be fodder for the conspiracy theorists among us. “You can just engineer a crime scene,” said the lead author of the new study. Oh, swell! Ars Technica has previously reported that there’s not a lot of science to the rest of forensic science. Thankfully, their read of this study suggests all is not lost: Fortunately,...

A new NBC News poll reflects that Americans remain skeptical about the Democrats’ health care reform plans. For example, “a plurality” believes that the Democrats’ health plan would worsen the quality of health care; a result that, according to MSNBC.com, “is virtually unchanged from last month’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.” Fair enough. The president and the Democrats...

Studying how zombies might take over the world sounds like something for The Journal of Irreproducible Results, but it’s really serious science: Science ponders zombie attack — Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice. — Technorati : humor, research, science, zombies Del.icio.us : humor, research, science, zombies Zooomr : humor, research, science, zombies Flickr :...

WE ARE THE ATOMIC CHILDREN AND WE ARE STILL DANCING It began before we went to school… we asked for live ponies, but received inflatable whales made of polypropylene instead. But it was okay. We waited and waited for April so we could dance can-can tournaments in the rain. We wore eerie iridescent swim suits glowing like uranium. Our swimsuits were always too big and showed everything, or they were always...

The DOJ announced an indictment today in what looks to be the biggest credit card data breach of all time. Ars Technica: Indeed, before today, the former high score was represented by the scarlet letter on TJX’s forehead, parent company of retailer T.J. Maxx. That data breach involved “at least” 45.7 million credit and debit card numbers that occurred between mid-2005 and early 2007, as well...

In the past, we literally had to sell our house to pay a huge hospital bill. The hospital sent the bloodhounds. My husband had just lost his job. I was near death. Afterward, anything related to that crisis was big red lettered ‘pre-existing condition,” by any and every insurer we’d ever had… and although undertaking scrupulous selfcare (dont drink dont smoke, dont do illegal drugs, dont...

President Obama may or may not be a lame-duck after the 2010 Midterm elections and be swept from office in 2012, but such prognostications are really a waste of time because greater forces will dictate what happens to the U.S. both politically and economically. The reasons behind his moving so fast on so many fronts may be that he senses the ephemeral nature of political power in a deeply divided country with...