In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. --michael crichton
While the iron is really, really hot; Riverhead Books has announced a deal for a book about Boston Marathon bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It will be written by Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, author of the biography The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.
Environmental officials are set to conduct a survey of a Central Park lake for the northern snakehead, an invasive predator fish that can live out of water for days. This is a really aggressive predator and has no natural enemies. It can completely transform the ecology. Some have been found in the Mississippi and the local game commissions hunt them with a vengeance. This fish is a real ecology destroyer. Anyone dumping one of these beast in the U.S. should be considered an environmental terrorist.
The economist Walter Williams asks a very interesting question: How was wealth amassed before capitalism? His answer? Theft, raiding and slaving. Capitalism, he says, allows the development of wealth by serving your fellow man.
In a recent editorial, the murder of the soccer referee by an angry player in Utah was attributed to "lack of sportsmanship."
There is a thesis in psychology, called by Kahleman "priming," where the brain is fertilized by an event which later grows into a narrative through which subsequent events are seen. In the shadow of Watergate, perhaps this explains why the Republicans and the Press see the Benghazi event in the frame of scandal rather than competence.
There has been a presentation of Mexican as Palestinians in the discussion of immigration. That is, the Americans stole the southern part of the country from Mexico as Israel did Palestine and the "illegals" just want it back.
In 1990, the world used virtually no wind or solar energy, and considerably fewer nuclear reactors were operating then compared to now. Today, the world has more than 100,000 megawatts of solar power and nearly 300,000 megawatts of wind--big numbers and a lot of power production. Yet the world is using more coal today than ever before.
ETH Zurich researchers have shown that exhaled human breath contains a characteristic molecular "fingerprint." The scientists want to use this finding to diagnose diseases based on the chemical analysis of a patient's exhaled breath, using highly sensitive and precise instrumental methods.
Romney received a little less than 30% of the Hispanic vote in the last election; Obama, of course, got a bit more than 70%. If those numbers were reversed and Romney out polled Obama among Hispanics 70 to 30, Romney would still have lost.
Over 20% of all the immigrants on the planet are in the U.S. The country's foreign-born population has doubled in the last two decades to 40 million. According to Numbers USA, if the immigration bill passed, it would increase the legal population of the United States by 33 million in its first decade. That figure includes 11.7 million amnestied illegals and their children, plus 17 million family members imported through chain migration.
Harper Lee is suing to recover royalties from her former literary agent, Samuel Pinkus, who she claims tricked her into signing over the copyright to her novel To Kill A Mockingbird while she was recovering from a stroke in an assisted-living facility. The 87-year-old author regained the rights in 2012, but says Pinkus has still been collecting royalties.
Before the advent of electric lighting in Europe, sleepers awoke from their "first" sleep for an hour or more during the night, before returning to their "second" sleep. NASA has been interested in sleep patterns since discovering their astronauts did not sleep well for long periods. Their studies show that some long sleep --4 to 6 hours--is necessary and that augmentation with short sleeps help some cognitive functions. Piotr Woźniak, who developed a software system to help memory called the spacing effect ("one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning," the psychologist Frank Dempster wrote in 1988), thinks relying on short sleeps is destructive to learning, productivity and personality.
Luci Tapahonso has been named the Navajo Nation's first poet laureate.
Physicist Lee Smolin has a new book out describing his disenchantment with the perfect and timeless world of scientific law. "I used to think my job as a theoretical physicist was to find that formula. Now I see my faith in its existence as a kind of mysticism." Ever since Newton, physicists have been developing ever-more exact laws describing the behavior of the world. These laws live outside of time because they don't change. That means these laws are more real than time. Smolin is not so sure although he admits he has no substitute.
Pope John XXXIII appointed a "blue ribbon panel" to evaluate controversies within the Church and one of their recommendations was to change the Church position on contraception. Then he died. Paul VI, who revered John, became pope and wrote Humanae Vitae which reestablished the Church's old position.
Robert Putman, a Harvard political scientist, has reported on a five year study evaluating the effect of "diversity" on a community: The greater the diversity, the greater the distrust, the more the isolation. There is less sharing, less charity and significant social and political pessimism. I'm niot sure what this means other than what a stupid and coarse measuring stick "diversity" is.
The U.S. Census Bureau says the rate of participation of people 65 and older in the workforce increased from 12.1% in 1990 to 16.1% in 2010, and was 16.2% in 2011. Surveys show a growing number of workers 40 and over are also planning to work beyond retirement age.
Who is....Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Olugbala Shakur?
Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is before the Supreme Court and might be interesting. The top 10% of graduating Texas high school students are automatically offered admission at UT-A--race neutral--and these students make up 80% of incoming freshmen. The remaining 20% of the slots are given to minorities. Abigal Fisher was not in the top 10% and had to go the other route but was declined because she was white. (The school admits this.) What is unusual here is that the "race neutral 80% " has more minority represented than the general population so there is no need for a "race based" pathway at all. This asks another question: How long does the race preference go on? Forever? 100 more years? How long? Because it would be nice to have the nation focus on quality again.
There was a riot in Seattle in some strange celebratory May Day event. There were signs protesting capitalism and extolling unions and immigration. This spate of demonstrations has no need for coherence; one sign said "No human is illegal."
Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft (MAVEN) is scheduled for launch this November, to study the Red Planet's upper atmosphere; the craft will examine why Mars lost its atmosphere. Part of its publicity campaign is to hold a contest to send three haiku poems with the craft. When a tree falls....? NPR has a list of entries; they are really terrible. The cosmos should not know of our silliness.
Bon Jovi's daughter had a heroin overdose at Hamilton College.
Sen. John McCain is now proposing that the U.S. look more carefully at admitting persons "from countries that have histories such as Dagestan and Chechnya and others where there has been significant influence of radical Islamic extremism." Sometimes watching these guys is really fun. He does not mention Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. And, of course, Dagestan and Chechnya are not countries; their citizens travel on Russian passports. So Mr. McCain is suggesting....what?
The Cuban government and the Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation are collaborating to digitize and preserve papers and records from Ernest Hemingway's estate on the outskirts of Havana, which scholars in the United States have not previously had access to. Digital images of 2,000 papers will go to John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
A new Centers For Disease Control And Prevention study points that oil and gas workers have a fatality rate that is 7 times greater than the national average. Oil and gas workers suffer 27.1 fatalities per 100,000 workers, while the US average is 3.8 fatalities, and many of the deaths are in helicopters.
Golden Oldies:
Hitting the Air Traffic Controllers with the Dreaded Sequester is like the attack on 9/11: It will embitter knowledgeable people. But they may not be the people the administration is trying to impress.
From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7.
The philosopher Edmund Burke was a withering debate opponent and conversationalist. Conversing with Burke, it was said, was like being "grazed by a powerful machine." Once, when Samuel Johnson was feeling poorly, he said, "That fellow [Burke] calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me."
AAAAaaaannnnnddddd....a picture of the snakehead:
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