Friday, April 30, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Volcanic Eruptions
See Icelandic broadcaster's videos of the volcanic eruption. I recommend the video at the second link.
I see that a Lufthansa representative complained that the German government should not have relied on the British data and that the German government should have done it its own testing. I'm betting that the Brits (and other European governments) overreacted.
But there is an upside: Perhaps regular transatlantic passenger boat travel will return."But German officials defended their decision to close the skies. 'What’s more important, the safety of passengers or business?' asked Mr. Malewski of the German Weather Service." NYTimes article (April 17, 2010). It might be noted, however, that the decision to close the skies was not costless. Did the decision cost or shorten some lives? (For example, was the shipment of some medical supplies delayed?) And should we assume that the estimated $200,000,000 in daily losses to the airlines would all have been spent on spas by wealthy vacationing airline executives? (I'm not much of an economist but I think it's bit too simple to say that the tradeoff is the value of lives versus the value of business.)
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Harvesting Spaghetti from the Spaghetti Tree
The spaghetti tree hoax is a famous 3-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current affairs programme Panorama. It told a tale of a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the fictitious spaghetti tree, broadcast at a time when this Italian dish was not widely eaten in the UK and some Britons were unaware spaghetti is a pasta made from wheat flour and water. Hundreds of viewers phoned into the BBC, either to say the story was not true, or wondering about it, with some even asking how to grow their own spaghetti trees. Decades later CNN called this broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled."[1]
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_tree
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_tree
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Friday, March 26, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Google Helps You Ride Your Bike to Work
Google will help you ride your bicycle to work: it promises to map safe riding routes in 150 cities.
Folks, if I can ride to work (and I can, most of the time), most of you can too.
I ride a bike to work because it's fun -- not to save the world, the environment, etc.
All hail Google. And I'm referring to the company rather than the number.
Will Google's successor be Googleplex?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Prime Mover of Arecibo Radio Telescope Dies
This is sad news: W. E. Gordon, Creator of Link to Deep Space, Dies at 92 NYTimes (Feb. 26, 2010):
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The dynamic evidence page
William E. Gordon, an electrical engineer who conceived, designed, built and operated the world’s largest radio telescope, which has been described as Earth’s ear to outer space, died on Feb. 16 at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 92.
The story made me think back to my teenage years when I trooped out one weekend, with some scientists, to the Ohio State University radio telescope north of Columbus, in Delaware, Ohio. (Apparently this telescope later came to be called "Big Ear.") The main receiver on that thing-a-majig - was a flat rectangular thing that tilted on just one axis. But the whole apparatus was awesome. I tried to imagine -- without much success -- how one would decipher the signals it received.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Sunday, January 31, 2010
A Timely Reminder: The Ignored Tragedy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
"Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake." Nicholas D. Kristoff, Orphaned, Raped and Ignored NYTimes (Jan. 30, 2010).
Monday, January 18, 2010
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