Random Thoughts

Wow... Evidence Of The Recession Really Is Everywhere

In 2007, advertisements talking about how much money you could make sitting on your butt if you would just BUY THEIR SECRET were at least interesting.     We got tales of people making obnoxious amounts of money selling stuff on the interwebs or flipping h ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Aug 26 2009 - 12:09am

The Say of the Week

" It is not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes " (From a sentence attributed to Josef Stalin) With a thought to Middle Eastern elections... ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Aug 26 2009 - 2:02pm

On The Distribution Of Money And Ability

Data on the distribution of wealth is apparently hard to come by directly, but inheritance tax data from the UK for some years is available.  This data, it turns out, can be well-fit by an exponential function, over most of the UK population [1].  That is ...

Article - J.R. van Meter - Aug 28 2009 - 9:04am

Morning Science Quote

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to thi ...

Blog Post - Michael White - Aug 31 2009 - 9:35am

Jaycee Abduction: Failures Galore

OK, I'm just going to say it.  Where was law enforcement? We have a registered sex offender, we have a neighbor reporting children on the property in November 2006, we have a parole violation in 1993.... I guess the question is what does someone have ...

Blog Post - Gerhard Adam - Aug 31 2009 - 5:24pm

Are you the same person you were a minute ago?

You have the same skin, same bones, the same meat. More importantly, when speaking about the mind, the essence of your good self, you have the same brain: the same neurons (more or less), the same synapses, the same blood vessels and connective tissue ins ...

Blog Post - Theadora Martens - Sep 1 2009 - 11:20am

Morning Science Quote

... Experiments unguided by an appropriate theoretical framework usually amount to little more than "watching the pot boil."- John Holland, "Complex Adaptive Systems", Daedalus 121:17-30 (1992) Read the feed: ...

Blog Post - Michael White - Sep 3 2009 - 6:00am

Tangential Science: 42,001 And The Science Of Karma

Tangential Science: it's not necessarily science, but it's still funny. 1. Science of Karma  Can there be science to 'Karma'?   Likely not, since Karma is, by definition, an Eastern religious concept that has been colloquiallized into a ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Sep 3 2009 - 2:03am

I swear, Officer, I got this pot from a church fundraiser!

Ah, summer. Sunshine, lazy days, kids selling cocaine under the guise of lemonade on the sidewalk. Wait, what? Best excuse ever for ingesting pot: it was the mysterious sidewalk salesman working for a "church fundraiser" who sold me the magic bro ...

Blog Post - Becky Jungbauer - Sep 3 2009 - 1:19pm

A walk on the wild side

Sometimes I forget that my time constraints force me to make a choice between writing on my blog and reading other people's, and so I start reading random stuff in physics blogs I am acquainted with, to then find myself listlessly drifting from a site ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Sep 4 2009 - 7:51pm