Inquiry is fundamentally different from stated conclusions, even when those conclusions can be legitimately qualified as knowledge (which is to say, as the products of valid inquiry). One can ennunciate a profound truth without ever even remotely approaching the effort of inquiry needed to earn that truth.

This is one of those "enough monkeys randomly pounding on typewriters" observations; sooner or later even the most capricious and willfully arbitrary of productions will generate something that is "true," "correct," "interesting," etc. [1] But such "results" are devoid of any philosophical or cognitive interest.

Last week I posted a column on cost accounting. But I didn’t say it was about cost accounting, and nearly eight hundred people read it.   Let’s try a (ahem) “scientific” experiment, starting with this announcement: This column is about cost accounting too. I’ll share the readership numbers with you next week!

Among the first things we teach students of business operations are the cherished principles of incremental cost (cost resulting from an action taken, minus costs that would have resulted had the action not been taken), opportunity cost (cost relative to the next best alternative), and sunk cost (past, irrecoverable, and hence irrelevant costs).

A group of University of Utah scientists say they developed a "molecular condom" that could help protect women against AIDS in Africa and other impoverished areas.

It's a vaginal gel that turns semisolid in the presence of semen, trapping AIDS virus particles in a microscopic mesh so they can't infect vaginal cells.

A study testing the behavior of the new gel and showing how it traps AIDS-causing HIV particles will be published online later this week in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The sex hormone estrogen tempers the killing activity of immune cells called cytotoxic T cells (CTLs), which are known to attack tumor cells and cells infected by viruses.

Estrogen plays a critical role in the regulation of growth and the development of cells and is also crucial for cell-type-specific gene expression in various tissues. Deregulation of this system results in breast and ovarian cancer.  The key player in this process is a cytotoxic T cell molecule known as EBAG9.

Breast and ovarian tumors are treated with drugs such as tamoxifen. Researchers suggest that this drug inhibits tumor growth by blocking the estrogen receptors of the tumor cells. However, up to now it has been unclear what effect this inhibition has on the immune system. 

Methane was discovered on Mars in 2004, meaning volcanic activity continues to generate heat below the martian surface or, if you are exceptionally kooky, that life there is generating it.

When Mars Express arrived in orbit around the red planet, Vittorio Formisano, Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario CNR, Rome, and the rest of the instrument team using planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) began taking data and saw a puzzling signal; along with atmospheric gases such as carbon monoxide and water vapor, they saw methane.  
 

When did executions go from being functional example-setting to being more humane in method?

Annulla Linders, a University of Cincinnati sociologist, examined newspaper accounts of 19th and 20th century Ohio executions to put more 'scientific' executions in context.  

Linders used two late 19th century executions to illustrate the transition from hanging to electrocution and determined that central to the switch was the audience of executions - including journalists and physicians. 

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US, have performed sophisticated laser measurements to detect the subtle effects of one of nature's most elusive forces - the "weak interaction", and in the process also found the largest effect of the weak interaction ever observed in an atom.

Our offices are in a building in sunny Folsom, California, a town made most famous when Johnny Cash had a concert at the nearby prison (*).   It's one of those full service places where they have the phones and the furniture and a kitchen in the middle.   It's obviously more expensive than a regular office lease but the riverboat gambler in me doesn't like long-term leases and I am convinced I could work from my house if my wife didn't say things like, "You can't work from the house."

On Thursday I was walking toward the kitchen to get my 11th coffee of the day when I passed two fellows talking in the hallway.   "No, the cost to run it is $3 million a day," says one.   "That's ..."

I kept walking.

"That's ..."

The Voynich Manuscript Part 7 : Further Dating Studies

I present here more evidence in support of my suggestion that the Voynich manuscript may date from a period between 1350 to 1450, perhaps even earlier.  This is part 7 of an occasional series which commenced in part 1 with information about Wilfrid and Ethel Voynich.

Merlons and Bartizans.

Amateur astronomers fond of visual observation of faint galaxies and other fuzzy treasures of the night sky are always in search of the best observative site, where to drag their large Dobsonian telescopes.

Unfortunately, their road is always uphill - also in a metaphorical sense: light pollution is growing everywhere at a disturbing rate, and it has already erased all but the brightest stars from our urban and suburban skies.

Many of our kids grow without having seen the Milky Way, and the few who are drawn to astronomy are surprised to realize, from the tales of older dogs like me, that it did not use to be that way.