Dirty Coal And Boring Science


There was a time when, through the proliferation of steam power, coal extraction in vast quantities became economically viable.  Throughout the U.K. coal was burned to make steam for locomotives, factories and ships.  It was the domestic fuel of choice.  The price of cheap coal was pollution: the skies over many cities were black with soot when coal was king.

... nothing surely was ever more dirty, inelegant, and disgusting than a common coal fire.

Marc Cenedella has excavated an old resume of da Vinci, the very definition of 'renaissance man' and  'genius'.  At the time, da Vinci was applying to work for the Duke of Milan.

Wired UK looks at his resume (Was Da Vinci the right man for the job?) and (being Wired) come to exactly the wrong conclusions.

To see the future, you must know the past: these nine words nicely summarize a syllogism which knows few exceptions. Turning to known data to check the power of one's extrapolations is a quite well-founded scientific approach. So if we are to try and guesstimate how much will the CDF and DZERO experiments manage to deliver in the next few years, we must check how well they delivered this far, by comparing results with early expectations.

But why bother ? Well, of course because there is a real challenge on: bookmakers need to tune the odds they offer!

Fermilab versus CERN