Well, you knew this day was coming. Ray Kurzweil, futurist and author, was attacked for his supposed lack of understanding of how the brain functions, by popular biologist and ScienceBlogs blogger PZ Myers earlier this week.


Image courtesy of Singularity Hub

Several Italian scientists may be charged later this year with manslaughter over the deaths of 308 people who died in and around l'Aquila in 2009.  Is this reasonable?

I wanted to write about something new in this post, but as Google News failed to inform me of any interesting geology-related happenings (unless you include this BBC article which is just one big rock pun) I will have to make do with something almost-current I have wanted to write about for a while.

During cosmic inflation, the universe's volume doubles only about 260 times. Not much, but still, if this happens during an amazingly short time duration Δt, it would be an amazingly fast process. Lets see about this. The duration of cosmic inflation Δt is constrained by particle physics. Reheating, which is the end of inflation, also called “Big Bang”, must happen before the so called electro-weak symmetry breaks at around 10^-12 seconds in cosmic time.

A young fisherman in a distant past looks across the sea and ponders: "What an unimaginably big stretch of water!" He has no idea where it ends or even if it ends. But he knows one thing: over time spans of many years the rainfall into the sea adds up to a lot of water, and therefore the sea must be rising. This means that in a number of generations the sea will inevitably flood the lands, making the world an inhabitable place. But it also means that in the past the sea must have been much shallower. Too shallow for fish to thrive in. An inevitable conclusion forces itself upon our young fisherman. His generation is a very privileged one. A generation that lives late enough to find fish to feed on, and early enough to find land to live on. A remarkable coincidence.

A few days ago, while talking about mundane business issues, I learned that today, August 19th, was the birthday of that famous childhood delight, the 'black cow', what would later be called a root beer float.

If you are not up on your carbonated beverage lore, root beer hails from the root of the sassafras tree or the sarsaparilla vine.  When the root mixture is mixed with water, sugar and yeast, it is sweetened and the yeast generates carbon dioxide and carbonates the water.