Bob Geldof, former singer with The Boomtown Rats, is better known today for his work with poor people. Long after it stopped being fashionable, he has continued to help starving people in Ethiopia.

It's not the only way he is unfashionable - so is his old-school liberalism, which doesn't care about labels or circling the wagons for Big Tent left-wing causes or being against anyone on the other side by default.  When he spoke nicely about George W. Bush in 2003, it was stunning because we were all told to hate George Bush. Liberals in America were not allowed to say nice things about the man or the pitchforks and "neo-con" labels came out.

One Small Step - Two Small Strips 
 ( Or Maybe Three )


The news that Neil Armstrong's EKG is up for auction has been reported across the world.  Having more than a passing interest in how language is used, I was looking at the different ways that writers have dealt with this story when the article by PC mag caught my eye.  The image they posted was not the same as the one from RR Auction.

Combining Medicare's hospital, physician, and prescription drug coverage with private supplemental coverage into one health plan could save the government and seniors $180 billion over a decade, according to a new analysis from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and advocacy group The Commonwealth Fund. 

Under the proposed plan, called "Medicare Essential," Medicare costs would be $63 billion lower between 2014 and 2023, with total premium and out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries estimated to be 17 percent to 40 percent lower than current costs.

Species of gigantic animals that once roamed Australia were long gone by the time people arrived, a major review of the available evidence has concluded.

The research challenges the claim that humans were primarily responsible for the demise of the megafauna in a proposed "extinction window" between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, and points the finger instead at climate change.

The Black Sea sediment record has a terrific variety of past plankton species that left behind their genetic makeup - the plankton paleome.

The semi-isolated Black Sea is highly sensitive to climate driven environmental changes, and the underlying sediments represent high-resolution archives of past continental climate and concurrent hydrologic changes in the basin. The brackish Black Sea is currently receiving salty Mediterranean waters via the narrow Strait of Bosphorus as well as freshwater from rivers and via precipitation.

A roughly 3.5-mile high Martian mound  known as Mount Sharp is not evidence of a massive lake but might be the result of the Red Planet's famously dusty atmosphere, a new analysis has found. If correct, the research dilutes expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water and ideas about past habitability.

You've seen it on television; a rich, older man who supports a younger, attractive spouse. And it happens in real life, but it's rare.

Instead, a new analysis by economists has found that people married to much younger or much older mates have lower average earnings, lower cognitive abilities, are less educated and even less attractive than couples of similar ages.

British Radar in WW2 -  by Sir Robert Watson-Watt

I am pleased to be able to publish here in my blog a historical document of some importance: a short history of radar by Sir Robert Watson-Watt.  The document - reproduced below these introductory comments - includes some information and images which have not, to the best of my knowledge, been published before on the internet.  Of special interest to historians is the

first photographic record of radiolocation of aircraft, made on the 24th of July, 1935. 

Hawaii does not get a lot of hurricanes, only two have made landfall in the last 30 years.

But scientists at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa predict that Hawaii could see a two-to-three-fold increase in tropical cyclones by 2075.

How worried should Hawaii residents get?

With the Higgs boson in the bag, the game called "global fit" that particle physicists have been playing for a couple of decades has changed significantly. The knowledge of the Higgs boson mass provided by the measurements obtained by the ATLAS and CMS experiments, added to dozens of  other measurements of critical observable properties of subatomic particles that have been measured at LEP/SLC, LEPII, the Tevatron, and the LHC itself, allow us to constrain some of the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model more than direct experimental determinations do.

But what the heck is a global fit ?