On the day after Squid Day, I got mail from the publishing company Immedium*, letting me know they'd just come out with a new children's book: Sid the Squid and the Search for the Perfect Job. It might be of interest to me and my readers. Would I like to preview a pdf?

Flattered beyond all reason by the suggestion that I have "readers," and obsessed as I am with both squids and literature, I answered with a swift affirmative. (Apparently I was not the only cephaloblogger thus recruited.)

In the alchemical days of building your own circuit boards, you had to swirl hand-masked boards in noxious chemicals to burn away the layers you needed. Now, you can just pay by the inch. It's a glorious time for using home-designed printed circuit boards (PCBs).

Arctic Ice November 2010

Return to previous Arctic conditions is unlikely

Record temperatures across Canadian Arctic and Greenland, a reduced summer sea ice cover, record snow cover decreases and links to some Northern Hemisphere weather support this conclusion

Arctic Report Card 2010
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/

It's playoff time in baseball and the Giants have home field advantage over the Texas Rangers starting tomorrow, October 27th.

Baseball, more so than any other sport, lends itself to numerical analysis because virtually everything except defense is rigorously quantifiable.   There are some details, such as an umpire who might call a wider strike zone than another, but at least from a rules perspective the strike zone is what it is. 

Anyone in their late 20s who lived in Minnesota in 1991 remembers the record-setting Great Halloween Blizzard, which dropped several feet of snow across the state and bestowed upon children a few rare snow days.¹

For folks living in the upper Midwest today (particularly the Great Lakes region), we're experiencing what one of my colleagues called a "land hurricane" and Mother Nature is setting more records. It is already becoming one of the strongest storms on record, and it's just getting going.

When the skies of October turn gloomy²

The priest of Vigevano's Duomo must have been startled to realize that by far the most faithful presence at mass, ever since the altar was built, is not nonna Pina but a real dinosaur -a glaring testimony of the falsity of catholic-diffused pseudoscience and of the true origin of life on Earth. The red circle in the picture on the right shows the location of the marble slab in the altar.

President Obama's director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, made no friends among women when, as president of Harvard, he tried to have a discourse about gender differences in the higher levels of math-intensive fields.    He quickly learned that speculation and conjecture are best left to philosophy undergraduate classes and actual women in academia don't much care what he thinks about their abilities.

New research from a four-year study shows that 'gender bending' chemicals which find their way from human products into rivers and oceans can have a significant impact on the ability of fish to breed, which could have important implications for ecosystem health and possibly humans.

Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) disrupt the ways that hormones work in the bodies of vertebrates, including humans.    They can be found in everything from female contraceptive drugs and hormone replacement therapy pills to cleaning soap - most well studied EDCs are those that mimic estrogen.

Physical reality is composed of properties like distance, duration, velocity, area, volume, mass, energy, and temperature. To quantify these properties you need to measure them. And the act of measuring boils down to comparing against an agreed yardstick, a unit of measurement such as a foot, a gram, etc. 

Do you need a dedicated yardstick for each quantifiable property?

Would the answer to this question be 'yes', then physics as we know it, would not be possible. We would not be able to relate the various properties to each other, physics laws would not exist. Fortunately, the answer to the question is a clear 'no'. We need far fewer units than one might expect based on the number of physical properties. 

You may not know the name Hammer Films, but if you have watched movies at all you have probably heard of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.    In 1957 they appeared in a British 'horror' movie called THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and it put both of them, and the studio, on the cultural map.