Fix can mean to repair or to gimmick, as in 'the fix is in'.  I'm not going to tell you how to repair science journalism.  A few wingnuts stalwarts here at Science 2.0 beat that to death.  Their suggestions include sack the journalists, and also rehire journalists.  Be like ESPN.  Be ISO9000 (say what you'll do then do what you say).  Possibly, don't fix it.

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.

The human genome is the home of over 3 billion nucleotide base pairs packaged into 23 chromosome pairs. But despite the tremendous size of the human genome, only 1-2% of genome actually encodes for proteins.

Previously undetected landforms indicate the Moon is ... shrinking.

Lobate scarps  are thrust faults that occur primarily in the Moon's lunar highlands. They were first recognized in photographs taken near the moon's equator by the panoramic cameras flown on the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions. Fourteen previously unknown lobate scarps have now been revealed in very high resolution images taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. The newly detected scarps indicate that the thrust faults are globally distributed and not clustered near the moon's equator.

As a resident of the Elysian Fields that is the Twin Cities, I have been deluged by the Favreian Circus descending upon our fair binary metro area, and I. Am. So. Over. It.

The bacchanal over Number Four's return has spread through the sports-writing world at ludicrous speed¹ as has the dissolution of decades-long hatred among Vikings fans toward the former Cheesehead - hypocrites, the lot of you - but thus far I haven't come across a story that discusses regression toward the mean, which could be a factor in the upcoming NFL season.

A word is vague if it has borderline cases. Yul Brynner (the lead in "The King and I") is definitely bald, I am (at the time of this writing) definitely not, and there are many people who seem to be neither. These people are in the “borderline region” of ‘bald’, and this phenomenon is central to vagueness.

Nearly every word in natural language is vague, from ‘person’and ‘coercion’ in ethics, ‘object’ and ‘red’ in physical science, ‘dog’ and ‘male’ in biology, to ‘chair’ and ‘plaid’ in interior decorating.
Vagueness is the rule, not the exception. Pick any natural language word you like, and you will almost surely be able to concoct a case -- perhaps an imaginary case -- where it is unclear to you whether or not the word applies.