Icon for Cosmic Embryo: Erupting star V838 Monocerotis
”On 2010-09-26, at 5:01 AM, Frithjof A.S. Sterrenburg wrote:
Dear Richard!
Sorry to hear you have been in the claws of the barber-surgeons. Hope everything is well now!… As for your itinerant existence, you begin to resemble the mathematician Erdös! Cheers, boy, get well soon!"
I am 21% of awesome. But the rest, well, as with last year, I thought I'd let everyone know what you hated. My two worst columns from last year, the only ones to get under 400 visitors, were:
1)
AGU Meetup? (San Fran, Dec 13-17), at 154 visits.
2)
Dating Advice or disaster in the making?, an anemic 257 visits.
Yeah, I can see it. Neither calls to me. The first is just reaching to regular readers who might be in San Francisco, the second is a reblog of someone else's bad dating advice.
On August 21, 10:25:20 and 10:51:16, a mid-level aid on my opponent's staff signed up on my Political Action Committee's website to "Turn out voters, Make policy, Fundraise, Volunteer in general" on both occasions.
This occurred only 4 days after an annoucement was sent to the broader Columbia Alumni Community. A few days later a lobbyist from a large Albany Law Firm asked for a call. "What do you want kid?" He asked me. "You can't be serious about trying to unseat a sitting speaker. There are easier ways to get into public office."
What is the most popular form of Citizen Science?
Some want to make us believe it is SETI@home, 8 year olds being pressured by overenthusiastic teachers, or people in their backyards looking for comets.
The Political and Financial Leaders of today have ransomed our future. No one is innocent. People of the earth you have all been poisoned. The only antidote is a drastic program of retraining, retooling, and
reform. Short of this, a Jeffersonian call to revolution is the only alternative, and one which I do not relish. Our debt per capita is more than most people's retirement accounts. A quick reading of history will show that the French had the same problem before their problems started a few hundred years ago. As they say, "the only war the french have won since then has been the French Revolution." Our atmospheric and oceanic environments have degraded to the point where ecosystems are soon to be
Last Wednesday, this paper, published in PLoS ONE, hit the popular news in the medicine/science category, with articles such as this one from MedPage Today and this, from Reuters.
Jonah Lehrer in
The New Yorker about the slipperiness of the scientific method:
"The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With The Scientific Method?"The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
It's no secret that humans are not the only species with circadian rhythm - a biological clock. Studying red bread mold may teach us how our own internal clock works and by experimenting with the fungus’ response to light and darkness, researchers can explore its reaction to different substances, food and temperatures.
Basically, giving mold jet lag may help us mitigate it in humans.
Sorry I've been absent for a while. (I hope you missed me!) Here's one thing that's been keeping me busy:
New York State would achieve significant cost savings, while also creating opportunities to generate revenue with state owned assets by shifting to Real Time Pricing. Furthermore, the state may act as an innovator by helping to mature developing technologies which would facilitate the adoption of real time pricing for residential constituents. It is believed that the complete migration of all New York customers to RTP is inevitable in the future. Real-time pricing (RTP) is a rate class where customers pay for the electricity they consume based on wholesale hourly market prices.
