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Avi Loeb And Aliens: The Right And Wrong of Science Funding. (Also Bing Image Search Brings up Porno When you Search for him)

Avi Loeb he prolific Harvard astrophysicist, dances on the edge of cosmic controversy. His research...

What Is And Is Not Plagiarism In Scientific Papers? Neri Oxman And Claudine Gay Did Nothing Seriously Wrong. A Basic Guide To Citation.

The online discourse of our time has come to the issue of plagiarism. Now Claudine Gay and Neri...

Asteroid 2007 FT3 Will Not Hit Us, And Other Predictions For 2024. Suppose It Did Hit Us.

In the past I have predicted certain things at the start of certain years.  This is a selection...

UPDATE: Claudine Gay Not Fired By Harvard. Claudine Gay Did Not Plagiarize. Weeks Later Resigns Due To Ongoing Pressure.

Christopher F Rufo has accused the president of Harvard of plagiarism in an effort so clumsy that...

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Hontas FarmerRSS Feed of this column.

Currently I am an adjunct professor at the College of DuPage. My research focuses on astrophysics from massive star formation to astroparticle physics. Born and raised in Chicagoland I have lived... Read More »

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One Drive a service many Windows users rely on for storage and, unadvisedly as backup, is down.  This will be especially bothersome for devices that have smaller internal drives and rely on the cloud for storage, and for certain office apps that rely on the cloud. 

In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Chaya Raichick also known as LibsOfTikTok on Twitter has stated that LGBT people are evil and want to recruit children to be gay. This is not a matter of opinion, but much science has been done looking into the causation of LGBT identification. It is clear that the LGBT mating strategies found in humans are a matter of biology and neurology not just psychology and sociology. All those sciences, yes all of those are science, play a part. For instance, biologically transgender people are born (largely) one sex or the other. At the same time biologically and neurologically transgender people are born with brains that execute the mating strategy (gender) of the opposite sex.

The national ignition facility has reported at a press conference that they have gotten more energy out of a controlled thermonuclear reaction than was put in.  We’ve gotten out more energy from thermonuclear fusion before, using bombs.  The issue is getting the energy out in a way that is useful.  This relates to Elon Musk in that he is, like fusion power, one who will over promise but under perform.  The key difference that the researchers would tell you is that the media over promises and hypes up their work.  Meanwhile Elon Musk will overpromise on technology, free speech, space travel, tunnels, solar roofs, stock prices, and everything else.  These are things his “Twitter files” PR agents like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and othe

In science the things that have a tiny probability of happening are the things which make for the best headlines.  News reporters cover crashes, not safe landings or auto races where nothing goes wrong.  Transgender care for youth is like this.  Reuters and other media know that the trainwreck will get ratings. They wrote “No definitive research has established a link between social media use and gender identity among youths.”  Then published a story that presents this very thing as being the case ignoring all evidence.
 

Republicans tend to favor big, impressive science projects. While the Democrats have a portion of their constituency which believes, against all numerical proof, that money spent on space science could cure world hunger. This stereotype is only partially true but to the extent it is true the divided government result is great for science. This ensures that there is no constituency in Congress that will be able to agitate for cutting budgets for organs such as NASA, the Department of Energy (high energy physics), the National Science Foundation (so many things) and so on.

The most important service to physics can be revealing that there are problems to be solved rather than solving them.   As the Nobel laureates, prize winners, Alain Aspect and John F. Clauser  did by demonstrating the fundamental difference between classical and quantum mechanics.  Anton Zeilinger who also won for his key work on teleportation and quantum information.  These are kin to the fundamentals of electricity in terms of how they may effect human technology in the future. 
Spooky action at a distance