Speculation is rampant that the discovery of the Higgs boson will get a Nobel prize.

Internet algorithms have done lots of wonderful things but can they help you live your life?

In the past, algorithms helped you find better encyclopedia answers to questions, but that is very 1990s. Google is not a search engine company now, they are an ad company that has a search engine front-end and their searches end up at Wikipedia or About.com so you're better off just going directly to those.

Modern algorithms are instead recommendation engines tailored to you.

I've often argued that California's biggest industry is hypocrisy - not just talking about freedom and liberalism while banning conduct elites happen not to like this year or reconfiguring voting districts so that there is no political opposition but that we claim to care about the environment.

In reality, our dirty secret, that people either don't know or don't want to know but every policy maker is well aware of, is that garbage has been one of our biggest exports. We tax the public a lot to deal with recycling, and then pay companies a lot to handle recycling, and then those companies ship it to China as garbage.  

It bugs me a little when 'time' is randomly called a dimension in casual talk. Since just after Einstein's relativity, we've been treated to the mathematical idea that time is its own dimension - though Einstein never said that.

In the beginning, Mother Nature created the universe and in it she put Quantum Mechanics.

Mother Nature had formed out of the ground all the wild particles in the sky. She brought them to Quantum Mechanics to see what Quantum Mechanics would name them; and whatever Quantum Mechanics called each thing, that was its name.  But it was not enough.

Then Mother Nature said, “It is not good for quantum mechanics to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for her.” And so she created Relativity and a classical garden in which they could live.