Random Thoughts
- Black to move: what would you play?
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The following position arose from a blitz chess game played on the Internet Chess Club this afternoon. I am white, and black is to move. As you can see, material is even; white has all his pieces but the Rd1 trained against the enemy kings' shelter, a ...
Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 1 2009 - 11:22am
- The Real Ira Hayes
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The Real Ira Hayes The world's largest statue is a bronze sculpture 110 feet high. It depicts six Marines. Each figure is about 32 feet tall. They are hoisting an American flag on the island of Iwo Jima. I would like to introduce my readers to an ar ...
Blog Post - Patrick Lockerby - Jun 1 2009 - 1:23pm
- Random Noise #14: Colorless Green Syntax
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Random Noise #14: Colorless Green Syntax Formal grammar is heavily based in syntax. It is possible to generate sentences by using word lists and rules in a computer program, but the output rarely makes much sense and can be exceedingly funny. By ignoring ...
Blog Post - Patrick Lockerby - Jun 1 2009 - 5:22pm
- Morning Science Quote
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An educational culture where it's an embarrassment to not know the names of five plays by Shakespeare but OK not to know the difference between a gene and a chromosome isn't functional. - Larry Summers, quoted in The New York Times April 27, ...
Blog Post - Michael White - Jun 4 2009 - 11:02am
- David Carradine's Last Stand
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If you have not yet heard, David Carradine, aged 72, was found dead in a Bangkok hotel room on Wednesday, probably of a suicide (or perhaps something more INXS-related?). I was in my den drinking a coffee, reading science and eating some Mini-Wheats whe ...
Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Jun 5 2009 - 11:27am
- Fraud Takes A Lot Of Brass
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Fraud Takes A Lot Of Brass There have been many daring and dastardly deeds of deception throughout history. The daring deeds of the French Maquis and Britain's SOE in the second world war are legendary. The faker and fraudster, on the other hand, ju ...
Blog Post - Patrick Lockerby - Jun 4 2009 - 1:31pm
- Lost in the Deluge
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This can't all be good stuff: a paper I'm reading noted that "Just a few keywords (linkage, mapping, SNP, genomewide association) identified 6866 articles in the PubMed database published in 2007 alone." (Before you get too depressed, n ...
Blog Post - Michael White - Jun 4 2009 - 5:01pm
- DeCAPitating puzzles, or ways to procrastinate
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Not quite as scientifically challenging as Garth's Geek Off, but still a workout for the neurons. John Tierney's "Tierney Lab" column in the NY Times features DeCAPitated puzzles, like the one below: For the first puzzle, identify the e ...
Blog Post - Becky Jungbauer - Jun 4 2009 - 7:46pm
- Morning Science Quote
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An essential prerequisite [for genius] is a particular skepticism. [The scientist] must have refused to acquiesce in certain previously accepted conclusions. This argues a kind of an imperviousness to the opinions of others, notably of authorities.- Erne ...
Blog Post - Michael White - Jun 5 2009 - 6:00am
- Morning Science Quote
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There are certainly more mysteries than knowledge and, perhaps, more ways of finding out than science. I like science because when you think of something you can check it by experiment; "yes" or "no", Nature says, and you go on from t ...
Blog Post - Michael White - Jun 8 2009 - 6:05am