The other day I was reading up on Phlebopus marginatus, the Salmon gum mushroom of Western Australia, and noticed that it is “generally recorded as of unknown edibility”. I was surprised to see that — I mean, is the thing edible, or not? — until I thought about it and realized just what’s involved in […]
Call me crazy, but I think this is one rakish alligator.
Living is walking backwards. All we can see is where we’ve already been.
Here’s Arthur Miller, remembering the sweltering New York of his youth. (I doubt I would have survived it.)
Scientist James Lovelock, best known for his development (with Lynn Margulis) of the “Gaia hypothesis” and for his ardent advocacy of radical measures to prevent global warming, surprised us all a little while back when he told MSNBC that in retrospect he thought he had been too “alarmist” about climate change. (It is no small […]
Working late tonight, with much to catch up on — so for now, just an odd little item about the physics of Slinkies.
We’re back, after a splendid trip. Visiting Venice and Florence reminds one just how tall the West’s candle once stood, and on returning home it’s hard not to dwell on how very low it has burned. But that’s just the way of the world, I suppose. Did I miss anything? I have a lot of […]
We’ll likely be off the air until sometime around June 21st: the lovely Nina and I are celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary with a little trip to Italy (Venice and Florence). We’ll have scant access to email and the Internet — and it will be nice to take a little break from all that is […]
I’ve lived in the Northeast all my life. I like it here. I like the landscape, the culture, and the dramatic cycle of the four seasons (my favorite being autumn). I have no inclination to live anywhere else, and will doubtless make my home here for the rest of my life (unless some combination of […]
From the website “prosthetic knowledge” comes this cross-section of a marram-grass leaf:
Here’s a nifty invention, at least four years in the making. Wonder how long the deregulating will take?
Today’s Times reported that it is now possible to read almost all of a fetus’s genome simply by taking blood from the mother and saliva from the father. Lurking behind the headlines is an idea, once heartily embraced by Progressive intellectuals: eugenics. Thanks to certain mid-20th-century events, eugenics nowadays is generally thought of as entirely […]
This looks promising: touchscreens that can create 3-D buttons as needed.
From NASA: a little historical item about a previous transit of Venus.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s Victory Deals Blow to Unions
OK, last item about Wisconsin: for those of you who hadn’t followed the recall campaign, here’s a video clip that should help to explain what happened there yesterday. The Dow shot up 286 points today.
Have a look at some impressive photos of yesterday’s astronomical event, here.
Sorry to harp on politics, but the Walker victory in Wisconsin yesterday was an important inflection point, and this recent piece by economist Walter Williams underscores its significance so clearly and straightforwardly that I’m going to reproduce it here in full. Why was Wisconsin so important? Because the tragedy-of-the-commons effect described here by Williams is […]
James Lileks weighs in, so to speak, on the soda-ban ruction.
In which it is demonstrated once again that “Second-In-Command of al-Qaeda” is the world’s most dangerous job.
Here’s Gary Taubes in Sunday’s New York Times, writing about the flimsy case for restricting dietary salt. (Mayor Bloomberg, take note.)
With the Walker recall election on the morrow — widely regarded as a key American battle in the bitter ideological conflict now convulsing all of the West — here’s a piquant item from Mark Steyn. Excerpt: [I]n 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec. […]
Warning: you won’t be able to unsee this.
My friend G. Orcalimbo Jones (be sure to listen to the live stream of his radio show on WOMR, Fridays at 9 P.M.) has sent us a nifty item: a continuously zoom-able display of our Universe at all scales. Seen this way, scale itself seems to become a linear dimension of its own. Have a […]
Shouldn’t be difficult, after you have a look at this.
The infantilization of America, and the accelerating subordination of a free people to self-righteous, moralizing, totalitarian bureaucratic busybodies, continues apace. Here.
In a rare online moment over the holiday weekend, I ran across an article in the Daily Mail about how our Department of Homeland Security, in its restless hunt for loquacious malefactors, scans the Internet for alarming words. The article lists scores of examples. I noted with interest, though, that the list is published on […]
This space will be mostly quiet for the next few days, as the lovely Nina and I occupy ourselves with spring cleaning, houseguests, and Memorial Day revelry. Enjoy the holiday weekend!
Singularity University‘s Peter Diamandis talks about the SpaceX Falcon launch. Here.
Our reader The Big Henry has been sending along some engaging science-related links lately, and he’s just sent me another. This one has to do with the possibility that “biophotons” — light quanta emitted within living cells — may be a channel for some sort of information transfer. I’ve never heard anything about this until […]
Life just keeps getting better.
From Brad Templeton’s blog: flying telepresence drones as medical first-responders. Here.
Here’s an item that should come as no surprise to anyone: Religion Is a Potent Force for Cooperation and Conflict, Research Shows The article discusses a paper by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges that describes religion as strongly fostering cooperation within human social groups, as a means of competing more successfully against other groups. We […]
Coffee Drinkers Have Lower Risk of Death, Study Suggests
Here’s an interesting item: “Good’ Cholesterol Not So Good After All, New Study Shows The revelation that high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, is the “good cholesterol’ has suffered a major blow. A meta-study involving over a hundred thousand participants used two different strategies to see if genetic mutations that increased levels of HDL also decreased risk […]
A few months ago one of our readers reader kindly sent me a copy of The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. I finally got around to reading it, and recommend it to you all. Here’s the publisher’s summary over at Amazon: For […]
Attention, readers: Radio Derb is back. John Derbyshire, following his defenestration by National Review, has dusted himself off and taken his weekly podcast over to Taki’s. So far, there are three new installments. Have a listen here. And speaking of Derb, here’s a recent essay of his, also at Taki’s: Ridding Myself of the Day.
From time to time in these pages we have noted the accelerating caponization of the Western male, as the grand project to bring the sexes into complete convergence somewhere deep in distaff territory continues apace. Fortunately, there are still a few pockets of resistance.
Here’s a novel approach to implementing coordinated behavior in a non-hierarchical “swarm” of autonomous machines: Biologists have long puzzled over the ability of bacteria and social insects to sense not only the presence of compatriots but their number and to synchronise their behaviour. It turns out that these creatures perform this synchronisation using a process […]
Remember Colin Quinn? That Brooklyn comedian who was on Saturday Night Live for a while? I happened to be looking at Twitter just now and watched him destroy whatever was left of his professional life. In response to the news that the majority of babies born in the USA are now non-white, he emitted this: […]
Attention, teens: if you need some help answering the call of the wild, then make your way to Sex: A Tell-All Exhibition, now running at Ottawa’s Museum of Science and Technology. The exhibit includes floor-to-ceiling photos of nude toddlers, children, teens and adults, and an array of heated, flavoured and textured condoms rolled over wooden […]
As if the news out of Washington D.C. weren’t already depressing enough, here’s an especially sad item: Chuck Brown, the “Godfather of Go-Go”, has died at age 75. As noted here, I was lucky enough to do a record with Chuck long ago, and the lovely Nina and I saw him play just last summer […]
For those of you who might enjoy it, here’s a five-part interview with Thomas Sowell on the role of intellectuals in modern democracies. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5.) Churchill said this, once upon a time: The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come […]
Ever since seeing Fantasia as a boy, I’ve been fascinated by animated renderings of music. Poking around online today I found two very different animations of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #6. Both are complete mappings of the musical score onto a scrolling visual display, and so both express the same information. I can’t decide, though, […]
I’ve mentioned “exponentially advancing technology” a lot lately. Think I was kidding?
Here’s a poignant item from the Daily Mail: a P-40 Kittyhawk lost in the Sahara 70 years ago has just been discovered, preserved in the sands.
Our reader Henry has sent along a thought-provoking item about a mechanism by which complex systems can bootstrap themselves into existence: autocatalytic sets. The idea is particularly intriguing in its metaphorical generality, and its applicability may well extend beyond chemistry to social and political domains as well. Have a look. An explanatory article is here, […]
The big news of the day is that President Obama, after years of reticence on the topic, has just announced that he supports same-sex marriage. I don’t suppose this will have much effect on the vote. It’s hard to imagine that his coming out in favor of SSM will snatch any supporters away from Mitt […]