Some spectacular photos of the moon and what might be on it in the not-to-distant future. You can see why people can argue that the shots are faked - they look like the worst kind of photoshopped montages in some respects.
They rarely show this on ER. A woman died surrounded by other patients and guards - after waiting 24 hours in the waiting room!
I haven’t seen much splash about Al-Qaeda recently - it seems that they are making waves, just not in the Western media. Very interesting that they have learned to be better at internet communications than their opponents (i.e. us).
I like all of these for different reasons.
Whoisi looks like an interesting find your friends site.
Some anniversaries we should bear in mind (they are not quite on the right days, though)
- June 22nd - when Galileo had to recant the heliocentric model
- July 1st - first reading of a composite paper on natural selection - neither Darwin or Wallace are present.
That’s how to survive a plane crash, it seems. We’ll all be badgering airlines for these seats.
Lords of the Blog comes up trumps in a well-argued discussion on compulsory voting. I’ve changed my mind from pro (as memorably expressed to John Sergeant at an event he was doing for us) to probably anti. We shouldn’t paper over a lack of trust in representative democracy by forcing people to vote. We should find a new way of engaging people - what if the Lords started blogging?
The dismal science gets its hands on global issues. As the results suggest, the best bang-for-buck in a four-year period isn’t climate change. But the setup - $75bn over four years - must lead to shorter-termism, mustn’t it?
We should push for this: miles per gallon is a poor indicator of fuel efficiency - it is so sensitive at the lower end (going from 18 to 28 mpg is better than going from 34 to 50 mpg). So how to start this happening everywhere?
I’m not sure why I find them funny, but I do. I was searching for a bbq related one for Mark, but didn’t come across one. However, this one gets the right kind of message across!
How would a physicist look at getting our energy sorted? Read on.
Food for thought from Wired: what happens now we are beyond inundated with data.
- Can the standard hypothesise, model, test approach to science continue to work? (e.g. Google doesn’t understand web quality or languages, but there’s enough out there to let it model them effectively). But what if we find lots of things (patterns, clusters) that we don’t know how to understand?
- We can use satellite images to generate crop predictions (more effectively than surveys).
- The Large Hadron Collider will produce 10 Petabytes of data each second - Google processes 20 Petabytes each day.
- “We detected a gastrointestinal outbreak in Korea,” Mansfield says. “I called my boss, and he asked me, ‘When did it happen?’”. Korea is 13 hours ahead of Washington. So Mansfield simply answered: “Tomorrow.”
- Lowest airfare prices are normally between eight and two weeks before departure (based on a trawl of 175 billion US fares)
- A terabyte of text is more than all the words you’ll hear in your lifetime (unless you are married to an Italian
insert suitable stereotype).
Irony-bought a new suit jacket to replace one that had cigarette burns (not from me) only to find that moths had got the corresponding t …
Irony-bought a new suit jacket to replace one that had cigarette burns (not from me) only to find that moths had got the corresponding t …
Question: how to apply unconference / xCamp ideas to the sorts of conference that the public sector is beset by?
All the best, young man.
Funny that we don’t seem to care about civil liberties. I think this is the flip side of my “treat us like honest citizens” argument. Most of us are honest (mostly) law-abiding citizens. So we don’t notice CCTV and other tracking, because it doesn’t affect us (save in extreme circumstances).
The liberty groups are right - we probably don’t need the level of surveillance we do have (as there is no proof that CCTV decreases crime rates or increases solving rates). However, if we aren’t affected by it, then we don’t really care.
A cool and unusual thing: my pa has finished a film about the installation of a David Begbie sculpture at Wimbledon - the BBC should show extracts at some stage. Nice one, pops. We bought them a Begbie sculpture for their wedding - I have strong dibs on it!
Bozza has launched a review of the City of London’s future as the world’s leading financial centre. This must be manna for the Tories - get all the bigwigs on board, “align with” existing Labour initiatives and for an issue that will get plenty of headlines. Not surprising that Bozza has kept his head down - lots of practice for the Olympic handover, I guess.
