Search Content

Displaying results 9601 - 9650 of 87950

Last Minute Holiday Shopping!!!

As I'm sitting here ordering things on line and last minute for people's Christmas presents (there, I said Christmas. Take THAT Bill O'Really!) I thought I'd make a few suggestions for my readers. For the K-6 age scientist: The 7-Function Binoculars For Kids An inexpensive science trans-formative toy, the "Binoculars for Kids" which also transform into a microscope, magnifying glass (good for observing bugs, starting little fires, or both at the same time), includes a compass, and a signal mirror to warn off the helicopters. This cool Head Light, again for kids but actually quiet…

Amazon Dot Com IS a different kind of thing.

I told you so, but most of you would not listen. Amazon has tossed an entire publishing company off its site (hat tip: H.G.) because that company would not comply with Amazon's universally imposed Kindle edition pricing strategy. That places Amazon at the decision making table where the publishers and the market (the buyers of books) usually sits, and not just as a stakeholder but as the holder of everyone else's nuts. (And when I say nuts, I'm talking chestnuts, so don't get any ideas.) Amazon is not a book store. It is a public utility that delivers a wide range of products (including…

Open Data & The Panton Principles: Thoughts on a presentation to librarians

As I mentioned last week, on Tuesday, April 17 I was part of a workshop on Creative Commons our Scholarly Communications Committee put on for York library staff. My section was on open data and the Panton Principles. While not directly related to Creative Commons, we thought talking a bit about an application area for licensing in general and a specific case where CC is applied would be interesting for staff. We figured it would be the least engaging part of the workshop so I agreed to go last and use any time that was left. Rather unexpectedly, the idea of data licensing and in particular…

Does BPA interfere with breast cancer treatment?

The health concerns about bisphenol-A (BPA), a component of hard polycarbonate plastic, has been extended once again (see here, here, here for previous posts on BPA). BPA, a ubiquitous contaminant of human bodies, leaches from water and baby bottles, the lining of tin cans, dental sealants and many other sources. BPA also looks a lot like potent hormones, like estradiol and the synthetic estrogenic agent, diethylstilbesterol (DES), the cause of transplacental carcinogenesis in humans. So there have been plausible concerns that BPA might increase the risk of cancer in humans, especially in…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Venomous Brown Widow Spiders Making Themselves Known In Louisiana: A dangerous spider is making itself known to Louisiana residents. The brown widow spider is becoming more common, according to entomologists with the LSU AgCenter. Bat Flight Generates Complex Aerodynamic Tracks: Bats generate a measurably distinct aerodynamic footprint to achieve lift and maneuverability, quite unlike birds and contrary to many of the assumptions that aerodynamicists have used to model animal flight, according to University of Southern California aerospace engineer Geoffrey Spedding. Could Carrots Be The…

February Pieces Of My Mind #1

Boomer neighbour calls me and tells me his water meter reads "420". "You're such a stoner" is what I avoid replying. Every year my employers each send me a piece of paper telling me how much they've told the tax man that I've earned. A few months later, the tax man sends me a piece of paper telling me how much my employers have told me that I've earned. In a quarter century of managing my own money, I've never had any use whatsoever for the first piece of paper. In recent years I've begun sticking it straight into the recycling bin. When the kids in the Minecraft videos that Jrette watches…

Surviving the end-of-semester push through drastic means: camping

I've noticed that a certain grimness has entered my colleagues' and my attitude over the last week or so. It's a "there is only (X) days/weeks left, we just have to finish" attitude, similar to what I anticipate marathon runners experience around about 24 miles or so. A just keep going, don't break down now, you are mortgaging your body with lack of sleep and too much effort, but keep going, you only have a little bit left, and then you can sleep kind of thing. Does that sound familiar? Well, to try to combat this attitude in myself, my husband and I took ourselves camping this weekend.…

Delay not deviance: brains of children with ADHD mature later than other

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is the most common developmental disorder in children, affecting anywhere between 3-5% of the world's school-going population. As the name suggests, kids with ADHD are hyperactive and easily distracted; they are also forgetful and find it difficult to control their own impulses. While some evidence has suggested that ADHD brains develop in fundamentally different ways to typical ones, other results have argued that they are just the result of a delay in the…

The universal grammar of birdsong is genetically encoded

Human cultural traits such as language, dress, religion and values are generally said to be passed from one generation to the next by social learning. And in animal species which have language, the same is true; male song birds, for example, learn the songs with which they serenade potential mates from older male relatives. A new study, published online in the journal Nature, shows that the songs of isolated zebra finches evolve over multiple generations to resemble those of birds in natural colonies. These findings show that song learning in birds is not purely the product of nurture, but…

Cabinets of Curiosity

There is a triple theme here, circling around cabinets of curiosity, which I'll get around to eventually. How about a picture first. Frontispiece from Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities But first. A few days ago we linked to a site on the "Longest Running Scientific Experiment," at the Athananius Kircher Society. I'm still not sure what the site is, or the Society I should say, but it's, let's say, curious. Someone--Wamba--commented that it reminded them of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which was just right. What a perfect connection. The MJT was the…

DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge: raising our own classroom stimulus funds.

Around this corner of the blogosphere, folks frequently bemoan the sorry state of the public's scientific literacy and engagement. People fret about whether our children is are learning what they should about science, math, and critical reasoning. Netizens speculate on the destination of the handbasket in which we seem to be riding. In light of the big problems that seem insurmountable, we should welcome the opportunity to do something small that can have an immediate impact. During the month of October, a bunch of us ScienceBlogs bloggers will be participating in the annual…

Trolled

On Wednesday, in response to really bad analogy attacking the NAACP and the Black and Hispanic Congressional Caucuses, I wrote a rather lengthy post that attempted to educate the rather clueless blogger by the name of LaShawn Barber who had produced the rant about how the white nationalist teen singing duo Prussian Blue (who, according to LaShawn, are only expressing "white pride") got their name from a technique of Holocaust denial. Well, it turns out I've been trolled. LaShawn has posted an update that's basically one big gloat: A belated "Happy Independence Day" to all the left-leaning (…

Rainy Day Distractions

I've been saving these for a rainy day--a game or other timesinking tidbit for each ScienceBlogs category. I originally was going to wait until a rainy weekend, but the climate hasn't favored that idea. As it is,I'm behind on other projects, so today works. Besides--it is pouring outside, leaving me in dire need of something to chase the rainy blues away. Rather than making ten separate posts, I've crammed the distractions all into one list, counting down to my favorite. I'll admit, some of the categorizations are a stretch (you try coming up with something about politics that is a fun…

"Very candid"

Pepsi's Chief Scientific Officer addresses #Sbfail: Earlier this week, PepsiCoâs blog, Food Frontiers, was added to ScienceBlogs.com so we could begin open discussions about the role science can play in finding solutions to global nutrition challenges. Mmmm, sorta. The blog was indeed added (then deleted), but a more accurate phrasing would be, "PepsiCo's bought ad space masquerading as a blog on ScienceBlogs.com." This is different from the path most blogs take in order to be added to Sb, and the failure to make this distinction is unfortunate, and would have been more unfortunate if this…

Google delists Mike Adams' NaturalNews.com. His hilarious tantrum about the "conspiracy" behind it is epic, as is my schadenfreude.

Regular readers here are probably familiar with Mike Adams and his website NaturalNews.com. Forget the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, when it comes to wretched hives of scum and quackery on the Internet, NaturalNews is the wretchedest, scummiest, and quackiest. Not surprisingly, Adams got his start in wingnuttery selling Y2K scams nearly 18 years ago. Now, besides presiding over a scammy online publishing empire that racks in considerable green by publishing articles laced with quackery, antivaccine pseudoscience, character assassination, and thuggery, both legal and getting a bit too…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Created by a schoolteacher, so it must work! (from the vaults)

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 9, 2006 and seems to fit in with the whole "Friday Dose of Woo" thing; so I'll repost it as such. Enjoy!. I was…

Birds in the News 57 (v2n8)

Long-billed Curlew, Numenius americanus. Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Arthur Morris, Birds as Art. Click image for larger view in its own window. Birds and Science Some pied flycatchers, Ficedula hypoleuca (pictured), a common migratory bird slightly smaller than a sparrow, are missing their spring meals and dying as a result of climate change, a team of scientists reported this week. The discovery is one of the most sophisticated showing the domino effect of shifting seasons and their impact on predators and prey. The migratory birds fly thousands of…

Birds in the News 154

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Female Anna's Hummingbird, Calypte anna, sitting on her nest. Notice her long tongue sticking out of her mouth and the uncommonly bright colors on her gorget. This bird nested on Bainbridge Island in Washington state earlier this year. Image: Eva Gerdts, May 2008. [larger view]. Christmas Bird Count News The Annual Christmas Bird Counts are rapidly approaching, so I am publishing links to all of the counts here; who to contact, and where and when they are being held, so if you have a link to a Christmas Bird Count…

Obesity Crankery - A growing problem

Recently, it seems there has been a backlash against medicine and the current knowledge of the relationship between diet, weight and overall health. I don't actually believe this is directly the fault of scientists or doctors, who react to the trashy mainstream reporting of science with little more than the occasional raised eyebrow. However, many people in response to all these silly health pronouncements, which seemingly come from on high but really are from press coverage of often minor reports in the medical literature, have lost their trust in what science has to offer as a solution to…

Sex, rap, and rock 'n' roll

And the winner of today's bad headline award goes to: Sexual lyrics prompt teens to have sex Teens whose iPods are full of music with raunchy, sexual lyrics start having sex sooner than those who prefer other songs, a study found. Whether it's hip-hop, rap, pop or rock, much of popular music aimed at teens contains sexual overtones. Its influence on their behavior appears to depend on how the sex is portrayed, researchers found. Songs depicting men as "sex-driven studs," women as sex objects and with explicit references to sex acts are more likely to trigger early sexual behavior than those…

The power of nonsense

Forgive me, readers, but Madeline Bunting has raised up her tiny, fragile pin-head again, and I must address her non-arguments once more. Well, not her non-arguments, actually, but the same tedious non-arguments the fans of superstition constantly trundle out. She was at some strange conference where only people who love religion spoke and came away with affirmations of the usual tripe. It's as if the "New Atheists" have provoked a counter-attack by critics armored in pudding and armed with damp sponges. …the Archbishop of Canterbury was brisk, and he warned, "beware of the power of nonsense…

You Have To Buy Their Defective Product

The health care reform process is getting extremely ugly.  href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-healthcare-insurers24-2009aug24,0,6925890.story"> href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-healthcare-insurers24-2009aug24,0,6925890.story">Healthcare insurers get upper hand Obama's overhaul fight is being won by the industry, experts say. The end result may be a financial 'bonanza.' LA Times  By Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger August 24, 2009 href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090823_this_isnt_reform_its_robbery/">…

On Labor Day, looking back at the year in US occupational health and safety

Last year, Celeste Monforton and I started a new Labor Day tradition: publication of a report that highlights some of the important research and activities in occupational health in the US over the past year. The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2012 – Summer 2013, the second edition in the annual series, is now available online. We want it to be a resource for activists, regulators, researchers, and anyone else who values safe and healthy workplaces. Much as the AFL-CIO’s annual Death on the Job report focuses attention on workplace injury and illness statistics each April…

Transposition of the Great Arteries

OK, it's time for another science-y post. Usually, I take on something very relevant to my specialty---it's a helluva lot easier to write about stuff I already know. But some basics are just really cool, and worth exploring, even though I'll have to step a bit outside my comfort zone. In this case, it's the heart.  Because I'm venturing a bit on the wild side, I consulted an expert, whose hot, hot science helped illuminate this topic. If you've taken a basic biology course, you probably have some idea of how the human heart works, but understanding can be a bit deeper if we look at the heart…

Why Terra Sigillata?

[This post appeared originally at my Blogspot site on 20 December 2005 to describe my rationale for the name of this blog. With today's traffic from the Daily Kos, I thought it would be useful to new readers to know our story here. FYFI, here is why I chose the pseudonym Abel Pharmboy. - APB] If you Google, "Terra Sigillata," you'll get a number of hits for various clay pottery recipes. Very complicated stuff, requiring the use of a deflocculant to separate out large clay particles from the small ones. Terra sig, as it is known among pottery hipsters, is then used to coat finished pieces…

NSF Workshop on Scholarly Evaluation Metrics – Morning 1

I attended this one-day workshop in DC on Wednesday, December 16, 2009. These are stream of consciousness notes. Herbert Van de Sompel (LANL) - intro - Lots of metrics: some accepted in some areas and not others, some widely available on platforms in the information industry and others not. How are these metrics selected? Why are some more attractive than others? Two other points: informal science communication on the web - it's being adopted rapidly - scholars immediately reap the benefits. Lots of metrics: views, downloads, "favorites", followers. So our current metrics are impoverished (…

Dangerous Jumping Calculator

Maybe this could fall under my "physics of parkour". It could also apply to the MythBusters "dumpster diving" episode. In both of these cases, the question is: how far can you jump off of something and not severely hurt yourself. They do this a lot in parkour. Here are some examples: There are a ton of these things on youtube. Let me go ahead and say it. I would not recommend trying any of this stuff. Even reading this blog won't adequately prepare you. So, if you go ahead and try to do some cool jump, don't blame me for your injuries. Now that the warning is out there - let me get on…

National Geographic's Wild Case Files covers the 'Montauk monster'

On March 14th 2011 National Geographic screened episode 1 of their new series Wild Case Files (here in the UK, the episode was screened on April 11th), and the reason I'm writing about it is because I featured in said episode. The first section of the show was devoted to an investigation of the 'Montauk monster'. They provided a potted history of the whole 'Montauk monster' story, spoke to all the main characters involved, and ended with me explaining how the carcasses (both the original, July 2008 specimen, and the 'Clapsadle carcass' of May 2009 and 'Gurney's Inn monster' of September…

Allies: Duke's Henry Friedman, MD

In preparing for the ScienceOnline'09 session on Gender in Science - Online and Offline, one planned discussion point will be how to enlist allies representing the dominant power structure to enhance equality and diversity in the STEM disciplines. No one ally can do it all but a combination of like-minded people can make a huge difference. Here is a terrific example of an ally, written by superb higher ed reporter, Eric Ferreri, of the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer, on Dr Henry Friedman and CAPE, the Collegiate Athletic Pre-Medical Experience: Georgia Beasley was practicing her jump shot…

Copyright Infringement = Theft. (or; A Few Pharyngulites Behaving Badly)

I haven't always had as much concern about copyright infringement as I do now, but I've always considered it to be a given that copyright infringement involves taking something that doesn't belong to you without paying the owner. Taking something that doesn't belong to you without paying the owner is, at least under any system of ethics that I'm familiar with, theft. Not "something like theft". It is theft. I was surprised (and a little disappointed) to find that a handful of people over at Pharyngula don't seem to understand that view. There's a discussion going on over there right now in…

Birds in the News 178: Helsinki Edition

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Plump and hoping to get plumper, a red knot takes a break from eating horseshoe crab eggs at Mispillion Harbor. Image: Louisa Jonas/WYPR [larger view]. Birds in Science Catching adult eagles for research purposes is no easy task, but a Purdue University researcher has found a way around the problem, and, in the process, gathered even more information about the birds without ever laying a hand on one. "Many birds are small, easy to catch and abundant," said Andrew DeWoody, associate professor of forestry and natural…

Don't Throw Out Those Introns

A somewhat accidental discovery and random meetings between proteins in a cell: These are the subjects of two new online articles. Each, it its way, involves a technological advance that will, in turn, lead to further scientific discovery. The first involves a partnership between a physics group and a cancer-research group. Among other things, such collaboration is essential for dealing with large data sets - multiple gene expression patterns, for example. When the team made their discovery, they were looking not just at gene expression, but at pieces of genes. More precisely, they were…

Beyond Smoke and Mirrors

Smoke and Mirrors: Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century By Burton Richter Cambridge University Press, 218 pages. Do we really another book summarizing the science of climate change and the available response options? Sure. Why not? What's the harm? In this era of hyperfractionated audiences and echo-chambers, there's no such thing as too many arrows in our collective quiver. This one, by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter, doesn't contribute anything new. But at this point in the conversation, there's not much new to contribute, just novel approaches to making the argument…

Bio Databases 2016

Someone missed the memo. Over the past year, news and presentations by NIH leaders like Philip Bourne have communicated that the proliferation biologically focused databases is unsustainable. However, unlike last year, where the number of databases tracked by Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) dropped by three databases, 2015's net growth was 136. Counting databases is hard As summarized in the database issue's introduction, Rigden, Fernández-Suarez, and Galperin tell us this year's issue (the 23rd annual) has 178 papers. 62 papers describe new databases, 95 provide updates, and 17 are updates of…

There's no fool like a Bush administration fool

Since this piece in Wired referenced an email with a date of April 1 I was pretty sure this was an April Fool's joke. But the joke was on me. It's was for real: A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world's largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word "abortion," concealing nearly 25,000 search results. Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It's funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of…

How Obama uses Behavioral Economics to change our habits

In TIME, a couple of days ago - How Obama Is Using the Science of Change: Two weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama's campaign was mobilizing millions of supporters; it was a bit late to start rewriting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) scripts. "BUT, BUT, BUT," deputy field director Mike Moffo wrote to Obama's GOTV operatives nationwide, "What if I told you a world-famous team of genius scientists, psychologists and economists wrote down the best techniques for GOTV scripting?!?! Would you be interested in at least taking a look? Of course you would!!" Moffo then passed along guidelines and a sample…

What kind of personality predisposes one to start blogging?

That is an interesting question, an answer to which was attempted in this paper: Who blogs? Personality predictors of blogging: The Big Five personality inventory measures personality based on five key traits: neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness [Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Normal personality assessment in clinical practice: The NEO Personality Inventory. Psychological Assessment 4, 5-13]. There is a growing body of evidence indicating that individual differences on the Big Five factors are associated with different types…

New and Exciting in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine

Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait: We advance this long tradition of surveying teachers with reports from the first nationally representative survey of teachers concerning the teaching of evolution. The survey permits a statistically valid and current portrait of US science teachers that complements US and international surveys of the general public on evolution and scientific literacy [2,24] and on evolution in the classroom [3,25]. Between March 5 and May 1, 2007, 939 teachers participated in the study, either by mail or by completing an identical…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Early Experience Affects Where Birds Breed For Life: What Happens If Habitat Changes?: How young migratory birds choose the nesting location of their first breeding season has been something of a mystery in the bird world. But a new University of Maryland/National Zoo study of the American redstart suggests that the environmental conditions the birds face in their first year may help determine where they breed for the rest of their lives, a factor that could significantly affect the population as climate change makes their winter habitats hotter and drier. Ancient Puzzle Solved In Fossils…

Twittering is a difficult art form - if you are doing it right

Yesterday, Jay Rosen on Twitter wrote that his goal on Twitter was to have "a Twitter feed that is 100 percent personal (my own view on things...) and zero percent private." This is an excellent description of mindcasting. Its alternative, 'lifecasting' is 100% private made public. There is nothing wrong with lifecasting, of course. It is a different style of communication. It is using Twitter with a different goal in mind. Mindcasting is a method to use Twitter for exchange of news, information, analysis and opinion. Lifecasting is a method to use Twitter to make friends and communicate…

Safety blitz at WV Massey Energy mine, 20 instances of aggravated misconduct

The Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Adminstration (MSHA) issued a news release yesterday reporting on the results of an inspection at Inman Energy's Randolph coal mine, a subsidiary of Massey Energy. MSHA chief Joe Main said: "the conduct and behavior exhibited when we caught the mine operator by surprise is nothing short of outrageous. ...The conditions observed at Randolph Mine place miners at serious risk to the threat of fire, explosion and black lung. Yet, MSHA inspectors can't be at every mine every day. Our continuing challenge is counteracting the egregious behavior of…

New survey finds many Americans are open to discussing gun safety with their doctors

Every year in the U.S., more than 32,000 people die due to gun-related violence, suicide and accidents. That number includes the deaths of seven children and teens every day. So it’s not surprising that health care providers — those who witness the tragic results of gun violence — are often vocal proponents of gun safety reform. But when it comes to the intimate patient-provider relationship, do people want to discuss gun safety with their doctors? A group of researchers set out to explore that question in what may be the first nationally representative survey on whether Americans feel it’s…

Study: School Breakfast Program linked to better academic achievement

Thanks to the federal School Breakfast Program, millions of low-income children have the opportunity to start the school day with a healthy meal. But does the program impact the brain as well as the belly? A new study finds that it does, with students at participating schools scoring higher in math, reading and science. A striking illustration of the connections between nutrition and education, the study not only found higher academic scores within schools that participate in the School Breakfast Program, it also found that the effect was cumulative. In other words, the longer the school…

Peter Watts, Blindsight [Library of Babel]

This is the final Best Novel Hugo nominee of this year's field, and given James Nicoll's immortal description of Watts's writing ("When I feel my will to live getting too strong, I pick up a Peter Watts book" or words to that effect), I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about picking up Blindsight. I was on something of a roll, though, and took it along to read on the plane to our Internet-less vacation weekend in Michigan. In the end, I think my reaction to the book was colored by James's comment, but it wasn't as bad as it might've appeared. Blindsight is narrated by Siri Keeton, who had a…

Arnie: $150,000 puppy

This is the funniest thing I have read since PZ got thrown out of EXPELLED. This cant freaking be real. A woman by the name of 'Bernann McKinney' just made news by having her dead pit bull, Booger, cloned by a S. Korean company, RNL Bio. Shortly after 'Bernann' rescued Booger off the streets, 'Bernann' was attacked by another dog, and Booger came to her rescue. She feels like shes alive because of Booger. I know the loyalty pits show their owners-- I feel her pain. But since she rescued Booger, 'Bernann' of all people should know what great dogs you can find on the street and in shelters…

A Pox on Both Your Cultures

A lot has been written about Steven Pinker's article about "scientism," most of it mocking his grandiose overreach in passages like this: These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable for having crafted their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical data. The mathematical theories of information, computation, and games had yet to be invented. The words “neuron,” “hormone,” and “gene” meant nothing to them. When reading these thinkers, I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-…

How should we talk about Army Ants?

Neivamyrmex army ants attacking a pavement ant, California I see this morning that Daniel Kronauer has published a review of army ant biology in Myrmecological News.  The paper, among other topics, attempts to straighten out some key terminology: AenEcDo army ant: a connotation free abbreviation that is introduced here to avoid the term "true" army ant. It collectively refers to species in the three subfamilies Aenictinae, Ecitoninae, and Dorylinae and is strictly taxonomically defined. Army ant: any ant species with the army ant adaptive syndrome. Army ant adaptive syndrome: a life-…

The incredible calculating canine!

It's hard to believe that a dog can understand four languages, discuss the intricacies of Christian theology, and perform complex mathematical operations, including calculus and algebra, but it's even harder to believe that the editors of an until-now reputable newspaper would be so hard up for local news that they'd be able to find space for 1,500 words on the subject. But the Asheville Citizen-Times did just that. On the front page. I can't remember when they gave 1,500 words to anything. Never mind that the video accompanying the story gives away the trick -- the dog's clearly following…

Clearing the air on the Airy fuction

There was some dissension in the comments of my post on solving the Schrodinger equation with a linear potential. What the post boiled down to was that the solution was Ai(u), where we found that u was: The point of the post was to work through and get that coefficient that's in front of the (Fx + E). The point wasn't to actually solve a physics problem with that, so I glossed over the fact that in solving the physical problem we'll need to deal with boundary conditions, which means paying attention to both types of Airy function Ai(u) and Bi(u), as well as taking into account that only…

Photons, Universes, Etc.

I thought about linking this Forbes article on the economic situation simply because it's interesting. What actually made me link it was the sentence at the end: And reality tells us that we barely avoided, only a week ago, a total systemic financial meltdown; that the policy actions are now finally more aggressive and systematic, and more appropriate; that it will take a long while for interbank and credit markets to mend; that further important policy actions are needed to avoid the meltdown and an even more severe recession; that central banks, instead of being the lenders of last resort…