The Gulf of Mexico fills with oil. This disaster is short-term insoluble, even for highly-advanced, 21st-century, western nations. Medium- to long-term, there is likely to be a solution. There always is. The cleanup process will be long and painstaking, but it will be out-of-sight for most people. Once the problem is solved and years have passed, the shortness of human memory will serve to help us forget what happened—and to be surprised the next time it happens.

Petroleum is intrinsic to... [More]

Bill Gates is the world’s most generous philanthropist and has made curing malaria and combating viruses of all kinds his new goal in life (see Mosquitoes, Malaria and Education by Bill Gates (TED) for the video). However, he’s changed his focus to climate change because, though preventing disease is a huge concern for the third world, rampaging climate change will make many more things far worse for the world’s poor. As he put it in his talk, Innovating to zero! by Bill Gates (TED):

“But energy and climate are extremely important to... [More]”

If you’ve been looking for an introduction to Quantum Computing and how it surpasses our current binary computing, the article A tale of two qubits: how quantum computers work by Joseph B. Altepeter (Ars Technica) is a great place to start. The language is about as accessible as it’s going to get and there are helpful diagrams sprinkled throughout. For example, the engine of a quantum computer—entanglement, and its result: “action at a distance”—is analogized thusly:

“Imagine if someone showed you a pair of coins, claiming that... [More]”

Though it sometimes seems that religion always has the upper hand in public debate, there is usually at least one crusader per generation willing to come out strongly in favor of the Enlightenment and against superstition. The article Mencken, Islam, and Political Correctness (Capitalism Magazine) cites the early 20th-century journalist H.L. Mencken on the subject of religion and other closely related superstitions.

“What the World’s contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in... [More]”

In search of the world’s hardest language (The Economist) is an interesting read, proposing candidates based on number of sounds, number of genders or genres, number of individual sounds, number of difficult-to-make sounds, number of consonants, consistency of spelling (adherence to consistent phonetic rules) or agglutination (combining of words to express concepts).

So, for example, spelling in French and English are not particularly predictive, so that makes them difficult to write error-free without a... [More]

Human Space Exploration MapSaturn at Equinox (75 exposures)Hubble's final servicing missionWith recent rumblings from NASA as to the successor to the aged and mostly retired space shuttle fleet, National Geographic published the lovely graphic of human space exploration seen to the left. Also very recently, NASA has been trumpeting their images of Saturn as sent back over the years by the Cassini probe. The second image to the left is from the photo essay, Saturn at equinox (Big Picture/Boston.com). The final image on the bottom is from another photo-essay called Hubble’s final servicing mission (Big Picture/Boston.com). Click the... [More]

Though the phrase above was originally intended to apply to technological gadgets, it applies equally well to any concept of sufficient complexity. The trick is often used to get people to believe things that are wrong or that they would not believe in were they mentally equipped to follow the reasoning. Instead of simply reserving judgment because they don’t know enough, most people will elect to bluff and simply agree with... [More]

Compared to the problems caused in the first world, third world problems can generally be solved relatively cheaply. It costs well north of a trillion to even make it look like you’re doing something about saving the U.S. economy, but it takes a few paltry tens of billions to feed everyone in Africa. How much is that? A couple of months in Iraq? We can spend our money on blowing things up, but not on feeding people or controlling disease. While building a military machine to grind the world... [More]

Silicon Tracking DetectorThe LHC (Large Hadron[1] Collider) is located in France and Switzerland at CERN[2]; the first experiments begin in early August 2008 and a full test of all 27km of track is planned in September. Project members expect to be analyzing the first collisions by the end of the year. The entire track will be cooled to just 1.75ºC shy of absolute zero (to -271.25ºC) and will be in-use for decades. The big expectation is that the long-sought Higgs Boson[3] makes an appearance.

The article Large Hadron... [More] (Big Picture)

Just as governments seek to justify everything they do—regardless of how violent or fascist—as being in the name of democracy or the greater good or for moral reasons, other dubious ideas have glommed onto the idea of portraying themselves as science in order to accumulate more than their fair share of respect. It seems that the cloak of science is just the spoonful of sugar the media needs to make any crackpot idea go down without a hiccup. Two areas in particular are swirling with boasts... [More]

The universe is, apparently, quite big. This is made all the more amazing in light of how small its constituent components are, since it clearly takes quite a lot of them to make up something so mind-bogglingly huge as the universe. Brian Cox at LIFT Conference (LIFT07) gave a brilliant talked aimed at the layperson—if the lay-person happened to be versed in the basics of particle physics. Dr. Brian Cox explains nuclear physics is another, wider-shot video of the same event, on which you can... [More]

The BMI, or Body-Mass–Index, has been in the news a lot lately. Whether because of runway models, whose BMIs are dangerously low, or because of kids in first-world countries, whose BMIs are dangerously high. The BMI myth by Peta Bee (The Guardian) takes a look at the utility of this measurement in determining health. As usual, now that the public (as well as insurance companies and government agencies) has glommed on to this statistic as the final say in health, scientists have taken a look at it and found it wanting.

Calculating... [More]