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POPSDoctor Who regenerates fan base is perhaps far geekier I've been called many things in my life but never a geek. I guess I'm in good company. I really love this show. The first Doctor Who episode was postponed because it had been scheduled to air on the day JFK was murdered. They were in black and white. I started watching when they came to the US. My son was watching it on a Sat. AM and I got so interested, I was hooked. It was the 4th doctor and although I can't recall the name of the episode, it was about a Sontarian. (probably spelled wrong). Maybe "The Sontarian Experiment"? He was testing humans for weaknesses.
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POPSClearest sign yet of dark matter detected "Had the experiment seen five events above the expected background, the claim for having detected dark matter would have been a lot stronger. Nonetheless, the team cannot dismiss the possibility that the two events are because of dark matter." "Space-based telescopes like PAMELA have seen particles that could be coming from the annihilation of dark matter in our galaxy. Similar sightings have been made by a balloon-based experiment called ATIC. Soon, the Large Hadron Collider will be starting to smash protons together in the hopes of creating dark matter."
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POPS"Our World May Be A Giant Hologram" continues (full at source): For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.
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POPSMajor Groundwater Loss in California's Heartland I've visited this area many times during the past three decades and each and every time have been forced to conclude that the current practices are not sustainable. When (not if, but when) it finally collapses, the "values" we now take for granted will come back to haunt us.
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POPSPulling the Plug on Capitol Punishment
Brilliant article, short and sweet, on the history of legal support and current non-support of the death penalty. Strongly recommended, people. It really is interesting. More from the article below: "Ordinarily, the decision of a non-governmental organization to reject a sentencing system it adopted in the early 1960s would richly deserve public obscurity. With states like New York and Massachusetts turning back efforts this decade to revive capital punishment, and with New Jersey and New Mexico abolishing their death penalties, why pay much attention to the American Law Institute? Because the institute has pulled the intellectual rug out from under the current system of deciding between life and death in 30 death-penalty states. The declining legitimacy of the death-penalty system in the legal profession must trouble all but the most extreme justices. The Supreme Court's close association with state killing has never been a comfortable one, and the collapse of any pretense of prin
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POPSWhat A Country We Live In "For eight years, he ran the Bush administration on the sneak, unleashing a campaign of fear, warfare and wild spending that has caused the very viability of this American experiment to teeter on the brink of collapse. This was the man who claimed the office of the vice president was not part of the Executive Branch because he did not want to obey the law and hand his official papers over to the National Archive. Dick Cheney belongs in a prison cell, not in a conversation about the presidency of the United States. That we actually have people floating his name in the first place reveals just how dark some of the corners of our politics really are. Worse, these are the people whose ideals and ideology were the dominant force in government for most of this decade, so dismissing them out of hand is a truly dangerous error in judgment. Indeed, quite a country we live in."
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POPSHistory as the Monster and the balm of Gilead
History is the monster. And there is no escape. You can't talk your way out of it--at every step we're confronted by our own laziness. It warps our stories, reduces beautiful and complicated narratives about race, sports, agency into cartoonish fairy tales. It's sad. I always thought that what we needed in this country wasn't so much cash payments, but some respect for history. Not history as an excuse for hamburgers, hot dogs and chips, but history as a way of understanding who we--despite ourselves-- really are. And for African-Americans, history really is the balm in Gilead. I think a lot of us can come to some peace, can come to understand that whatever happened to us, there are limits on what anyone can do to make it right, and while those limits have to be pushed, some of this we're going to have to carry ourselves. And then with a even broader sense we can understand that our suffering is not singular, that it isn't the only suffering.
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POPS"Blue Skies" versus "Goal-Oriented" Research The Large Hadron Collider at Cern near Geneva has now achieved the status of the most powerful particle accelerator and the biggest and most expensive experiment in history. Will it be worth its cost? (via @ProfBrianCox)
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POPSRoyal Society Puts Rare Scientific Manuscripts Online Newton?s theory on light and colours in the 1600s, that continues to provide the basis for theoretical physics, will be published along with a gruesome account of a 17th-century blood transfusion. A paper by Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States, will also be released on an experiment to fly his kite in a storm to prove that lightning is electricity rather than a supernatural force.
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POPSYour Skin Can Hear For years, scientists have known that watching another person speak can affect what we hear. In a well-known phenomenon called the McGurk effect, a person who listens to audio of someone saying “ba ba ba,’’ while watching another person’s lips forming the words “ga ga ga,’’ hears something in-between: “da da da.’’ Wow, wow, wow! .:p http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSwJ2rjUSdc
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POPSPlymouth Rock, The Story of Thanksgiving
and generally though a very faulty ideology. William Bradford, governor of the colony, explains clearly in his own hand what happened in his History of the Plymouth Settlement. They imposed what he call “communal service.” We would recognize it as a precursor to socialism. Everything " the land, the work, the crops, everything " was held communally. Everyone was expected to work hard, and receive only what they truly needed. As a result, as Bradford wrote, many would simply “allege weakness and inability.” Bradford reported that “the young men who were most able and fit for service objected to being forced to spend their time and strength in working for other men’s wives and children, without any recompense.” At the same time, “The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could.” Bradford would note: “Community of property was found to breed much confusion and discontent.”
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POPSWorld's largest ice sheet melting faster than expected "If the current trend continues or gets worse, Antarctica could become the largest contributor to sea level rises in the world. It could start to lose more ice than Greenland within a few years," said Jianli Chen, of the University of Texas at Austin.
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