Perhaps our resident translator of things Japanese can help explain this: A 60-year-old man from Mobara, Chiba Prefecture, recited pi to 100,000 decimal places early Wednesday, smashing the world record. It took clinical psychologist Akira Haraguchi–who also held the previous record–more than 16 hours to achieve the feat, which ended with the number 6. The …
A great comment discussion with Daniel Collins reminds me that I always like his blog when I read it, but I forget to read it. Adding it to the blogroll (I’m thinking “meta science”) and to the Planet as soon as I can figure out how to get his RSS feed.
James Annan has had several posts that were spot on over the past year (see here and here) about what I call “the Nature problem” – scientific results that get hyped all out of proportion because they appear in Nature. My favorite case in point is the paper in Nature last year by Bryden et …
It is that time of year when I awake from my sporting slumber and begin paying close attention to the telly. I admit to being a fair weather baseball fan, with a love for the game but a lack of patience for the 162-game season. I’ve come to see the season as statistics, and the …
More on the bad drought story I wrote about yesterday, an AP piece with heart-rending stories about drought in Kansas. Standardized precipitation index data showing that, since December, conditions in the area in question have been “near normal”: It’s not like there hasn’t been drought in the United States, just not in Kansas in any …
There’s a fascinating meme echoing around the Internet in recent days suggesting Al Gore said something idiotic. The source is a NewsMax story about a talk Al Gore apparently gave last week at the United Nations. The NewsMax article suggests Gore claimed that ” Cigarette smoking is a ‘significant’ contributor to global warming”. It’s obviously …
reading: Famine. A symposium dealing with Nutrition and relief operations in times of disaster, the proceedings of a 1970 meeting on the issue. I’m trying to understand what actually happens to humans, both physiologically and culturally, in famine-causing drought. reading 2: I was fascinated by the whole Hugo Chavez-Chomsky thing, and I’d not read Hegemony …
Some months ago, I published on this blog the plans for making an atom bomb. It seems only reasonable now to link to some tips on how to dismantle one. (Hat tip Incubator Mouse.)
Drought is a real problem. But this just pisses me off: Each night before going to bed, cattle rancher Barrett Broadie prays for rain. More such prayers follow on Sunday mornings, when he and his neighbors meet for church services in Ashland, a town of about 1,000 in southwestern Kansas. It’s been eight years since …