We still hear a lot about consensus about climate change, and yet when you talk to people at large, it's still pretty clear there is none, outside of a few scientific circles.

One of the big problems, I think, is that the debate has become polarized into two political camps - "Of course it's all anthropogenic" and "Nonsense, it can't possibly be ( Read more... )

Flawless launch.  They nailed it perfectly.

This entry was originally posted at http://unixronin.dreamwidth.org/815397.html. That post currently has
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There's an interesting example of confirmation bias in the back of the July Scientific American, which is amusing because it comes just two pages after Michael Shermer's column in which he talks about confirmation bias and why skepticism is important to science.  The article asserts that child mortality rates decline as women become better ( Read more... )

Thought for the day:

Neils Bohr once challenged Albert Einstein to prove that the moon exists when no-one is observing it, after Einstein asked him whether he could really believe that it doesn't.

I don't have the math chops to do it.  But, I believe it can be shown that for the Moon to not exist except when being observed would violate local ( Read more... )

yesterday, NASA really stirred people up with a cryptic announcement of a press conference relating to astrobiology.  Today, this NASA blog post has quieted a little of the speculation.

The conference, it turns out,. will discuss the issues relating to "shadow biospheres" with different biochemistry.  And it's about damned time!  I've been ( Read more... )

THIS is just ... brilliant.  (And the pun wasn't intentional.)  A group at the University of Bonn in Germany has figured out an ingenious trick to accomplish a stunt previously believed impossible:  They have created a Bose-Einstein condensate OF PHOTONS.

...Well played, sirs!

This entry was originally posted at http://unixronin.dreamwidth.org/ ( Read more... )

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has found evidence of "the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood".  This is being fairly widely reported across the 'net and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, it's being badly reported.  The typical report says that this black hole is 30 years old.  But it's not.  It's fifty million light-years away in ( Read more... )

From November 2006, a Google Tech Talk from Robert Bussard about inertial electrostatic confinement fusion and the hydrogen-boron fusion cycle, along with some interesting commentary on such things as why government programs are actually preventing progress on fusion and why ITER will never work.

This entry was originally posted at http:// ( Read more... )

Nope.  It's Frankenbooster, a proposal to get a family of heavy-lift boosters operational fast by reusing Space Shuttle parts.  The low-end configuration mates three SSMEs to a Shuttle external tank, straps two Shuttle solid boosters on each side, and puts a payload capsule atop the tank to lift 70 tons to orbit.  Other proposed configurations ( Read more... )

Cnews is reporting that a University of Toronto student has built and successfully flown a human-powered aircraft with flapping wings.

Look at the video, though.  It can't get airborne under its own power; it gets off the ground only by virtue of a cable tow from a vehicle.  According to the article,

[...] Reichert climbed aboard, flapped its ( Read more... )