The Times this morning has a nice article on the Archimedes Palimpsest, which turns out to contain more than just important works on early mathematics: An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from… Continue reading The New Hyperides
Category: In the News
How Predictable
New Scientist has decided to commemorate their 50th anniversary by asking a large number of scientists to predict what will happen in the next 50 years. As you might have predicted, the list of responses includes a large number of short essays of the form: Exciting new developments in my own field of research will… Continue reading How Predictable
Still in the Dark
The dark energy press conference mentioned a couple of days ago happened yesterday, and is written up in the Times. You can also get information straight from NASA. The basic result here is that astronomers have made a bunch of measurements of supernovae at extremely large distances, which amounts to looking at galaxies a very… Continue reading Still in the Dark
Broken Things
I would post some sort of wrap-up about the Lisa Randall chat yesterday, but Discover is broken. They don’t have a link to a transcript on the site– in fact, they haven’t updated the front page to reflect the fact that the chat was yesterday, and is now over. There was a link that would… Continue reading Broken Things
Like The Lorax, With More Formal Mathematics
Scott Aaronson speaks for the computer scientists, partly in response to the same Times piece that I blogged about recently.
Good News from Outer Space
NASA has scheduled a mission to service the Hubble. This should keep the space telescope flying and producing great science until 2013 or so. Obviously, there are a lot of caveats in there– the mission isn’t scheduled until 2008, so the Hubble needs to last that long, and there can’t be major delays or disasters… Continue reading Good News from Outer Space
If It Has “Science” in the Name, It’s Not
The Times this morning has an article on the future of computer science: Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the “universal machine” in the late 1930’s… Continue reading If It Has “Science” in the Name, It’s Not
Polling for Dummies
Because I’m a Bad Person, I no longer remember who pointed me to Halfway There’s primer on polling, but it’s really an excellent of the effects of sample size, and why it’s legitimate to project results based on small numbers of interviews. Some important notes from the conclusion: Second, even a poll that is supposed… Continue reading Polling for Dummies
Give the Fat Kid a Break
Gina Kolata in the New York Times today reports on new attempts to blame obesity for the problems of the world: Last week the list of ills attributable to obesity grew: fat people cause global warming. This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of… Continue reading Give the Fat Kid a Break
Falsify Data, Go to Jail
The New York Times Magazine this week has a troubling story of scientific misconduct, involving the fraudulent research of Eric Poehlman: Before his fall from grace, Poehlman oversaw a lab where nearly a dozen students and postdoctoral researchers carried out his projects. His research earned him recognition among his peers and invitations to speak at… Continue reading Falsify Data, Go to Jail