Random Thoughts

In the golden age of science fiction (1930s-1950s), a typical protagonist was a square-jawed working stiff, perhaps a bureaucrat or a cop, who stumbled into a strange mystery that defied conventional explanation. Who would that bloke call up, but his friendly local scientist!  Inevitably, this would be an affable professor affiliated with a small, sleepy suburban teaching college.  Despite the low profile of the school, this professor was a multi-discipline expert, particularly in matters involving space, technology, and futurism. The scientist's lab was always in his basement.…

In many ways, things here are undoubtedly like they are for countless other families: our kids whine over chores, they bicker with each other, they push each other's buttons countless times a day, and they shout out choruses of "Do I have to?" and "But that's not fair!" And like countless mothers, I respond back with "Would I have asked you to if it was optional?" and "Get used to it! Life isn't fair." Part of acclimating children for their future roles as adults who will find themselves saying the same words their parents said to them despite the protestations that they'll never be like us…

This afternoon we had the first formal meeting for product planning of the Science 2.0 television pilot.   As you can imagine, there was talk of technical details, how the creative guys will set up the shot lists and storyboard the segments, what segments we will use, and then some of the philosophical stuff. Like, what will make Science 2.0 a science show for the next century? I told the agency and the producer what a fond recollection U.S. scientists of today have for shows like "Nova" and Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" - but noted that at the time, those were not regarded as stodgy,…

Blogging will be non-existent for three days, and please do not expect me to answer your comments in the various threads -I am going to be on a ship carrying me to Greece, and, God bless it, there is no Internet!

It is always disappointing to see agendas being rationalized by what passes for "research".  A good example occurs in this article examining the impact of smoke-free laws in rural or urban businesses.Of course, it is never quite clear what the impact was anticipated to be, since there are clearly no alternatives to customers (given state-wide bans). In essence, the argument is simplistic by arguing that smoking is likely to be higher in rural areas, so it was anticipated to have a greater impact on business.   It does illustrate how little the researchers understand economics, since…

I am told "Transformers: Dark Side Of The Moon" is a good film.  I enjoyed the first movie well enough, even if it was noisy in all of the wrong ways.   The sequel hurt both my eyes and my sensibilities but at least the pain in my eyes had an easy explanation:  Michael Bay, or perhaps his cinematographer, read some science and discovered that flesh tones, which exist in the orange range, have a complement on the color scale in teal.  Two complementary colors next to each other give an image 'pop' visually, shows neuroscience and therefore color theory.   So if you…

Mark Osteen's One of Us There are many memoirs out there, many stories by individuals about their journeys as parents of disabled children, and some are good, some are great, and others are neither. Some writers are polished and offer their journeys with a luminosity of prose that leaves your soul fed. Other memoirs, while polished and offering a distinct voice, a unique insight, leave you with a heavy heart, a soul weighed down by the limbo, the purgatory, the family finds itself in. Osteen's tale, One of Us, does that: leaves the reader weighted and yet lost. Mark Osteen's memoir…

The Scientific Method     While I was working hard on my translation of the memoire of the illustrious Ignaz Venetz, I found that the need to indulge in some hermeneutic and other studies had me nicely side-tracked on more than one occasion.   In order to know what an author meant by his words of 1821, one must see how those words were used by his or her contemporaries.     This led me to some works in French by a little-known historian and geographer : Alexandre Dumas,  père.  His Impressions de Voyage Suisse, 1833, reminds me greatly of the…

Maybe Nosferatu was a good name for this cat after all. He loves to leap at our legs, clamp on with his front claws and start chomping. Same for our arms. Cujo the cat would have been a good name, too. Still, he's a lovely animal; even when his little teeth are trying to break your skin. See, he's so sweet. I guess we all have our moments, some where we're sweet and others when we are vampire-like, trying to do as much damage as possible to another. Sometimes we inflict damage when we're just playing, or even when we're just making an offer (or an observation). Now, you're no more surprised…

For a long while now, having watched bubbles form and pop, I have found it frustrating how people pile into assets with straight line trajectories.  I first noticed it in the time of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.  During that time, as I recall, returns in the market were frighteningly close to straight line, not only highly positive, but with a low volatility of returns from month to month. A more frightening version of this, in terms of risk to our way of life, was in residential real estate.  Prior to the popping of the real estate bubble, residential real estate in…