Random Thoughts

Consumers could soon be paying a lot more for meat, milk, eggs and other farm staples if bad weather withers a U.S. corn crop that is now tethered to grain-intensive renewable fuel mandates, a new University of Illinois study warns. A corn shortage, coupled with surging demand to meet government-ordered ethanol standards, could push cash prices to $7 a bushel, the study found, squeezing livestock producers and spiking grocery prices. The study warns that federal policymakers need to forge solutions now to cushion the blow of a shortfall that history shows is a matter of when and how severe,…

A very personal blog posting today. Well, at times it so happens that I feel like writing something about myself... That is the whole purpose of a blog for many, while I, like most of the writers here, usually have additional reasons; today the chance to write about myself comes handy though. Twenty-five years ago this evening I was at a birthday party, with a bunch of friends. It was the birthday of two nice girls, and the party was held at the home of one of them. We were barely 20 years old back then (the two girls in fact were turning 20), and in similar occasions we used to smoke a lot,…

The Albatross Here is another of my poems which I hope may be of use to educators.                      THE ALBATROSS                      She slowly glides above the oceans deep       in effortless grace, and almost seems asleep. She banks and turns, and falling like the rain,       she plummets down, then soars aloft again. …

Only a tiny fraction of all scientific research is ever covered by the popular media, however, and most scientists go through their entire career without once encountering a reporter. New results and ideas are argued in the halls of research institutions, presented at scientific meeting, published in scholarly journals, all out of the public view. Voodoo science, by contrast, is usually pitched directly to the media, circumventing the normal process of scientific review and debate…The result is that a disproportionate share of the science seen by the public is flawed. - Bob Park, Voodoo…

In paintings of the last supper from last Millennium, the sizes of the portions and plates have gradually grown bigger and bigger, according to a forthcoming study in the International Journal of Obesity. The finding suggests that the phenomenon of serving bigger portions on bigger plates – which pushes people to overeat – has occurred gradually over the millennium. "We took the 52 most famous paintings of the Last Supper (from the book 'Last Supper,' 2000) and analyzed the size of the entrees, bread and plates, relative to the average size of the average head in the painting," said Brian…

The replication of fermion generations is one of the outstanding puzzles in particle physics. Could there be also a fourth generation of quarks and leptons ? There is no convincing theoretical or experimental reason why not. In some grand unified schemes consistency with the evolution of masses and couplings may indicate only three generations, but these models are not uniquely established. Thus it is important for collider experiments to continue the search [...] We label [...] the fourth generation quarks by (a,v) where a and v have charges (2/3, -1/3). This notation for the quarks is…

Part One? Just for giggles one day I went over to Cleverbot.com to have a little chat with what is proportedly the "latest and greatest" AI on the internet.There was a rumor going around that it had "gone crazy" and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. It didn't seem too crazy to me, just a normal AI bot, all content, no context. The following is a transcript of the highlights of our conversation. Perhaps I will talk again with Cleverbot. Perhaps you should talk to Cleverbot, I hope you have better success than I.I know logic but I know nothing of programming. User: I heard you went…

"A male astrophysicist talks physics to the astronomers and astronomy to the physicists, but then he meets another astrophysicist, and they discuss women." Unknown

Questionable lending helped sink the U.S. economy, but also provided a lifeline that kept countless firms afloat and averted an even deeper recession, according to research by University of Illinois finance professor Murillo Campello. The research was cited by President Obama in a report on the state of the economy, so you know it must be correct. The survey of corporate executives found that many small and mid-sized firms survived the economic storm by tapping easy, low-cost lines of credit locked in ahead of the downturn, during an era of loose lending that also included sub-prime home…

Children in England see much more smoking in movies compared to their counterparts in the US and are more likely to pick up the habit as a result, finds research published in Tobacco Control. The UK film classification system, which rates more films as suitable for young people than its US counterpart, is to blame, say the authors. The research team assessed the number of on-screen smoking/tobacco occurrences in 572 top grossing films in the UK, which included 546 screened in the US plus 26 high earning films released only in the UK. They then divided the total box office earnings of each…