Random Thoughts

The Brightest Candles #2The brightest candles are the people whose light remains long after they are gone. Imagine all the peopleliving life in peaceyou may say I'm a dreamerbut I'm not the only oneI hope someday you'll join usand the world will live as one. John Lennon ( 1940 - 1980  ) Imagine

Today I visited the 53rd international art exposition at the Biennale di Venezia, which this year is titled "Fare Mondi" (making worlds). I am posting below a few pictures I took of the installations I saw there, for those of you who are not insensitive to contemporary arts. But before I do, let me add a personal note. The Giardini della Biennale, the gardens where the exposition is set up, are located in a large area in front of the S.Marco basin. In it, thirty separate buildings host as many independent art galleries; each of them features a different, distinctive architecture, and each…

  More World Science Festival articles can be found here.

Each individual decision along the way seemed rational at the time, but the result was insane. - Former Secretary of State Robert McNamara on the development of the nuclear arms race, interview with Richard Rhodes in Arsenals of Folly, p. 99

With school budgets already sub-par, and the purse strings futher tightened in this current economic state, teachers have to find ways to do more with less. One suggestion, if I may, is to combine chemistry and history. Checking off the list of U.S. presidents while also teaching children about the periodic table is a great way to kill two birds with one stone, and who knows, it may even help retention of each subject. (I use U.S. presidents as one example; you could easily apply the venerable Table to a whole host of subjects.)  Let's start easy. 1. George Washington: the…

I'm on the road, so here are two (dueling?) quotes to make up for the hit-or-miss blogging:  God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.    - Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, p. 30 It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in  science. It is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has…

Meganonsense Alert!There is no consensus amongst linguists as to exactly what constitutes a word.  How do you count words?  What counts as a word?  Do 'run', 'running', 'ran' count as three words or one? Is 'dotwatcher' a word? What about 'haptualize'? Philosophers of the world: trouble yourselves no more.  The problem is solved.  A word is whatever The Global Language Monitor says it is. Web 2.0 ?  Yup! That's a word.  They say.  The English language's 1,000,000th word, to boot! Hype, or erudition?  You decide: Austin, Texas-based, Global…

Struggling to find a publisher for your brilliant and genre-shifting novel? You could go the way of Andrew Bodnar, former Bristol-Myers Squibb senior exec VP. In 2006 BMS tried to delay generic competition for its blockbuster Plavix by setting up a secret agreement with generic manufacturer Apotex. BMS promised to not undercut Apotex sales if Apotex delayed bringing the generic to market until just a few months before Plavix's patent expires (in 2011). It's a big deal - Plavix has about $8 billion in global sales and brings in about $15 million per day, according to this Bloomberg article.…

I keep seeing these ads for Acai pills that help you lose belly fat, supposedly used by Oprah.  Sometimes I’m slapped with these commercials saying that you have belly fat because you're very stressed and you should take their drugs, because, obviously, it’s the only solution.  Then I see articles about how there are these magical foods that burn belly fat.  In a state of confusion and depression, I stumbled into Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neuroscientist and author of “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers", giving a talk at UC Davis about stress and his work.  After studying…

The Brightest Candles #1The brightest candles are the people whose light remains long after they are gone. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. John Milton, Areopagitica.