Random Thoughts

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, accused of rape, accused of groping, accused of sexual misconduct …. (UPDATE: He has made a formal statement on this on his facebook page ). Please say it ain’t so.  As one whose grim duty it was as a reporter to report what I found out it had to do some basic fact checking on Tchiya Amet’s rape allegation then write it up.  In my opinion her story is and was credible by itself.  She knew you.  You were in the same place at the same time.  Certain… shenanigans were accepted as “boys will be boys” back in the day.   For an accusation as…

Want to know how to create a $1 million company? Give $60 million to someone claiming they are going to revolutionize journalism by hiring a bunch of young, edgy people who don't care about business or making money, but who believe success happens by being popular on Facebook. You know who is the only company with long-term success being popular on Facebook? Facebook. For everyone else, it is a terrible business model. "Field of Dreams" was just a movie, folks, wishful thinking and building something no one wanted is not why Reaganomics worked.  Mic has been acquired by Bustle, who say…

When I  took Hwy 88-E toward Fermilab, shortly after landing at the Chicago O' Hare Airport yesterday afternoon, it occurred to me that the first time I had driven there happened 26 years and five months ago, in June 1992, when I was 26 years and five months old. What makes the observation significant is that the trip to Fermilab I made 26 years ago arguably marked the start of my career as a particle physicist, something that I consider as a non-trivial defining moment in my life. I was still a student back then, but from that point on I started doing serious research with the…

In late 2014 I came downstairs from my home office and said to my wife, "Herb London just left me a message." "Is he any relation to Stacy London?" she asked in her offhand humor way. Well, yeah, she is his daughter, if you are from California, but if you are of my generation and from anywhere near the orbit of New York, you know who Herb London is. And Herb London was getting a return phone call. When I told him that story in 2015, he beamed. He loved talking about his daughters and he really loved that he had become second fiddle to their accomplishments. He was a literate, thoughtful man,…

Tourists are not alarmed by Proposition 65 cancer warnings on nearly every product in every store in California, it quickly becomes a joke to them. Scientists in California warned that would happen while trial lawyers behind the referendum insisted it would never get that bad, knowing that "leadership" in such a ridiculous area - a body in France "suggesting" a link to cancer - would be a disaster for public trust in science. And therefore good for trial lawyers who want a jury to believe Science Is A Corporate Conspiracy. Thanks to Prop 65 lawsuits, the Referendum became a populist tool for…

During the Obama administration, James Clapper, America's Director of National Intelligence exposed Russian efforts to undermine U.S. natural gas ("fracking") by supporting environmental groups using "donor advised" funds (large pools of money where individual participants can anonymously decide where to send the cash) in order to keep Europe, which has thrown the energy baby out with the political water by shutting down nuclear, suckling at the teat of Kremlin fossil fuels. They didn't want America exporting energy, the top export of Russia, and the way to do that was to pay activists to…

In Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur", French and English tales were reworked into the definitive mythology of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. But he may have gotten one thing wrong. Instead of a lady in the lake providing (and eventually taking back) the fabled sword Excalibur, symbol of pre-Norman rule, until the return of the King, the lady in the lake may have been meant to be the next great monarch. If so, she's arrived and her name is Saga Vanecek. Saga. Seriously. Call me Heimskringla but Saga is a great name for a monarch, it doesn't get any better than that. When the young…

Next month, a Microsoft developer, a classical pianist, and a philanthropist for kids' health will compete in the Miss America pageant. And they are all the same person: Allison Farris. Farris creates and codes apps for Microsoft as a career but next month she is poised to do something with a different kind of elegance. She will represent Washington, D.C. at the Miss America competition on Sept 9, 2018 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which will be televised on ABC. Farris, the daughter of Circuit Judge Doug Farris and mother Jane, grew up playing classical piano, and it was music that led her…

What is chance? Or better, does the word "chance" really have an absolute meaning? I believe this is not an idle question. We tend to use that word to describe phenomena which we cannot trace back to an explanatory cause by a cause-effect relation. But words are important: labeling an event as due to chance has a direct impact on our perception of reality, as the statement that something "happened by chance" constitutes a final verdict, which labels the event as something not liable to be scrutinized in more depth. I was brought to ponder on the matter yesterday, as I received the shocking…

I've never been much for the word "tribe." It sounds too insular in 2018, the kind of term (see also "zeitgeist", "heteronormative", and "schadenfreude") thrown around by postmodernists with their heads in the clouds believing what they tell each other as the real world passes by. That's not to say it isn't an accurate description of science media. We certainly have tribes: We have progressive ideologues in large media corporations who frame science belief (and denial) through their politics; there are academics who believe the public have a deficit of information and showing them some…