Topics pertaining to science and technology, current or future.
As I’ve long suspected, the scientists sounding the Global Warning alarm have been playing fast and loose with the data. Deliberately. I understand some of the reasons for it: if they had told the truth, intelligent people would have dismissed the problem, quite reasonably demanding more information before taking the problem seriously. And by the …
A failure to think through the consequences.
I’ve never been able to understand people who reject scientific evidence outright, in favor of whatever their chosen authorities dictate. (I recently saw a quote that sums it up: “[T]he problem with all the “science deniers” is they think the argument is about power and “we” think it is about what reality is.”) The book …
Continue reading ‘“Understanding the psychology of authoritarianism”’ »
Ground-Source Heating. Nice to see that it’s getting more air time now, because it’s a great technology. I looked into it for our place last year, but determined that it would take a long time to pay for itself — far longer than we’re planning to stay in this house, and there’s no guarantee that …
Continue reading ‘“GSHP: The green tech even carbon sceptics will like”’ »
The answer, in my case, is probably not. At least for now. On the get-more-RAM side: I do use a several virtual machines (VMs) regularly. With eight gigabytes, I could open all of them at once, and increase the RAM available to each of them too, and still have plenty of RAM left over for …
Continue reading ‘“Do You Really Need More Than 4GB of RAM?”’ »
To me, this article is notable only because the disease (a cattle disease known as “Rinderpest”) would only be the second disease, after smallpox, that our efforts have eliminated. We like to think that we, as a race, are technologically advanced… but something like this points out just how far we still have to go.
Even fearsome venomous snakes should know never to mess with the Roomba.
To quote Isaac Asimov: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’” This is another “That’s funny…” moment, and I’m very curious to hear what the cause turns out to be. Along with some other recent and curious discoveries, it suggests that the …
Continue reading ‘“Quickening satellite quickens pulses at ESA”’ »
It’s a good question, and one that we simply don’t have the information to answer yet. We can’t even prove that there are E.T.s at this point. From the science that I’ve read, it’s likely that life is fairly common in the universe. And once you have life, you have a biological arms race to …
It makes sense, things that are “good for you” never feel good. 😉