The God-Einstein-Oppenheimer Dice Puzzle
Here’s a good logic puzzle from John Tierney, the science blogger for the NY Times. You’ve gotta love this caveat:
Caution: Don’t assume there’s an immediately obvious or intuitive answer. When Mr. Sidhu first heard the puzzle, he promptly offered an answer only to be told by his professor, “You have only revealed that you know nothing about mathematicians.”
I, of course, have no idea of the answer.
How to Defend Earth Against an Asteroid Strike
Here’s a nice run-down of various techniques to avoid an asteroid-collision armageddon. My favorite? Landing on the asteroid and installing solar sails.
In Georgia, many old-school convenience stores feature illegal video gambling. Not sure why.
Atlanta Unfiltered
Here’s a new Web site from a former Atlanta Journal-Constitution staffer. Atlanta Unfiltered digs up public records and publishes them online. Here’s a good story on pay raises at cash-strapped MARTA — 114 people got 10 to 40 percent salary increases.
Millions
Just watched Danny Boyle’s film “Millions.” It’s fantastic.
DEA raids pot dispensary in SF
The Obama administration’s apparent shift on its drug war policy was just that — apparent:
Federal agents raided a medical marijuana dispensary in San Francisco Wednesday, a week after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder signaled that the Obama administration would not prosecute distributors of pot used for medicinal purposes that operate under sanction of state law.U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided Emmalyn’s California Cannabis Clinic at 1597 Howard St. in San Francisco’s South of Market district mid-afternoon.
They hauled out large plastic bins overflowing with marijuana plants and loaded several pickup trucks parked out front with grow lights and related equipment used to farm the plants indoors.
The Civil Heretic: Freeman Dyson
Rather interesting New York Times profile of Freeman Dyson, the incredibly smart physicist making waves for his views on global warming:
Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.
Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe
Here’s a sobering report from a NASA-funded study:
It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma – charged high-energy particles – some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection. If one should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating…The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: “two patches of intensely bright and white light” emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.
There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world’s telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale….
There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimising power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.
Read the article — pretty chilling to think what a modern country would be like with all the electricity grids burned up. Wouldn’t be a quick fix, either. Not like we’ve got 10,000 spare transformers sitting around. The result would mean an immediate return to the 1700s. Hmm.
British PM gets a lashing
This guy’s talking about Britain, but he could be addressing the U.S. as well. I agree with these words: “You can’t spend your way out of a recession.”
