Quote of the Day

I came across this quote in the book that I am currently reading. The character who gives the quote claims that is from Dr. Arendt. I have googled for it, but I have not found it. I am not sure if this is really from Hannah Arendt, or the author is putting words in her [...]

Shortage of Scientists and Engineers?

Robert Samuelson has an article disputing the notion that there is a shortage of scientists and engineers in the US, which prompted the American Competitiveness Initiative. He makes the point that some of the statistics about the number of engineers that are trained in China and India have been inflated. Many have the [...]

Visa Problems for Scientists Get Worse

Since 9/11 the difficultly that foreign scientists have experienced in getting visas to come to the US have gone from annoying to not worth the trouble. Today’s Washington Post has a story on the science adviser to the Prime Minister of India being denied a visa due to his expertise in chemistry.
The incident [...]

So That’s Where Ping Comes From

I have been using the internet since the 80’s and I cannot remember when I first pinged a computer, but I never knew where the name of the command ping came from. I knew the etymology of cat, grep, sed, ftp, irc, man, cpp, and many more, but I never knew where the name [...]

Using Writely for Blogging

In my search for a powerful and flexible way to create blog entries, I have stumbled onto Writely which was recommended in Squash. It is actually an online word processor. It’s native format is html, so it seems like it could be a natural tool for creating blog entries. It supports hyperlinks which is [...]

Book: Misquoting Jesus

A friend lent me Richard Rubenstein's When Jesus Became God a few months ago, and I found it fascinating. It that explained many different concepts were circulating in the early church about the divinity of Jesus, and showed how the orthodox view prevailed. I was raised Catholic and the perception that I always had was [...]

The Ghost Particle

I was flipping channels tonight, and I heard the phrase ghost particle. I stopped on the local PBS channel and discovered that NOVA was having a show on neutrinos. It was about half over, but I watched the rest. I did not learn anything new, but I get a kick out of seeing people that [...]

Blogging about Blogging

Blogging about blogging is perhaps the one thing that all bloggers have in common. Joel Achenbach has just made some discoveries about how other blog and get paid for it. He plans to take these ideas the ultimate extreme.
Technorati Tags: blogging

Pulling Together the Threads of the Women’s Health Initiative

I have been blogging about the Women’s Health initiative as the results on low-fat diets and calcium supplements have been released. These studies have shown that some highly recommended life style interventions do not show signifcant health benefits. Today the was a nice article in the Washington Post trying to explain how these [...]

Fun with Neutrinos (Part 1)

I have been thinking about developing a public outreach talk on science for a couple of years. I have not made any progress, so I thought I would start putting down some ideas in the blog. If I am lucky, I might get some useful suggestions. If not I will still have something down in [...]