Damned mosquitos.

Another case of our not being able to accurately judge risk?

"To Spray or Not to Spray"
John Tierney's Blog - NYTimes

I'm going out to fog the backyard now, thank you...

What if we had a party, and no one came?

Large numbers of scientists (a small fraction of the world's population) will be waiting impatiently for the results when the new collider at Cern starts up. What they will see will be guaranteed to be incredible. Whatever comes out is going to set the direction for basic atomic research for the foreseeable future. I am not one who is confident of finding answers to 'life, the universe and everything,' though. My best guess is that the answers they find will spawn more questions at an even more fundamental level.

But what happens if there turns out to be nothing?

That would be, to me, by far the most interesting outcome. That would mean we've been thinking about these things in a completely wrong way for a very long time.

Of course, try and explain the excitement of a null result to a politician who has sunk millions into this....

New York Times:
A Giant Takes on Physics’ Biggest Questions

Well, of course...

If you don't have a good plan for how to use them, they won't work!

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops
New York Times

"A handful of schools are abandoning one-to-one computing programs as educationally empty — and worse."

Technology is not a panacea. It is a tool. If you don't know how to use it well, it's pretty damned expensive and useless...

I wish I was this good with visualizations!

The topic is interesting by itself, by itself, but it's this guy's use of visual aids - animated graphs in particular, that make this amazing.

Is it worse to be right, or to be wrong?

I'm of two minds here. And I really don't want to be of either.

Scientists Detail Climate Changes

So, for years I've been one of the only people around here who studies things that are related to climate change. Peripherally, but still - I had a lot of schooling in that field, keep up with most of the research, etc.

The problem? All of a sudden, we go from a majority of people not caring, to this seeming tsunami of public opinion that we need to do something. (Is Al Gore the cause or just the lucky effectee of the change? Who knows?) In my gut, that's a problem, because I get really uncomfortable when mass public opinion swings my way - because I know the track record of mass public opinion.

So should that color my view of global climate change? No - it shouldn't. But it does.

I know exactly how complex the problem is. How non-linear. I always take such research with a healthy dose of skepticism. Not disbelief, but good, old-fashioned scientific "prove it to me" skepticism. Even as I weigh the evidence and decide that on the balance, humans are very likely the cause of the recent observed changes in climate, there's always that doubt, that realization that we may not be right. The remembering that it's dangerous to get on a bandwagon - you stop looking at the underlying premises and go blithely along.

What if we're wrong? Or what if we're just not right enough - that the earth's climate changes, but not enough to affect people enough for them (in the USA) to really care? What happens to the scientists who cried wolf?

So - do I hope that we're right - that humans are adversely affecting the earth's climate? Or that we're wrong - that the variations we're seeing are somehow natural and will swing back soon? Damned by public opinion in one case, damned by nature in the other.

Damn.

D'oh!

Too much going on lately, but this is a classic:

The Evolution of Homer

Don't blink, you might miss it...

Here is probably the one news story you'll ever see about space weather, from the Washington Post.

It's an article about how a new NASA satellite is able to monitor the sun and predict the arrival of high energy particles from solar eruptions. Of course, had the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory malfunctioned or didn't make it into space, you'd be hearing for weeks about how incompetent NASA is.

So - three silent cheers for NASA!