Newscientist.com news service reported the findings of Richard Price, a physicist at the university of Texas at Brownsville, to the horror of all weight conscious people: “Your waistline may be spreading, but you can’t blame it on the expansion of the universe.” “Since atoms are made up mostly of empty space, with electrons ‘orbiting’ the [...]
A stylistic note… Classic English style dictates that the relative placement of punctuation and quotation marks is to be determined logically. Thus, commas and periods typically come after quotation marks, as in the following example: …a post titled “Don’t Linger in this CAFE”, showing once and for all… In America, we use a different set [...]
A black essayist writes in this week’s Time magazine about falling out of love with hip-hop and in love with White Music. His journey is a thought-provoking commentary on the influence of race and other social pressures over what reaches our ears. There is universality in his tale of moving from Public Enemy to Bjork–fears [...]
Employers view extended periods of unemployment as a negative. So for workers who cannot find a suitable job within the first few months of unemployment, their chances of finding suitable employment begins to decrease with time. As their odds decrease, the average time before they find a suitable job increases (by definition). As the duration [...]
The facts are at ABC news. I know I’m not alone in saying that I’ll really miss him. I grew up with his voice in my home every weeknight, and turned to him first for the news of the day. It’s hard knowing that his voice has fallen forever silent.
Reading Daniel Drezner’s post today about a possible avian flu vaccine, one would think that things are looking up. However, according to Effect Measure, the article to which he links may be overly optimistic. Not only is this little ray of hope dimmer than expected, but reading this post over at FuturePundit, it becomes obvious [...]
As I grabbed an article on the emerging role of mathematics in the biological sciences a few weeks back from the Public Library of Science (PLoS), I was thinking about how wonderful it was to be able to access the article (and their entire archive) for free. For the previous four years, I had taken [...]
One of the few outposts of actual debate on the Internet is the aptly named ‘dialogues’ section of Slate. This section, appearing periodically in the online magazine, captures the essence of debate: flushing out arguments and discussing their merits and faults. It is a pleasure to read because the back and forth arguments give insight [...]