Science
Thanks to my favorite professor, Dr. Kenneth Krane
I recently stumbled across the path of my favorite professor from my college years, Dr. Kenneth Krane, after lo these many years; he was describing his approach to writing Physics textbooks. I was happy to discover that he has been given awards for teaching excellence, and has written textbooks of his own. In particular, he was invited by the authors of the best general physics textbook, Halliday and Resnick, to co-author their extended version of General Physics so as to include those topics of modern physics that he taught me so long ago; this version is also held in high regard.haiku
Star glows in the void,
pin point in the firmament:
quintessential!In the mood for a sweet scientific joke? Biology meets chemistry
I saw a restaurant called The True Taste, and I thought, well, okay, what is the true taste? So I went inside and looked at the menu, which had several sections. They were labeled "Brown Sugars," "Honeys," "Molasses" and "Artificials." I thought this was really weird, and I went over to the waiter and I said, "What's going on? Don't you guys serve food?" The waiter was actually the owner of the restaurant as well, and he explained to me that this was a tasting bar for sweeteners. He said that he had no background in the food industry, he'd never worked in a restaurant, but he was a Ph.D. biologist who worked on chemical sensing, and ...
Martin Gardner – Thanks for many hours of delight
Martin Gardner, a serious thinker and polymath, most famous for his mathematical puzzles and his Annotated Alice, died recently at the ripe old age of 95. Martin was at his most public during the years that he wrote the famous Mathematical Games column for Scientific American. I will miss him very much, not so much for his puzzles, which held little interest to me, but for his wide ranging essays and expositions on science, mathematics, philosophy and even poetry.
Our vital Microbiome: bacteria cure diseases too!
Recently, normal bacteria from a human gut were transplanted into another person who was suffering from a terrible gastrointestinal disease, and the disease was eradicated! The New York Times recently published an article noting this feat, and summarizing our current understanding of the human microbiome, as the microbial species that inhabit our body are collectively known.
"Superman violates the laws of physics!" (I will never live that down.)
Many years ago, my wife and I viewed the Superman movie with Christopher Reeve, which featured a scene wherein Superman sees Lois Lane being crushed in an earthquake, and so he flies around the earth faster than the speed of light so that he can go back in time and rescue Lois just before she is crushed.
My immediate response to this was "That couldn't happen; nothing can move faster than the speed of light." My wife's response was to start giggling without pause.
Craig Venter is utterly amazing!
Craig Venter and his team have taken a large step in synthetic biology: They have created a full bacterial chromosome starting from a computer model of the chromosome! Enter, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0.
Book review, Title The Death of Adam, Author Marilynne Robinson, Rating 2.5,
The Death of Adam
Marilynne Robinson
Book review
Modern Jeremiad
Marilynne Robinson's The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought could just as well have been entitled 'Modern Jeremiad', as its tone is often bleak, accusatory, and angry, sure that the world, and America in particular, has taken a set of massively wrong turns in terms of both its thinking and its behavior. This is a book that marks modern thought as empty of spiritual meaning, and continually contrasts secular (mostly failed) ideas and behaviors with Christianity's spirituality and ability to offer meaning and moral structure in a modern human's life. The essays are wildly uneven, and the variation in quality is quite wide; most are readable, but several are nigh on unreadable. If you were to read this book from back to front, you would, roughly speaking, be reading from the best essays to the worst.
Abiogenesis or Creation?
Abiogenesis currently amounts to little more than scientific parlor talk, which leaves us free to choose an explanation of the origin of life that is most personally satisifying.I think that life was more likely created by God than having arisen spontaneously on earth. I have read a number of scientific arguments regarding the origin of life. They differ markedly in some aspects, but they are consistent in arguing that life on earth is massively complex and a massive amount of time would be necessary for life to arise from non-life (formation of the first self-replicating cell, then the evolution of life to its current forms). Many of abiogenesis proponents suggest that the current estimate of the earth's age, 4.5 billion years, is not sufficient time for life to have arisen spontaneously! At any rate . . .
Bacteria talk to each other … new approach to antibiotics?
The old bacterial cell wall inhibitors, etc. are the antibiotics soon to be the past, obviously so because the bacteria have evolved means to defeat most of them, and we are out of good ideas to extend those methods, save at much too slow a pace. But much has been learned about bacteria in the past 20 years, and from this recent knowledge are born new points of attack!!!
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. Kilgore Trout
The uncertainty principle describes an inherent fuzziness that must exist in any attempt to describe nature. Our most precise description of nature must be in terms of probabilities.
READING
ARCHIVES
CATEGORIES
QUOTES
