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Showing posts from January 13, 2008

Darwin Day: February 12th

From the site:
The dual mission of Darwin Day Celebration is to promote public education about science and in addition to encourage the celebration of Science and Humanity throughout the global community including the general public, private and public institutions, science professionals, science educators at all levels, libraries, museums, the print and electronic media, and science enthusiasts everywhere. Science is our most reliable knowledge system. It has been, and continues to be, acquired solely through the application of human curiosity and ingenuity and, most importantly, it has provided enormous benefit to the health, prosperity and intellectual satisfaction for our human existence. These are worthy achievements for all people to celebrate!To accomplish this mission Darwin Day Celebration will maintain an attractive website that provides potential participants with extensive educational material, together with examples and appropriate suggestions, on ways to develop meaningfu…

NBC Blocks Kucinich From Debate

What the fuck is wrong with the Democratic Party, and with the media? A mostly rhetorical question, but this is really obscene and blatant.

More here, from the Kucinich campaign, including his reasons for asking for a recount in NH and ways to help with both issues: NBC/debates and the NH vote count.

Woah: I just google-news-ed this, and Kucinich sued, and the judge has ordered NBC to include Kucinich in the debate. But NBC is appealing. Holy moly. Here's the latest.

The Second Law and Cosmology, Max Tegmark

From MITWorld, a great site. Here's the blurb:
In spite of its old age, the Second Law of Thermodynamics “is alive and kicking,” says
Max Tegmark
, stimulating research on “really, really big puzzles.” In Tegmark’s case, “big” encompasses the cosmos, and investigating the entropy of the universe offers one path into understanding “how we started out.”

Tegmark frames his talk with paradoxical questions: Why is entropy so low, and why is entropy so high? The first question is “crucial to understanding the arrow of time,” and involves the microscopic definition of entropy. 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang, entropy in the observable universe is in “the ballpark of 1089 bits -- crudely speaking, a google.” This is much lower than the theoretical limit to how much entropy our cosmos could contain. Also, Tegmark wonders, why has our solar system ended up so far from thermal equilibrium, since when the universe was younger, the temperature was almost the same everywhere?

It turns out tha…