Apr 10 2010
I just finished watching the first season of the AMC television series Breaking Bad. The series chronicles the life of a high school chemistry teacher Walter White who learns that he has terminal lung cancer and who then turns to the production and sale of methamphetamine to hopefully create an inheritance for his teenage son [...]
Jan 17 2010
The Company for which I work is developing products which will support the Sustainability movement. In the area of real property that effort revolves around LEED ( Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards for energy efficient and low greenhouse gas emitting buildings promulgated by the US Green Building Council. As one might expect, President [...]
Jan 16 2010
There is a good end paper for the January 25,2010 edition of entitled “Innovations Accidental Enemies.” The authors are with the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. They note that if one proposes a new idea in business, the typical response is for management to request those proposing the idea to show [...]
Jan 15 2010
Back on August 8,2009 I wrote a post on a wind farm near Reno. Mariah, the mythical wind, has appeared in a new context. The San Francisco Chronicle has a story in today’s edition about the small scale wind turbines produced by Mariah Windpower of Reno. The small turbines called Windspires are capable of generating [...]
Jan 10 2010
In an article in Science Magazine’s State of the Planet 2008-2009, “Preparing to Capture Carbon,” Daniel Schrag,one of the editors of the magazine, outlines three possible strategies for dealing with the carbon dioxide emissions that are leading to the rapid warming of the planet: Reduce the amount of energy the world uses through changes more efficient technology [...]
Dec 29 2009
I published my first post on May 28, 2009 and some 23 or 24 have now followed. Before moving on to a new post I thought I would talk a bit about what the process of blogging. means to me. My grandfather came to this country from Scotland and went to work for the Southern [...]
Dec 20 2009
On November 28 th I posted on Mars and briefly noted that the red planet has been the subject of fiction as well as science. When it comes to Mars, American fiction begins with Edgar Rice Burroughs who is best known for his Tarzan stories but perhaps not for long. Burroughs was born in Chicago [...]
Dec 16 2009
I have noted a couple of new developments on prior posts. On November 22, 2009 I wrote a post on the Hawaiian “hot spot” that has given rise to the volcanic activity in the Islands. On December 3, 2009 the Carnegie Institution for Science reported on the results of the Plume Lithosphere-Lithosphere Undersea Melt Experiment [...]
Dec 12 2009
Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai ‘Nga’ je Ngai’, the House of God. Closer to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard [...]
Oct 24 2009
We have all played the game of flipping coins and matching them. Is it heads or is it tails? Each flip of a regular coin has an equal chance of producing a head or a tail. The coin is said to be “memory-less.” In terms of probability theory each flip of the coin is an [...]