Jun 17 2010
;City Guides is an organization in San Francisco that provides free tours to tourists and local residents of sites of historical interest in San Francisco. City Guides organizes the tours by subject, the waterfront, the theater, the gold rush. I signed up and was accepted for the City Guides training program, but I am also [...]
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 [...]
Feb 13 2010
I like to quickly leaf through each new weekly edition of Nature when I receive it. In the February 4, 2010 issue a picture of an attractive woman on page 610 and a mid article color picture of human cells caught my eye, so I read the book review by Steve Silberman, who writes for [...]
Jan 31 2010
I have posted on Barsoom, which is the word that Edgar Rice Burroughs used for Mars. This is an example of a constructed language or a “conlang.” A conlang, per the Wikipedia, is one whose phonology, grammar, and or vocabulary have been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having developed naturally. Two [...]
Jan 18 2010
The Economist notes that 2010 is the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society of Great Britain, perhaps the world’s most eminent scientific organization. The Society had a modest beginning at a gentle men’s club outside St. James Palace. On a November night in 1660 a group of followers of the Seventeenth Century [...]
Jan 03 2010
The China Syndrome is a 1979 motion picture starring Jack Lemon and Jane Fonda, both of whom received Academy Award nominations for best actor and best actress respectively. The movie won the Writer’s Guild of America award for best script. The Wikipedia explains the conceit of the movie this way: The China Syndrome is a hypothesis, or [...]
Dec 25 2009
As I have written about various scientific topics, I have frequently come across a term that was new to me but not to science,”Occam’s Razor,” which seems a bit mysterious at first glance. As a logical term I think a loose colloquial translation would be “simpler is better.” Ockham is an English town that was [...]
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 13 2009
I published the first post to my blog in May. During the relatively short time of my blog’s existence, nothing has created as much controversy as a statement I made in a post in August about a wind farm in Nevada.I noted a statement from the National Wildlife Foundation that said global warming could raise [...]
Nov 28 2009
In my post of November 2o th I described my trip to the Kilauea Volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii and the role of volcanic activity and plate tectonics in the formation of the Hawaiian Islands. I bought the December 2009 issue of Astronomy Magazine in Kona to read before we made the trip [...]