Built on Facts

After writing yesterday’s post I happened across a news article about the Aptera moving closer to production. What’s the Aptera? It’s a car, but not just any car:
The Aptera Typ-1 will be the most efficient passenger vehicle in the world. The first production models are planned to be available in December 2008 with [...]

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I am a huge fan of the environment. I’m not a huge Al Gore fan. Human beings are part of the environment as well, and the default setting of Gore and many other bureaucratic environmentalists seems to be “Do as I say, not as I do, follow my rules, pay new taxes, and [...]

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I am sick. Sore throat, sinus congestion, muscle soreness, all the hallmarks of what I hope is just the common cold.
Barring more serious failures of the body itself, illness is usually caused by bacteria trying to eat you, or viruses trying to program you to stop all that pesky “life” business and get to [...]

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I’m out of town for the weekend, and though I am not around to update this site it’s smart enough to update itself. Well, anyway it’s smart enough to schedule this post for Saturday morning when I’m actually typing this on Thursday night. I won’t exactly be in an internet-free wilderness, but I’ll [...]

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The Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to come online in a matter of months.  For all the thousands of theorists working in high-energy physics, SUSY, string theory, and related topics, no one really knows what kinds of new particles are going to be coming out of the collision point.  This, of course, is the entire [...]

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How tall are you? You might give an answer in feet and inches if you’re an American, or in meters most other places. And if you give than answer, I’ll have a good understanding of how tall you are - all because we’re using the same units of measurement. In practice your [...]

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You may have heard of the actinides, lanthanides, oxides, and various other -ide names from chemistry. Here’s another: pnictide. Rolls right off the tongue, no?
Well, you may be hearing more about them in the future.  In the race - now more like a marathon - to understand superconductivity, research has focused on the [...]

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The problem with particle physics is the difficulty of acquiring new data.  The major way particle physicists get data is to accelerate individual particles to tremendous energies and smash them into each other.  If you have enough E, the universe will obligingly generate some mc2 in the form of new particles flying out from the [...]

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You’re standing around minding your own business when suddenly a mile or two away, a rocket launches into the air. It curves upward in a lazy arc and begins its descent toward you. This rocket has several pounds of high explosive in its tip and so you’d prefer to find a way to [...]

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The Boston Globe has a beautiful retrospective on some of the most visually stunning photographs the Cassini probe has taken from the vicinity of Saturn. All of them are beautiful and I highly recommend the link so you can see all the images. This image is of Dione, Saturn’s 4th largest moon. [...]

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