Plutonium is Forever
I have been doing business in Japan for 20 years, consulting for big and small companies, speaking at conferences, writing for Japanese publications, and helping both American and Japanese companies do business with each other. For years I flew to Tokyo once a month, generally in my role as giver of bad news, which I
Why you get ideas in the shower
[This is an excerpt from the Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest, completely irreverent guide to creativity] When you are known as a writer about creativity, people send you interesting things…
Latitude doesn’t exactly mean what I thought
There are two kinds of latitude: geocentric and astronomical. On a perfect sphere, they're the same, but on an oblate spheroid like Earth they're different.
Why Retired Aircraft are Stored in the Desert
By Mark W. Danielson Why are all these airliners in the desert? In a word, they’re being preserved. Aircraft bone yards are a testament to t...
Do trees communicate? Networks, networks
I was unfamiliar with how mycorrhizal networks connect the roots of trees, facilitating the sharing of resources. Dr. Suzanne Simard writes: Graduate student Kevin Beiler has uncovered the extent a…
Closed access means people die
Jenny Molloy and I have been representing the Open Knowledge Foundation at the Open Science Summit and we presented the Open Research Reports (ORR) project. The slides we used are at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6280676/orr.pptx . I expect that at some stage we’ll be on the video record (last year’s was very useful and…
The Demon Machine
Over the weekend I was reunited with the first two computers I spent extensive time programming. The Sharp MZ-80K (released in 1979) and t...
Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power relatively dangerous
Update: I have written a fairly comprehensive article about steps to lower deaths per terawatt hour . Primary focus on pollution mitigation. Air pollution causes 3.1 million deaths per year
Deaths per TWH by energy source
I wrote this back in 2008 and with one new death that is somewhat nuclear energy related (a death at one of the japanese nuclear plants following the 8.9 earthquake) the statistics are not changed. Japan should have had sealed backup diesel generators or updated some of their designs. However, nuclear still compares…
The Carbohydrate Hypothesis of Obesity: a Critical Examination
Introduction I'd like to begin by emphasizing that carbohydrate restriction has helped many people lose body fat and improve their metabol...
Gerard ’t Hooft, Theoretical Physics as a Challenge
How to become a good theoretical physicist