Culture

As one blogger put it, this is just Dawkin’s Weasel program all over again–comparing a partially completed solution to the final solution, and modifying only the parts that are wrong. Not a very random way of using those monkeys at all! Imagine taking an MedCat exam where the professor told you which multiple choice problems were wrong and to go back and change them. Even without knowing anything, how long would it take you to score a 100%? – Rob Sheldon Musing on Sheldon’s recent post, “Just how many monkeys = Shakespeare?, Edward Sisson writes to ask, How about a computer program that simulates a few million monkeys randomly recreating Dawkins? Or randomly recreating Darwin? Or randomly recreating the program Read More ›

Space: rocks floating around in the dark. Who cares? Canadian blogger Five Feet of Fury offers her blunt opinion, which may be more widespread than many science nerds suppose: After the novelty wore off, NASA spent decades getting borderline bitchy about how nobody else cared about their launches and missions anymore. But they had turned into Marge Simpson in that one where she keeps wearing the Chanel suit to everything. When nobody else is looking, nobody over the age of 12 gives much of a crap about real life space travel. They care more about imaginary space travel; who gets asked for his autograph more often: the second man on the moon (whoever that was) or Leonard Nimoy? Proof that Read More ›

In “Faster-than-light neutrino claim bolstered” (New Scientist, September 23, 2011), Lisa Grossman notes, Representatives from the OPERA collaboration spoke in a seminar at CERN today, supporting their astonishing claim that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light. The result is conceptually simple: neutrinos travelling from a particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland arrived 60 nanoseconds too early at a detector in the Gran Sasso cavern in Italy. And it relies on three conceptually simple measurements, explained Dario Autiero of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Lyon: the distance between the labs, the time the neutrinos left Switzerland, and the time they arrived in Italy. Here comes the horseshoe: But only time will tell whether the result holds up Read More ›