Albuquerque scientist Mark Boslough’s famous pi hoax resurfaces, this time morphed on OhmyNews: Crawford Texas – Mathematicians and educators across the nation were stunned and infuriated after President signed a bill into law yesterday redefining pi, a mathematical constant used around the world. The bill to change the value of pi to exactly three was …
Here’s a fun little bit of business to warm a weather wonk’s heart: That’s from John Wesley Powell’s 1878-79 Report on the lands of the arid region of the United States, and is the earliest climatic data from Albuquerque that I have ever run across. The data was collected by Charles Schott of the Smithsonian, …
Aaron’s delightful tale of being laid off: I don’t know where I’m headed, but it could be practically anywhere. I could visit my brother in Bolivia. I could move to my grandmother’s farm in Ivy, VA, and raise pet goats, write freelance, sell vegetables at the farmer’s market. I could get the bird flu or …
Via HP, link to a fascinating piece on Steve Jobs.: Jobs doesn’t believe that technology is going to change the world. ‘This stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t … Technologies can make it easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in a …
My new favorite search string, in the logs this morning: “article on t.v. reports on october 31 about bedbugs”.
Via Luis, a trail of bread crumbs leads to Paul Graham: Actually, the fad is the word “blog,” at least the way the print media now use it. What they mean by “blogger” is not someone who publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online. That’s going to become a problem as the …
Finally found the time this evening to tack a comment onto a post at Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog, in which he suggested the media hasn’t been writing about a new NAS report because it “is inconvenient for those who view the radiative effect of human-caused CO2 increases as the dominant forcing of climate change.” Roger’s …
This morning I donated blood. Most of the the staff at United Blood Services was in Halloween costume. For some reason, there were a disproportionate number of vampires. Wonder why.
I know precious little about monetary policy. But I am inclined to enthusiasm about Ben Bernanke’s nomination to replace Alan Greenspan after hearing this on NPR about what might be called the “Bernanke-Jaffee Theory” on baseball’s hallowed “earned run average.” The ERA is a measure of the average number of runs a baseball pitcher would …
While doing the blog software transition, a trail of crumbs in my old archives led me to Dan York’s blog, one of my old Advogato blog buddies. Turns out he’s a collector of old globes, and has just launched This Old Globe, a blog about globe collecting.