Aaron yesterday suggested children may be an expensive luxury. Dude, there’s good science backed up by badass mathematical analysis to support that suggestion. One of the puzzles of demography has long been that as societies get richer, they tend to have lower birth rates. This seems evolutionarily counter-intuitive. As you get richer, you ought to …
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NASA’s PR machine is gearing up to announce today the discovery of Sedna, a Pluto-like object way the hell out in the Kuiper belt, the farthest solar system object yet found, etc. This will of course spark the usual debates over whether Sedna is really a “planet”, whatever that means. The definitional problem, as expressed …
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Dontcha just love libraries? Nothing quite like the serendipity of finding something unexpected on the shelf next to the thing you were looking for. On my mission to better understand statistics, I was at the downtown Albuquerque library Saturday going through all the stale, musty old stats textbooks when I stumbled up on Edward Tufte’s …
I was talking to my daughter, Nora, and her friend, Andy, last night about snow days. We all anecdotally remember the kids having a lot more snow days in the past, but it’s been years – Andy said he’s pretty sure at least four – since school here in Albuquerque’s had to be cancelled because …
It’s one of those fabulous examples of yet another huge world about which we know nothing: the realm of the symbiotic fungi living on the leaves of plants. All plants seem to have ’em, but why are they there? They suck up a small amount of the plant’s energy, and in the brutal economics of …