I assisted Carter’s work encouraging democracy – and saw how his experience, persistence and engineer’s mindset helped build a freer Latin America over decades
I assisted Carter’s work encouraging democracy – and saw how his experience, persistence and engineer’s mindset helped build a freer Latin America over decades
Though some may disagree, I believe that he was one of our good presidents. History will tell…
“500 pounds of plastic makes its way into the ocean every second.”
I have written blogs about CRISPR in the past. In one of thses blogs, in 2016, I talked about the possible ethical ramifications of the use of the technology in the future. My other blog, the next year, was just a link to a description of how the technology works. The scientists who developed this technology have now received the ultimate recognition, the Nobel Prize. But, as happens in many cases, there is some controversy about whether other deserving people have been left out of this honor. This article gives a broader perspective on this subject, including some history.
Some of us feel quite good about ourselves because we recycle our plastics at home. We believe we are doing our little bit to save the environment. But, as it turns out, very little of the plastics that we recycle are being reused in a useful way. As the article below points out, there are many challenges to achieving real meaningful recycling. Perhaps the solution is to use less plastics, or plastics in a more sustainable way. (The author of this article linked to below (click on the image) talks about “bioplastics”, which is something they are working on in their University.) Whichever way you look at it, there are additional costs involved in getting things on the right path. The article below is a good read in the sense that it also gives you a good sense of the bigger picture, and of the damage we are doing to ourselves over the longer run.
(Courtesy – The Conversation)
Here is a video from the article.
The Standard Model provides a theory that, so far, has been able to accurately describe how all the physical forces in nature known to man, except for gravity, are related to each other. Over the years, the Standard Model has been successful in predicting many physical phenomenon that we are finding in the Universe, most recently, the presence of the Higgs Boson. The article below describes all of this in relatively simple terms.
“A passionate advocate for the education of women and the poor, Agnesi believed that the natural sciences and math should play an important role in an educational curriculum. As a person of deep religious faith, however, she also believed that scientific and mathematical studies must be viewed in the larger context of God’s plan for creation.”
http://theconversation.com/maria-agnesi-the-greatest-female-mathematician-youve-never-heard-of-94378
The democratization of “science” and “information” by the Internet has enabled many strange things today, including acceptance of lines of thinking that one would have expected reasonable people to scoff at in the past, and events that some people would consider quite surprising during our times, such as the results of the US presidential elections in 2016.
Despite early claims, from as far back as HG Well’s “world brain” essays in 1936, that a worldwide shared resource of knowledge such as the internet would create peace, harmony and a common interpretation of reality, it appears that quite the opposite has happened. With the increased voice afforded by social media, knowledge has been increasingly decentralised, and competing narratives have emerged.
via I watched an entire Flat Earth Convention for my research – here’s what I learnt
Splattered Brains 