08 Mar 2007
Will Biology Solve the Universe?

This doesn't strike me as either new or original: his ideas seem to be little more than the anthropic principle on steroids.

Dr. Robert Lanza, famous for his stem cell and cloning research, has come up with some ideas he believes will lead to a unified theory of the universe. It's all in the biology, he says. Wired News interview by Aaron Rowe.

(link) [Wired News: Top Stories]

22:32 /Technology | 3 comments | permanent link

Saving Even More Daylight

Backwards ClockWell balanced article pointing out the ephemeral nature of the so-called "energy saving" engendered by this annual exercise in lunacy.

But since we're going to be going on it earlier this year, and staying earlier later (huh?), I've decided that I'd better get some more storage bins to save all that extra daylight in - maybe I'll just convert the hay mow above the main floor of the barn to a "daylight mow", and we can save it all in there...

Better double-check your appointment schedules this Sunday, March 11. That's when daylight saving time will start — three weeks earlier than usual — in most of the U.S. and Canada. In an attempt to save electricity, the U.S. Congress introduced a provision in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandating that clocks "spring forward" three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday in March, and "fall back" a week later, on the first Sunday in November. But the energy conservation that extra hour of sunlight is supposed to deliver comes with a cost: computer glitches that some fear could run to Y2K proportions. Companies with BlackBerrys and older computer applications must make manual adjustments or run software "patches" to revise internal clocks, often expensive endeavors.

(link) [Time]

07:21 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

The Fine Art of Dying Well

Wonderful essay - Charles Krauthammer hits this one out of the park.

We should all hope to die well. By that, I don't mean in the classic Greek sense of dying heroically, as in battle. I'm suggesting a much lower standard: just not dying badly. At a minimum, not dying comically—death by banana peel or pratfall or (my favorite, I confess) onstage, like the actor Harold Norman, killed in 1947 during an especially energetic sword fight in the last scene of Macbeth.

(link) [Time]

07:12 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link