I just learned that the term for temporarily forgetting a word, the just-the-tip-of-your-tongue problem, is Lethologica.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Beijing air pollution
The air pollution is so bad that just breathing the air for a day is as bad a smoking 21 cigarettes. People are urged to wear surgical masks.
As for why it’s so bad, China uses coal for 70% of their energy. They have had (what we would consider) lax regulations on car and factory pollution. In the past 20 years, the middle class has boomed, and this resulted in many more cars.
Awesome Spirit
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This is school spirit week, and today is “come dressed as a celebrity” day. Very few students are dressing up, but one of my students is dressed as Susan B. Anthony, complete with a “Votes for Women” sash. Awesome.
Did you know
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Did you know that over 1% of man made power goes into synthesis of ammonia?
Happy Birthday Carl Sagan!
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Happy birthday to one of my heroes, Carl Sagan. He was a scientist who was a consummate educator.
In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,” and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
Keynote address at CSICOP conference (1987), as quoted in Do Science and the Bible Conflict? (2003) by Judson Poling, p. 30
The Fukushima disaster could have been averted, and was
Remember the earthquake that sent a tsunami which flooded the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant? Remember the flooding, and meltdown, and ongoing radiation leaks? Very dramatic, wasn’t it. What most people don’t know is that there was another nuclear reactor in Onagawa, closer to the epicenter than Fukushima, that didn’t have any problems, except some flooding in the basement.
It turns out that the designer of this plant, Yanosuke Hirai, wanted to make sure that the plant was protected. He wanted the plant to be built 50 feet above sea level, with a cooling system that would work even if the water receded. The original sea wall was supposed to be 10 feet (bureaucrats), and he wanted 49 feet. In a culture of conformity he managed to get the sea wall to 46 feet. The Fukushima sea wall could only protect against a 19 foot tsunami.
On 11 March 2011, the earthquake released a 43 foot tsunami. Hirai’s stopped it. His plant shut down cleanly, and was used as an evacuation center in Onagawa. Fukushima’s sea wall was overwhelmed and the plant is still releasing radiation.
Did you know
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Did you know that the largest contiguous ecosystem on Earth is the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre?
Big Data
90% of the data we have was generated in the last two years. I don’t know if this includes data from the NSA.
Happy Mole Day
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Hope everyone has a happy mole day. October 23rd is mole day because 1 mole is 6.022 × 1023 particles. 10/23, get it?
OK. Yes, it’s silly. But a mole is a huge number that is very important in chemistry.
… grading …
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All classes had either a test or a quiz today. It’s a pain to have to grade about 120 assessments. But it must be done, For Science!