On December 26, 2016, Vera Rubin died at the age of 88. She is the scientist whose team made observations of anomalous stellar velocities in the spiral arms of galaxies that provided a great impetus to the dark matter hypothesis.
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The daily reports of murders are bad enough but I think that people are struck with a particular horror when they read of parents killing their own children, especially when the children are young, before killing themselves. It has the effect of infuriating me and making me wonder why, if they think that their lives are so bad, such people not simply kill themselves without taking innocent children with them. Of course, people who commit such horrendous acts are clearly in a highly disturbed state of mind and are not thinking rationally in the first place so we should not expect them to think like others would. But still, there must be some reason that drives them to do something so awful.
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If there is one thing that people should know does not work, it is prayer. Religious people pray for things all the time and they almost never get what they ask for. Even members of Congress hold prayer sessions to drive Satan out of power in the Capitol, though the best way to have that prayer answered would be if they just left the building instead.
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According to this report in Bloomberg News, solar-energy is now becoming the cheapest form of new energy.
A transformation is happening in global energy markets that’s worth noting as 2016 comes to an end: Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity.
This has happened in isolated projects in the past: an especially competitive auction in the Middle East, for example, resulting in record-cheap solar costs. But now unsubsidized solar is beginning to outcompete coal and natural gas on a larger scale, and notably, new solar projects in emerging markets are costing less to build than wind projects, according to fresh data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
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The book with the above tentative title that I have been working hard on for the past year is finally done! Well, not really. As has been said, “A book is never finished, it is merely abandoned by its author.” No book (or article or painting or any other form of free composition) is ever really completed because one can always keep refining it, seeking to make it better. On each review, I find things I want to change and it is only when I find that I am changing the same things back and forth that I realize that it is time to end the process.
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There was an interesting discussion in the comments about my dismissal as an ‘absurd’ claim the story that Hillary Clinton and key members of her Democratic party campaign were running some sort of child prostitution and sex trafficking ring out of a pizza shop, triggered by one commenter suggesting that I was dismissing the charge because I “liked” her, a claim that will cause some raised eyebrows among regular readers, some of whom have vigorously defended her from my attacks on her history and her qualities to be a president.
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The drug problem in the US has historically focused on marijuana and heroin and the like and it is relatively recently that people have realized the extent of other dependencies such as on pain-killers. The New York Times has a long article by a young, ambitious, hard-striving woman who attended an elite college about how she got hooked on a commonly prescribed prescription for Adderall, a drug that started out being used to treat ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) for young children but now has become used by many adults to power their way through the day. About 16 million prescriptions were written in 2012 for adults between the ages of 20 and 39 and very little known about the long term effects of its use.
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A new paper by João Magueijo and Niayesh Afshordi has been published that suggests that the speed of light has not had the same value over the age of the universe but instead could have been much higher, even infinite, at the very beginning of the universe when the cosmic temperature was extremely high. (You can see the paper without a journal subscription here.) Their suggestion is made in response to the well-known problem that the universe seems to be remarkably homogenous and isotropic over its entire size. This suggests that all the parts of the universe were in contact at one time in order for that kind of equilibrium to be reached. The problem is that the fastest communication possible is with light and that speed is not sufficient to create that kind of homogeneity.
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The idea that criminality is not contingent on external factors like need and opportunity but that some people are intrinsically prone to be criminals based on their biology has been around for a long time and led to efforts to create all manner of metrics to determine those markers. Sam Biddle writes about a troubling new study that claims that artificial intelligence (AI) software can tell whether you will be a criminal based on your facial features alone.
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We already knew that people had the ability to convincingly alter photographs and video to get almost any effect they wanted. The software has become so easy to use that almost anyone who wants to can do so. Now Marcus Ranum links to an amazing video showing new audio technology that enables people to easily do the same thing to audio, so that using just a small sample of someone’s voice, it can make it look as if that person is saying something that they never did.