Thanks to reader Reese, I learned that Ray Tomlinson had just died at the age of 74. Who was Tomlinson? He was the person who invented email. In 1971 he was working on ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, and fooling around trying to find more uses for it when he invented it.
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The discovery by the Hubble telescope of a galaxy that is 13.4 billion light years away is an exciting development. This is not only because it is further away than anything we have seen so far but also because it suggests that stars and galaxies were being formed at the very earliest stages of the universe, which is currently calculated as being 13.81 billion years old.
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I have been reading about the increased number of incidents in which pilots of planes report that they have been blinded by laser beams aimed at the cockpit from the ground. I was surprised by this since the lasers one uses in everyday life are quite low in power and it is not easy to aim them. But it turns out that these lasers, which can be easily purchased online, are more powerful than the ones used in meeting presentations and are getting even more powerful. Authorities are treating them as dangerous practices and urging a crackdown.
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I came across this interesting little math problem by Oliver Roeder that I thought I would pass on. I actually worked it out while I was waiting to board my plane on my return from California yesterday.
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It has been announced that scientists have detected gravitational waves for the first time, after a long and arduous search that rivaled the search for the Higgs boson in the difficulty involved even though it did not match it in costs. The announcement came in the form of a paper published yesterday in the journal Physical Review Letters, based on results obtained on September 14, 2015. You can read the paper here.
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In a moment of idle curiosity, I wondered what would happen if for some reason, human beings suddenly became extinct. Not a cheery thought but I was curious about how long it would be before all traces of our existence disappeared so that a new future intelligent species or maybe extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth would see no trace that intelligent life had ever existed because all the artifacts we created had simply decomposed away. It seems hard to imagine since humans have covered the Earth with our creations but surely all things must pass at some time?
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I had a distant uncle who said that he suffered from chronic insomnia. When I asked him once what he did all night, he said that he just lay in bed and let his thoughts wander and dozed off from time to time for very short periods. But this did not seem to cause him to be irritable or absent-minded or show any of the symptoms that the rest of us may display on those occasions when we have not slept well. He was as fully functional as anyone else.
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In the story about the high levels of lead in the Flint, MI water supply, the scientists who first produced the measurements that indicated that there was a serious problem were from Virginia Tech University. I was intrigued by the fact that people so far away had to be called in to reveal this problem but did not follow up on why this was so.
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