Newmark's Door

GIGO

For my younger readers, GIGO is an acronym for something that has been true in the past, is true now, and will be true forever: "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Case in point: NOAA and NASA temperature data.

There was a major station dropout — and an increase in missing data from remaining stations — which occurred suddenly around 1990. Just about the time the global warming issue was being elevated to importance in political and environmental circles.

A clear bias was found towards removing higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations — the cooler stations — during this culling process, though that data was not also removed from the base periods from which “averages,” and then anomalies, were computed.

"The Scale of the Universe"

From the Planck length to the size of the whole universe (a whole lotta of yottameters).

The world is pretty strange

Oscar the cat, angel of death.

The scientist in Dr. David Dosa was skeptical when first told that Oscar, an aloof cat kept by a nursing home, regularly predicted patients' deaths by snuggling alongside them in their final hours.

Dosa's doubts eroded after he and his colleagues tallied about 50 correct calls made by Oscar over five years, a process he explains in a book released this week, "Making Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat." (Hyperion, $23.99)

Kieron Williamson "paints like an old master". He's all of seven years old.

Finally: quantum physics meets public policy . . .

. . . in this fine and entertaining post by Keith Hennessey, "Schrödinger's health care bill".

And here's the follow-up: "It's dead".

(He missed a fine opportunity to reference the redoubtable Bones McCoy--a doctor and this is health care, right?--with "It's dead, Jim". Oh, well.)

"Engage the x drive: Ten ways to traverse deep space"

"The technologies range widely in their plausibility. Some, we could more or less build tomorrow if we wanted to, while others may well be funamentally impossible."

Weird science

As Dana Carvey doing Johnny Carson might exclaim, "This is some weird, wacky stuff!"

"New Model of the Universe Says Past Crystallizes out of the Future".

"Mysterious "strange" stars may rival black holes for weirdness".

"Looking for Life in the Multiverse".

"Physicists Calculate Exact Number of Alternate Universes".

"Dark matter holds the key to the universe".

"Move over, Schrödinger's cat . . ."

More on the "new green nuke"

Needless to say, it would be quite cool if thorium reactors pan out.

When he took over as head of Oak Ridge in 1955, Alvin Weinberg realized that thorium by itself could start to solve these problems. It’s abundant — the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn’t require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind.

Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab’s finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.

"The Unbearable Complexity of Climate"

Questions of fraud or just bad faith aside, the climate controversy seems to be yet another battle in the endless conflict between theoreticians and empricists.

Yet another phenomenon that follows a power law

Insurgent wars.

A big collection of undergraduate and graduate texts and monographs, free, and legal

The math books are here. Many are dated recently. Few, if any, will be the commercial texts from big publishers used in popular courses, but there are many books that might well be helpful for such courses.

Also available are books on astronomy, biology, chemistry, computer science, earth science, engineering, medicine, and physics.