News
"The undergraduate effect and the gravity wells of knowledge"
By Rob Winters - Published on Saturday, 07 May 2011 07:27
"As usual, Randall Munroe nails it (although if I were playing with that metaphor, I’d say that density distorts the sheet). But I like metaphors, because unfortunately I have the mathematical ability and skills of a drunken frog. So I am going to use a metaphor as a metaphor, if you can follow me.It is about specialisation in science. Scientists know various information to different degrees of sophistication and exactness. Often you will find scientists defending definitions like what a species is, when they have not done any work on species themselves, simply because they learned a particular definition as undergraduates, or because their advisor had and passed it onto them. The real knowledge about which they are competent to speak are the matters they do their research on, and which they have read, absorbed and critically thought about the literature of others in the subsubfield in which their doctorate or research grants are pursued."
Read more: http://evolvingthoughts.net/2011/05/the-undergraduate-effect-and-the-gravity-wells-of-knowledge/
"Remaking Stephen Harper in Canada’s image"
By Rob Winters - Published on Saturday, 07 May 2011 06:56
"So much for the honeymoon. The morning after the election, a reporter asked Stephen Harper whether he would push forward with a hard-right “radical agenda” now that he had a majority government. The Prime Minister shrugged.
“One thing I've learned in this business is that surprises are generally not well received by the public,” he replied. But there's another thing he has learned.
Mr. Harper has become a successful Prime Minister not by dragging Canada to the right, as so many critics allege. He succeeded because he understood the Canada that is becoming, and shaped his party and policies to fit. He saw the Canada that his opponents couldn't see."
"Math genius Grigori Perelman turned down $1 million"
By Rob Winters - Published on Friday, 06 May 2011 18:38
"He does it for the math, not the money.Besides, he "can control the universe." Money isn't relevant.
Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman solved the seemingly unsolvable Poincaré conjecture, a 100-year-old problem to prove that any shape without a hole can be formed into a sphere.
The problem was one of the seven listed on Cambridge, Massachusetts' Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Prize list"
"The wandering eye and affairs"
By Rob Winters - Published on Friday, 06 May 2011 07:42
"Making the rounds this week is a new study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, that suggests, among other things, that a person would be wise to let their partner’s wandering eye continue to wander, rather than attempt to correct the impulse or accuse him or her of ogling—confirming a widely held precept that people most want what they can’t have. In a series of experiments, college students who reported to be in serious relationships or dating were shown a slide show of faces—generally judged as either attractive or average—and then asked questions to investigate memory, enthusiasm about their current relationships, and their seriousness about fidelity. To summarize (broadly): the subjects who had the number of attractive faces they could view limited by the researchers were more likely to remember the attractive ones, were less enthusiastic about their current partner, and more open to pursuing affairs."
"N.Y. Man Makes $120G Selling 'Usama's Dead' T-shirts"
By Rob Winters - Published on Friday, 06 May 2011 07:36
"NEW YORK -- A quick-thinking New Yorker who started selling T-shirts celebrating Usama bin Laden's death made $120,000 in less than two days, TMZ reported Friday.
Maurice Harary, 23, went straight to his New York apartment when he heard Sunday that bin Laden was killed by US forces in a precision raid in Pakistan. He immediately began building a website to sell his "bin Laden is dead" T-shirts.
Harary claimed that his site went live at 3:30am local time Monday and sold 10,000 T-shirts at $12 each by Tuesday night.
The sales added up to $120,000 in less than two days as Americans expressed their relief that the man who masterminded the 9/11 bombings was dead."
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/05/06/ny-man-makes-120k-selling-usamas-dead-t-shirts/?test=latestnews
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