Steve Ersinghaus

Jacques Distler has numbers on political parties and fiscal reality.

Lots of writing on the subject of William F. Buckley Jr. As you’d expect.
My first encounter came with Firing Line with Buckley and then Kinsley as moderator later.
Then we went to Crossfire and then to Asshead and Shitmouth. Talk show evolution.

Chris Mooney on connections:
If science today isn’t learning much from the humanities, neither is it learning enough from those with expertise in politics or in communication. And it shows. Consider the experience of American science in the 2000s. Despite producing more Ph.D.s than ever—with 29,854 in 2006 representing an all-time high according to the National [...]

Jesse Abbot kicks off the first of a three part series of talks in the history and philosophy of math and science with Peter Skiff of Bard College. Meet us just off from the Cyber Cafe at 1PM tomorrow at the college.
This should be a wonderful kick-off to an interesting series of events that [...]

I find this article at Real Climate very interesting, a nice peekhole into potential disaster:
One also has to wonder whether the international treaties and organizations needed to agree on and execute a geoengineering scheme are significantly easier to realize than the agreements needed to decarbonize the energy future, which would offer safer and more durable [...]

Here’s to Al Gore and the Peace prize.
Cheers.

For me, the dancer is spinning clockwise.
Via Mark Bernstein, who has side by sides, which sometimes provides a peripheral shift, meaning that you may be able to adjust the spin direction of the figure. In the side by side, if I glance back and forth and hold, the figure will go counterclockwise. Come back and [...]

Chris Mooney asks some good questions
As a prerequisite, the next president must grasp how science flows into a democracy at all levels. Whoever wins the election—man or woman, Democrat or Republican—will face profound science-based challenges and questions. Will space become militarized, or remain a neutral zone of unfettered international access? Will we successfully protect our [...]

An interesting link to a pdf article by Olle Häggström via The Panda’s Thumb. Scroll down to Uniform distribution is a model assumption with link-back to more context. Note that you have to read the whole paper and the context to grab the gist.

This is wonderful stuff. Susan Gibb on the dangers of do-it-yourself:
The grapes are in full galloping fermentation and while I’ve been elbow deep in it popping the grapes to get that done quickly, it keeps threatening to overflow its container and I’m afraid that it just might tonight. At midnight. Seep over [...]

From Sharpebrains’ interview with Daniel Gopher via A Blog Around the Clock
What research over the last 15-20 years has shown is that cognition, or what we call thinking and performance, is really a set of skills that we can train systematically. And that computer-based cognitive trainers or “cognitive simulations” are the most effective and efficient [...]

Martin Rundkvist reports on medieval kilns
The site is on land belonging to Boo manor, right by a heavily trafficked Medieval shipping thoroughfare toward Stockholm, where there was great demand for bricks from about 1250 onward. I guess that would be the lower limit of the kilns’ possible dates. There must have been many buildings at [...]

These days it seems that politicians must choose a narrative and stick to it. I don’t think they want to do this, but, then again, they may. Here’s Sam Brownbeck explaining himself
The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any [...]

After making sure the owners could not influence their pets’ behavior, researchers tested three groups of dogs. The first 14, representing a variety of breeds, did not watch Guinness. When taught how to use the rod, about 85 percent pushed it with their mouth, confirming that is how dogs naturally like to do things.
The second [...]

These new discoveries are driving me crazy. We can’t get there, can’t see them. They tease from a distance, mock from their ambiguous now and notness.