If you’re sad about the administration’s desire to scrap our return to the moon, you might want to be at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Centerin Concord later this month for International Observe the Moon Night, a NASA-sponsored lunar lovefest.
Harlan Spence, lunar specialist and director of Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and [...]

When I was a kid, newly involved in the Boy Scouts, the emphasis was on acquiring skills that might lead to a badge. As part of the process, we were invited to attend an exposition where we all showed off our skills. My contribution was a stamp collection which got all the attention it deserved.  
Part [...]

It’s hard to pinpoint cause and effect when it comes to short-term demographic changes, but as this Washington Post item (read it here) notes, there is serious speculation that a two-year drop in America’s birth rate has been caused by the recession:
That drop prompted speculation that the fall was the result of the recession–a notion [...]

I had a speck of wood chip in my eye this morning. I went to the emergency center in Milford to have it taken care of. In the process of checking in, they measured my blood pressure and as usual, it read 100/70. I’m usually on the low side, so nothing to take notice of.
I then [...]

We’re all familiar with the debate in the White Mountains about charging for rescues (this is the famous case) partly because cell phones have given people a false sense of security in the wild. The NY Times has a story about how this is a problem in all National Parks, to the point where “Inattention [...]

He’s been dead 2 1/2 years, but Bobby Fischer still generates the most interesting stories in chess: His body was recently exhumed in Iceland so DNA samples could be taken to settle a long-running paternity claim. That’s certainly more exciting than lawsuits over who gets to head the World Chess Federation.
The NY Times says that [...]

My column in the Telegraph today asks the question “Whatever happened to West Nile Virus?” The answer is: Nobody’s quite sure, but it’s an interesting question, as these charts show:
The sharp rise and mysterious decline of West Nile Virus can be seen both nationally and locally.
Human cases and fatalities caused by WNV in the [...]

I’ve been sidelined by a bad back and won’t be posting on this blog for a couple days.

A few TV stations and papers reported today that President Obama’s youngest daughter is attending a summer camp in New Hampshire, with articles that included the name and location of the camp. All those articles have been pulled from the various Web sites as of today, as shown here from the Union-Leader site. I assume [...]

PHD Comics is a long-running Web comic built around graduate students. I’ve never been one myself, but it sure rings true.
You don’t have to be a grad student struggling to finish a thesis to enjoy today’s comic which presents a wonderful general-relativity-like, diagrammatic explanation of why it’s so hard to finish a project: It’s a [...]

The Globe has a story today (read it here) about a psychologist in the Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Harvard who is “on leave” because of questions about scientific misconduct, in particular related to this interesting paper:
The paper tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys’ ability to learn generalized patterns, an ability that human infants had been [...]

At exactly 6 minutes and 7 seconds after 5 o’clock on August 9 of 2010, it was ….
(and in military time, at 13 seconds after 3:14 p.m. on Dec. 11, it will be 15:14:13 12/11/10)

What’s the allure of sundials? “their mathematics, the artistic aspect, the history or the mottoes.”
That’s the conclusion from a light but enjoyable story in the Burlington Free Press (read it here) about the annual convention of the North American Sundial Society, meeting in Burlington.
>As a demonstration of how sundials are more than fancy garden [...]

Where I grew on the coast of Maine, the people weren’t noted for their technical expertise. When the first televisions came to Searsport, people erected huge antennas aimed at the Boston stations, primarily to see the Red Sox games. The pictures were pretty snowy of course. Sometimes though it was good enough so you could [...]

http://www.physorg.com/news199362347.html
Last winter’s weather around the North America was unusual for the cold that rolled down the east coast, heavy snows in the midwest, little snow for the winter olympics and I saw actual snow in Florida. This article is a pretty good description of the oscillating patterns that come out of the Pacific.
Looking back is [...]