My preliminary idea paper was accepted. The is the equivalent, for a track and field athlete, of passing the drug test. Now the hard part starts.

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Today I updated my database to MySQL 5, updated WordPress to 3.1, and fixed the pesky mis-rendering of emphasis tags (<em> … </em>) by the Talian theme this site uses. The fix for the style.css file is adding the following to style.css for the theme: i,em { display: inline !important; } (thanks to chaoskaiser for [...]

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I read today that the Dalai Lama’s nephew, Jigme Norbu, was struck and killed by a driver in Florida. (My sincere condolences to the family.) He was from Bloomington, IN, where his late father, the Dalai Lama’s brother, Thubten Norbuhold, had been a professor. In the early 1980s, a friend of mine had met the [...]

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A friend and professor is confident her granddaughters are able to multitask without any significant negative impact on their performance. She observes them using the computer and cell phone while doing homework and listening to music or watching television. They are star students in demanding schools. I told her I have my doubts. I suspect [...]

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This article provides examples of an engineering concept regarding what makes systems (engineered or natural) either robust or failure prone. The latter are characterized by lack of redundancy, interconnectedness, efficiency, and sensitivity to stress. Together, these characteristics amplify the effects of exponentially increasing strain prior to system collapse. Cascading effects follow from the lack of [...]

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Scientists propose a new framework for understanding when and how the results of our activities are bringing any of the nine most critical Earth processes close to thresholds beyond which irreversible, catastrophic global destabilization will occur. Some sort of rational, structured approach seems necessary for organizing resources to investigate the areas of greatest global survival [...]

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Our view on the morning of 7 September. The Albuquerque vicinity has many great hiking, mountain biking, and horseback riding trails.

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Yesterday my wife and I braved the heat and sun to stand in line for over an hour for a chance to participate in Congressman Martin Heinrich’s town hall. The line outside the University of New Mexico Continuing Education Center snaked around and around the parking lot. We frequently heard perplexed voices asking, “Where is [...]

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It seems that poverty and the endless ills that accompany being poor are passed from generation to generation. The Economist reports on research that further confirms the brain science behind apparently inherited lack of resourcefulness. The bottom line is that growing up in resource deprived circumstances creates persistent stressors. Stress provokes natural physiochemical responses that, [...]

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Participate in Earth Hour, Saturday March 28, 2009, 8:30 to 9:30 pm, your local time. Be a part of something BIG. Technorati Tags: earth hour, social action

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