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American Innovation and Pellet Power

Like I said in an earlier post, I thought this week’s Newsweek had a lot of great stuff…  Here are two articles with a scientific bent that I thought were neat.  The first article is by Fareed Zakaria, who asks Is America Losing Its Mojo?  Zakaria points to three tidals waves of innovation that made

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The Other Half of Your Brain

I’m huge on doing better with our math and science education.  But Alan Brinkley talks about not leaving the humanities behind as we do it (probably a good thing…) His article is titled Half A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste…

To the Amateur Scientist in Us

This is a great post by Seth Godin (and in many ways, what I like to point out with my blog posts…).  Seth is a king of marketing, but here, he points out how many people make bad decisions because they don’t really use any real scientific reasoning to get to a good answer… And

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Apple and 1984 all over again?…

Could Apple’s iPhone fall to the same fate as Apple’s Macintosh? In Newsweek, Daniel Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) poses that question in his article Back to the Future.  He notes that in 1984, Apple sprinted far ahead of the IBM PC makers with the Mac and its fantastic graphical user interface or GUI (you

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Odd Stats on Sarah Palin

This week’s Newsweek had a lot of interesting things that piqued my interest – here’s one regarding Sarah Palin… In Jon Meacham’s article, he talks about Why Palin Matters to Obama – And To You.  Certainly Palin is a polarizing figure – there are a lot of people who love her and a lot of

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The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

Voltaire in his Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) said, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien“, literally translated as “The best is the enemy of good.”  (bet you didn’t think I knew French, huh?…)  It has been modified over the years to refer to “the perfect”, but it long ago captured a consistent logical reality that challenges us all,

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“Unfriend”…

…is the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2009 Word of the Year.   The term “unfriend”, a verb, means to remove someone as a friend on a social networking Web site such as Facebook.  (read more here…) Oxford lexicographer Christine Lindberg says unfriend has “real lex appeal.”  (ugh….  there is no such thing as a good pun…) Admittedly,

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Dinosaurs Aren’t Extinct

60 Minutes has a fascinating piece this past Sunday on paleontologist and Montana State University professor Jack Horner.  He is your classic scientific rebel – doing things that confound the scientific establishment… and coming up with amazing and new findings as he does it… So basically, even though we know the story about how a

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“The Moon Is Alive”

In today’s Los Angeles Times, John Johnson Jr. reports the latest from NASA’s “moon crater creator” mission.  Of course, the goal of the $79 million Lunar Crater Obsevation and Sensing Satellite mission isn’t merely to see if we can hit the moon with a rocket – it’s intended to impact the moon so that we can

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Wolfram|Alpha Links With Bing

I ran across a post by Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch about Microsoft’s Bing search engine licensing search data from Wolfram|Alpha.  Might not be much of a big deal, but I think the Wolfram|Alpha concept is pretty cool…  While Google and Bing provide you websites that have the search phrase that you are looking for, Wolfram|Alpha takes your search

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