Back in January, I posted the announcement of Apple’s iPad tablet computer.  I’m personally really excited about it – don’t know if we’ll get one right away (it took us a couple of years before Stephanie and I both got our iPhones – which we love…).
However, this post is about the irony of Newsweek Magazine’s Senior Editor Daniel Lyons writing, within the course of two months, articles which seem to be covering their bets on whether the iPad will be a success or a failure.
The first article is titled “Why …

With the start of the 2010 Major League Baseball season upon us, MSNBC.com has an article about how the game of baseball has come to value statistics more and more over the years.
The trend toward utilizing relevant statistics started in the 1970’s with Bill James’ Baseball Abstract, and came to more widely accepted practice after Billy Beane, as General Manager of the Oakland A’s, used these statistical values to build a playoff team on the cheap.  Beane’s efforts, and how they’ve changed the landscape of modern baseball, was documented by author …

Element 112 has an official name – Copernicium – named after the 16th-century Polish scientist Nicholas Copernicus, who first theorized that the Earth revolved around the Sun.  Copernicium’s periodic element symbol is Cn.
While the name was announced some time back, it became official only recently.
Wonder how this would look in the periodic table of periodic tables?…
Read the Los Angeles Times article about Copernicium and the other most recently named elements here…

In a previous post, I mentioned that the Large Hadron Collider was starting their official research program, seeking to smash protons together in the 17-mile tunnel at energies of 7 trillion electron-volts (7 TeV).
Well, they did it!  The record was officially achieved today, breaking its previous record.
You can read more about the events at CERN here…

Discover Magazine has a really good article about some of today’s scientists that are trying to overthrow the conventional wisdom and find a more complete and accurate model for our universe.
Isaac Newton presented his theory of universal gravitation in 1687, and Albert Einstein overthrew that explanation with his theory of general relativity in 1915.  However, the efforts since Einstein, which include combinations of quantum mechanics and superstring theory, has left most of the scientific world wanting.
There is no doubt that quantum mechanics can predict much of the universe’s probabilistic weirdness.  However, string …

HBO is airing a docudrama they produced in conjunction with BBC on the pursuit for a new theory of gravity.  The movie “Einstein and Eddington” details (if not dramatizes a bit…) Albert Einstein’s efforts to come up with his theory of general relativity, and Arthur Eddington’s efforts to prove him right, all in the backdrop of World War I.
The tensions of the times (and within the movie) highlight that, with World War I pitting German and English armies against each other, Einstein was German-born and Eddington was English, so their …

Crazy cool stuff – a Yahoo! app called Predictalot lets you make any prediction you can think of, and it will calculate the odds of that prediction being true.  Predictalot is starting out with the NCAA tournament, where you can make predictions such as “Duke will finish better than Maryland” or “Each of the Final Four teams will begin with the letter U”
In calculating these odds, it evaluates all 9.2 quintillion possible outcomes – the combinatorial result of the 64 team, single elimination tournament. 
By the way, 9.2 quintillion = 9,200,000,000,000,000,000 …

Coolness (or just plain geekiness) abounds when scientific stuff is self-referencing…
Bill Keaggy (among many of his “visual indiscretions”) has a link that shows a periodic table of various websites that have different periodic tables!  Some are in the shape of galaxies, while other are periodic tables of cupcakes or candies…
Here’s the link.  Enjoy!…

It’s amazing sometimes how certain things come together, but I didn’t realize that I’d run across an article that was so true in so many ways.
In this week’s edition, Newsweek’s science editor Sharon Begley describes why scientists are their own worst enemies when it comes to communicating their ideas.  And, in my mind, the world is suffering as a result.
From evolutionary biology to climate change, scientists regularly lose the battle for the public’s attention to less correct, but more understandable alternatives.   Darwin presented the inarguable theories of evolutionary biology well over 100 …

March 30, 2010, marks the date on which the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will attempt to break its own record for achieving energies near what was present at the Big Bang.
Twin beams of protons, traveling with energies of 3.5 trillion electron-volts (TeV), will be directed at each other in the 17-mile round LHC, located underneath the French-Swiss border at CERN.  According to CERN, this will mark the beginning of LHC’s official research program.
I posted their original landmark test here, and you can read more about their upcoming tests here…