American is gone, but Hillary! (and Bill) will bring it back. Can’t wait.
[Update a minute later]
I loved this comment:
Maybe she means the American people will get their silverware back.
Well, You Can’t Say They’re Overrated Now
When was the last time that Michigan wasn’t ranked in the top twenty-five in football? I guess the question is now, how many teams do they have to beat to get ranked again? If they go undefeated through the Wisconsin game, that seems like it should be enough. In fact, assuming that Wisconsin is undefeated at the time, it should put them back in the top ten, and Saturday’s game will be viewed as a fluke. That is one advantage of an early loss. But that loss will haunt them all the way through the end of the season, in terms of what bowl they go to, even if they’re undefeated from here on out. Not that I expect that, of course.
Well, You Can’t Say They’re Overrated Now
When was the last time that Michigan wasn’t ranked in the top twenty-five in football? I guess the question is now, how many teams do they have to beat to get ranked again? If they go undefeated through the Wisconsin game, that seems like it should be enough. In fact, assuming that Wisconsin is undefeated at the time, it should put them back in the top ten, and Saturday’s game will be viewed as a fluke. That is one advantage of an early loss. But that loss will haunt them all the way through the end of the season, in terms of what bowl they go to, even if they’re undefeated from here on out. Not that I expect that, of course.
Well, You Can’t Say They’re Overrated Now
When was the last time that Michigan wasn’t ranked in the top twenty-five in football? I guess the question is now, how many teams do they have to beat to get ranked again? If they go undefeated through the Wisconsin game, that seems like it should be enough. In fact, assuming that Wisconsin is undefeated at the time, it should put them back in the top ten, and Saturday’s game will be viewed as a fluke. That is one advantage of an early loss. But that loss will haunt them all the way through the end of the season, in terms of what bowl they go to, even if they’re undefeated from here on out. Not that I expect that, of course.
A Free Man
Keith Henson survived his stint in jail in Riverside. I’m reliably informed that he’s been released. Hopefully, other than a restrictive probation period, the long nightmare is over for him.
More background here.
Dr. Strangelove Redux?
Did the Soviets build a doomsday machine that’s still operational?
Blair is not a wild-eyed Cassandra raising unsupported suspicions. Colleagues in his field regard him as a serious and cautious scholar raising real questions. Stephen M. Meyer, an expert ohttp://www.slate.com/id/2173108n the Russian military at MIT, told the Times that Blair “requires of himself a much higher standard of evidence than many people in the intelligence community.”
Blair’s troubling papers, along with his book The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, serve as a reminder that the illogic, irrationalities, and vulnerability to catastrophic error of our Cold War nuclear war command and control mechanisms were never resolved or fixed, just forgotten when the Cold War ended. His analysis suggests that during the Cold War, we may have escaped an accidental nuclear war by luck rather than policy.
Sleep tight…
[Update on Thursday morning]
Alan K. Henderson is having a flashback. Errrr…make that flashforward.
The Next Fifty Years In Space
You’re going to see a lot of these kinds of pieces as we come up on the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik, now only one month away. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ll probably come up with a version of my own in the next few weeks.
Sharper Pictures Than Hubble Can Take
One of the problems with proposals for space applications is that it turns out that many of them can be done without leaving the planet. But I suspect that the far side of the moon will still always be better for radio astronomy than earth-based telescopes.
Darwin Nominee
Here’s what happens when you make a spud gun with black powder as a propellant. Don’t try this at home, or anywhere else, kids.
The End Of The Silicon Age
Is drawing near:
Researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California developed a technique for measuring magnetic anisotropy, a property of the magnetic field that gives it the ability to maintain a particular direction. Being able to measure magnetic anisotropy at the atomic level is a crucial step toward the magnet representing the ones or the zeroes used to store data in binary computer language.
In a second report, researchers at IBM’s lab in Zurich, Switzerland, said they had used an individual molecule as an electric switch that could potentially replace the transistors used in modern chips. The company published both research reports in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.
Wonder what the implications of this technology are for Moore’s Law?
[Update a few minutes later]
Howard Lovy (who is back to blogging on nanotech again) has some thoughts on the paucity of imagination in reporting these things.