Editorials of a Scientist Political
Just a quick posting of a wonderful rock formation in Yellowstone National Park. Note the two layers of columnar lava rock. Recall the Devil s Causeway in Northern Ireland or Devil s Tower a couple of hundred miles to the east of Yellowstone in Wyoming. That Devil was a hard working demon. Slow solidification and shrinkage of [ ]
In researching a newspaper article on the expansive clay bentonite, I m reminded of the rich geochemistry and mineralogy of silicates and aluminates. A visit to the Wikipedia page for silicates reveals a taste of the variety of silicate structures. The clays under discussion here are of the sheet silicates also characterized as phyllosilicates. When the [ ]
Over the decades I ve listened patiently to conservatives, especially the elected GOP types, spout off about liberal proposals or programs as being socialism. The very word carries a strong revulsion in them, enough to cause right wingers and even some centrists to recoil in horror. In common usage, the word is almost spat out of [ ]
Being retired and an avid YouTube viewer I recently blundered into a group of videos presenting supercomputer simulations of tornado formation and evolution. The work is done by Dr Leigh Orf and coworkers. In an article titled A Violently Tornadic Supercell Thunderstorm Simulation Spanning a Quarter-Trillion Grid Volumes: Computational Challenges, I/O Framework, and Visualizations of [ ]
An actual lamentation. A pet peeve of mine is the wanton and extravagant overuse of the word massive. It seems to me that the word should be limited to physical things that have mass or weight. We can all agree that Mt. Everest or an asteroid is massive, you know, dense and heavy. But what [ ]
Search results from Googling $350 billion attack on communism - House Speaker Mike Johnson is pushing for an additional $350 billion in military spending for the Pentagon, on top of an already approved record-breaking $1.1 trillion defense budget. Speaker Johnson explicitly stated that a portion of these funds is needed for fighting communism on our own [ ]
Noisy idiots have been a problem throughout history. What to do with precocious citizens with half-baked yet strangely appealing ideas? The notion that jobs are being taken by immigrants is an enduring and popular fancy. Another is that the federal government is merely a front for a squad of hidden mandarins quietly controlling the government [ ]
In preparation for a dental implant I took a ride in a Cone Beam Computed Tomography, CBCT, x-ray scanner with my Geiger counter. I did the scan with a small Geiger counter hidden in my pants pocket. Why hidden you ask? Because I didn t want to spook the dental assistant and dentist into paroxysms of [ ]
I started to post the content below on Facebook but somehow the old saying about casting your pearls before the swine began to echo inside my pointed head. My Facebook friends aren t swine obviously -I love all of them- but it is a limited distribution. The same class of business geniuses who off-shored American manufacturing [ ]
Sphincters are beginning to loosen in LA with the MMA fiasco tapering into a more banal conclusion. Here MMA does not refer to Mixed Martial Arts. It is the abbreviation for methyl methacrylate, a reactive monomer for the production of PMMA, poly[methyl methacrylate], often called acrylic or Plexiglass. Plexiglass is a generic name like Xerox [ ]