America's Science No Longer Underlies China's Tech
Chinese patents are mostly built on Chinese science rather than American science, according to a new working paper. Across every "critical technology area" shown, the U.S. share of…
Gold Medal mission
The four astronauts who flew on the Artemis II mission to the moon in April have been put forward for the Congressional Gold Medal. Sen. Mark Kelly (a former space shuttle commander) and Rep. Don…
Let’s go hunting for exocomets!
How do you find a comet orbiting a star dozens or hundreds of light-years away? Join us today, as we look into this very question and what we can learn from finding these tiny, distant objects.
The Dirt That Refused to Die
[They “tried to kill it harder with more radiation, pressure, and heat”.] I was surprised to find myself hooked into reading this article about dirt , but it happened. For 15 years, Sébastien…
Panel discussion on USA's deep space engg excellence
I thank the American Center for inviting me to a panel discussion on USA’s engineering excellence that has made the USA the leader in deep space exploration. While NASA had its origin in Aeronautics,…
Quote Of The Day
The sociology in the simulation community seems to be to assert complete success in explaining everything at all times until the next batch of simulations completes running, then point out all the…
What comes around, comes around
A lack of trained workers may be one of the biggest obstacles to adopting circular economy practices, according to a survey of more than 100 industry experts involved in sustainability initiatives…
WHAT REALLY KILLED THE DINOSAURS
For more than 160 million years, dinosaurs ruled the land. They survived volcanic winters, shifting continents, and dramatic climate swings. Then, almost suddenly—on a geological timescale—they were…
A Theoretically Innovative MOG Theory
Canadian physicist John Moffat's MOG modified gravity theory is a long standing tensor, vector, scalar modification of General Relativity (GR). As the link explains: Scalar–tensor–vector gravity…
Lesson plan to teach statistical literacy to elementary school students
Today, I'm taking a break from blogging about college teaching and sharing a mini-lesson I created for elementary school-aged students. I am sharing my activity here because I bet I'm not the only…
26.3 Ampère’s law
Ampère’s law considers the electric current, I, enclosed by a magnetic field, B, that forms a closed loop. In post 25.16, we saw how to calculate the magnetic field surrounding an electrical current…
pCO₂ Gap
The venous-to-arterial carbon dioxide difference (PCO₂ gap), defined as PcvCO₂ (taken from a central line blood gas) – PaCO₂ (taken from an arterial blood gas), answers a question that neither…
"Cosmos" by Carl Sagan
A classic non-fiction about science and humanity's journey towards being able to gather knowledge about outer space. Although plenty of new things have been added to this knowledge since its original…
Was El Niño mit der Hitzewelle zu tun hat
Erst einmal wenig, aber es wird wohl eine neue El-Niño-Saison kommen und die wird es nicht für uns (oder die Welt) erträglicher machen.
Super El Niño Is Now Breaking Into the Atmosphere as July Forecasts Show a Pattern Shift for the U.S. and Canada
A powerful Super El Niño is rapidly developing in the tropical Pacific, and the first clear atmospheric response is already showing up in the weather … The post Super El Niño Is Now Breaking…
Meteor Activity Outlook for 27 June – 3 July 2026
Meteor season finally gets going in July for the Northern Hemisphere. The first half of the month will be much like June with predominantly slow rates. After the 15th though, both sporadic and shower…
Reflecting to optimise
This is nothing to be proud of, but I have never really studied optimisation in depth. Oh sure, I know my Adam from my AdaGrad and I even used L-BFGS one time, but when people start talking about…
The Dottie Number
Once upon a time, goes the story, a lady named Dottie got bored and started playing with her calculator, pressing the cosine key over and over again. At first the numbers fluctuated wildly, but over…
Testability of the Claim That Cognitive Science Can Be Effectively Applied to Embodied Non-Neural Systems [Essay assignment]
I got the results for the two evening courses I took last term, with VG for both (i.e., I passed!)
IISW 2027 call for papers available, abstracts due Dec 10, 2026
Link: https://imagesensors.org/CFP2027/fcfp2027.pdf FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS ABSTRACTS DUE Dec 10, 2026 2027 International Image Sensor Workshop The Westin Resort & Spa, Whistler, BC, Canada June 13-17,…
I have data showing only autistic women are as competitive as men. No one would publish it.
I ran a study at Harvard. I had a real finding. It’s sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished, and the story of why is a better illustration of what’s wrong with research than the finding itself. But…
Thunderstorms and a Winter-Like System Approaches the Pacific Northwest
A wet, winter-like frontal system is now approaching the Northwest and will arrive on Friday, but before I discuss it, let's consider the substantial thunderstorm activity that struck the regional…
Integration, the key to computational thinking
Training in computational thinking can improve a student’s ability to tackle complex problems, according to research in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, which examined both…
Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (152637) 1997 NC1 close encounter: new image – 24 June 2026.
We present here our latest picture of Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (152637) 1997 NC1, now that it is almost at its minimum distance from us, having a spectacular and safe close approach with the…
Proof of the Sunflower Conjecture (4)
We are in Step 2 of our proof to construct some families of sequenced neighbor pairs. Links to: 6/18/26 for (2.x), 6/22/26 for (3.x). Figure: the three relations (4.7)-(4.9) to show (4.5) In my past…
The Zone
When you start thinking deeply about a mathematics problem you may enter the "zone", a period of intense focus where you think solely about the problem and potential solutions, and more importantly…
Thoughts on the heatwave
It's day 2 of the UK heatwave and I have a few issues on my mind that I need to discuss. In the run up to this I was monitoring the discourse online about it because I am a masochist who wants to…
The Dumbbell Nebula
Messier 27, also known as the Dumbbell Nebula, is one of the most striking planetary nebulae in the summer sky. It lies in the constellation Vulpecula...
E.coli Doesn't Like Diets Either, At Least Genomic Ones
Another interesting preprint that fits several recent themes - genome minimization, discontinuation of products - comes from a Japanese group that reports on significantly reducing the genome of…
Wallace the 6 inch f/2.8 telescope, building it, and hiking with it
Hiking with Wallace, my 6" f/2.8 corrected dobsonian.
Unnatural
Content warning: This poem is about the ongoing heat in Europe. I strike an optimistic tone toward the end, but if you would prefer not to read about the heat, I offer you one of the Scottish poems I…
Cultures of making and relating
Cultures of Programming - The Development of Programming Concepts and Methodologies is a recent book by Tomáš Petříček that analyses the history of programming from the perspective of five interwoven…
Unstable Future – Deranged Climate Now
So hot in Europe! June wildfires on Greenland. Antarctica above freezing even in the dark of winter. Hear new science of why and what next. Maybe the Gulf Stream/AMOC doesn’t stop. What does that…
Building the
Sometimes I get weird projects stuck in my head. I’ve always wanted to do a “quantum” hardware project; in my PhD and postdoc I’d messed about making fluorescent dyes and proteins that were…
Quantum Computers Are A Scam
Brief thoughts Quantum computers are the cold fusion of our lifetime: for the classes of problems they'd be good at they would be world-changing. Unfortunately they're mired in problems nobody wants…
The Intergalactic Fermi Problem
The headwaters of the Fermi Paradox channel directly through Michael Hart and Frank Tipler, and it’s a testament to the power of their arguments that this remains true today. It was Hart who in…
Is this for real?!
Is this for real?!Note: in hindsight, I feel like I was complaining too much here. I’ve collapsed some of the more negative sections, sorry for that. Note to self: don’t publish when…
Modular independence in determinantal processes
An observation due to Eric Kostlan states that for a large class of radial planar determinantal processes such as the spectrum of random normal matrices,…
I used sound waves to make espresso
Francisco Trujillo at The Conversation: We have developed what we call an ultrasonic espresso: a room-temperature brewing process that uses high-frequency sound waves to extract the flavour, oils,…
A data-driven normal for the Spain temperature chart
https://dominicroye.github.io/blog/spain-temperature-normals-openmeteo/ The author goes through his many choices for building the above chart, and gives the code and shows how they gathered the data…
Trump Can Cancel Wind Leases. He Can’t Cancel Physics.
This is really a posting about sea level rise. However, to segue into it I will open with some recent news from Trump’s war on renewable energy. To be specific, this news as reported by various…
Asteroid Day Italia 2026: 30 giugno 2026
L’iniziativa ufficiale per l’Italia per celebrare insieme l’Asteroid Day! Un’iniziativa per curiosi del cielo, singoli appassionati e associazioni culturali! Partecipate…
Schools are closed, records are broken. Let's talk heatwaves.
The data are clear — extremely hot days are on the rise.
The Brain Is Not a Neural Network: Computation Across Biology and Artificial Intelligence
A first-principles exploration of what separates biological neural computation from modern LLMs — and the decades of research that tried to close the gap.
In Conversation with Dr. Paul Bartha: Precautionary Reasoning and Analogical Reasoning
My interview with Dr. Paul Bartha on The Blue Hour is now available as a podcast. In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Paul Bartha, Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia,…
Announcement: CFP Synthese Topical Collection: Severity and Learning from Error
I hope that many readers of this blog will consider contributing to this! ANNOUNCEMENT SEV26 Synthese Topical Collection CFP: Severity and Learning from Error This Topical Collection examines how…
Dogs are experiments in applied genetics
You may recall our dog, Eleanor, a.k.a. the Dire Floof. She definitely has “domestication forehead“. Despite looking pretty darned wolf-y at times. I dearly love this dog, but I take one…
French Bakeries & Climate Change
The climate news is… bad. Very bad. As in: it looks like summer months in some heavily populated places are quickly approaching medically unsurvivable levels.