Friday, February 28, 2003
Instapundit asks
HEY, THERE'S AN ANTIPUNDIT: If the two of us ever met, would we cancel out? Or suffer mutual annihilation and explode?
according to my rusty memory to anhilate or "cancel out" some of your characteristics would have to be identical (like mass) and some would have to be equal and opposite (like electrical charge) ... so to it all depends on the color of your eyes ;-)
Of course, maybe just parts of you would cancel out .... it all depends on how you really behave under charge conjugation, parity, and time reversal. Fundumentally Feynman would suggest that as you go to shake hands, if one of you extends a right hand and another a left hand ... watch out!
Posted by E Moritz @ 10:24 PM CST [Link]
Monday, February 24, 2003
According to SCi-BYTES, these are some of the hottest papers in 2003 (AS OF 2/24/2003):
Agricultural Sciences: "Bioavailability of pure isoflavones in healthy humans and analysis of commercial soy isoflavone supplements," by Kenneth D.R. Setchell and 8 others, Journal of Nutrition, 131:1362S-75S, 4 April 2001. (29 citations since 9/2001)
Chemistry: "Nanobelts of semiconducting oxides," by Zheng Wei Pan, Zu Rong Dai, and Zhong Lin Wang, Science, 291(5510): 1947-9, 9 March 2001. (79 citations since 7/2001)
Psychiatry/Psychology: "Does fast dissociation from the dopamine D2 receptor explain the action of atypical antipsychotics?: A new hypothesis," by Shitij Kapur and Philip Seeman, American Journal of Psychiatry, 158(3): 360-9, March 2001. (46 citations since 9/2001)
Biology: "A toll-like receptor recognizes bacterial DNA," by Hiroaki Hemmi and 10 others, Nature, 408(6813): 740-5, 7 December 2000. (343 citations since 11/2001)
Medicine: "Comparison of upper gastrointestinal toxicity of rofecoxib and naproxen in patients with rheumatoid arthritis," by Claire Bombardier and 11 others, for the VIGOR study group, New England Journal of Medicine, 343(21): 1520-8, 23 November 2000. (302 citations since 11/2001)
Physics: "Boron isotope effect in superconducting MgB2," by S.L. Bud'ko and 5 others, Physical Review Letters, 86(9): 1877-80, 26 February 2001. (269 citations since 3/2001)
What do we learn from all of this? 1. Its fun to look at the hottest paper listings, 2. despite the scientific method and training ... empirical observations never use the same frame of reference ... (why the wild fluctuation in the start dates of citation analyses?) 3. If you wrote about 'Nanobelt Boron receptors in antipsychotic superconducting bacterial DNA' you might have everyone's attention. Well ... maybe ....
Posted by E Moritz @ 09:53 PM CST [Link]
According to SCI-BYTES, the United States Keeps doing it again ... In the category of "top ten nations ranked according to output of published journal articles in 22 main fields of science" ....for the period 1992-2002 ...
1 United States 2,702,477
2 Japan 697,468
3 Germany 641,695
4 England 589,894
5 France 475,536
6 Canada 357,199
7 Italy 299,843
8 Russia 264,062
9 Peoples Rep. China 206,698
10 Australia 205,441
this is pretty good ... in absolute terms .... Now David Letterman can have yet another top ten list ... but, wait a sec ... how do we stack up per capita or per Trillions of GDP? Well, at least someone is keeping track ... but what about the trends? are we getting better?
Posted by E Moritz @ 09:22 PM CST [Link]
Of course there's more Buffy starting with the Complete First Season , Second Season and the coming Complete Fourth Season . Believe it or not Mr Ripley ... Buffy is slaying the home blix office! That's Box Office ...
Posted by E Moritz @ 07:07 PM CST [Link]
 | Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The Complete Third Season (DVD; Sarah Michelle Gellar) |
Is Free Speech awesome ... or what?
But Speech in the United Nation can't afford to be free ... somewhere in the deliberations of the current crisis, those who prefer speech to action must somehow be held accountable for preventing action. Perhaps those who prefer non-action should be required to post a "bail bond".
I wonder how eagerly the speech only crowd would act if they had to compensate for victims that would be directly attributable to their non-action. Just a thought ...
Posted by E Moritz @ 06:35 PM CST [Link]
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
Reading Republic.com by Cass Sunstein. Sunstein brings out the "astonishing finding by the economist Amartya Sen that in the history of the world, there has never been a famine in a system with a democratic press and free elections."
[see
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation by Amartya Sen]. Interesting! Are there other correlations like these?
Posted by E Moritz @ 08:15 PM CST [Link]
Sunday, February 9, 2003
Look at "The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century" by Johns Hopkins' foreign policy professor (Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the School of Advanced International Studies) Michael Mandelbaum. "addresses the three fundamental concepts of liberalism as defined by Woodrow Wilson" ... "One of America's leading foreign policy thinkers outlines the new power realities in the world today, and the challenges facing American leadership--his magnum opus and a major new statement in the mold of Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Paul Kennedy, and Jacques Barzun."
