The dean of Australian aerospace journalists, Ben Sandilands, on Neil Armstrong’s death, here.
I was just about to turn 13 years old, on July 20, 1969 and I remember every bit of the landing and subsequent moon walk. To a kid growing up in the shadow of Caltech among the palm trees of Pasadena, it seemed then that the future was truly filled with wondrous possibilities.
Professor Armstrong passed away yesterday at the age of 82. There will never be another first man on the moon.
I thought the Guardian had the most interesting take on the verdict, here.
Tyler Cowen has a blog post about non-negligible chances for a major conflict in Asia as a result of China’s new geopolitical power here. Graham Allison has a similar take in his op ed piece from today’s FT, behind their firewall.
The really big questions are:
Is this risk being priced adequately into markets? Cowen thinks no.
Is such a conflict inevitable as the geopolitical power balance changes? Allison thinks no.
Influenced by these concerns are questions about what the future US Navy will look like. There seem to be two camps. One, the Area-Denialists, see the Super-carrier going the way of the battleship, as new Chinese anti-ship ballistic missile capabilities come on line. The other, let’s call them the Mahanists, see maintaining and modernizing the carrier fleet (11 of them!) as critical to maintaining world trade stability.
The new Ford class super-carriers cost $9B a piece.
And I’m not talking about the Mars Rover….
A great op-ed piece in the LA Times by Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail, here. Bottom-line, curiosity-driven basic research is an at-risk species and should be protected.
From this weekend’s Guardian, here.
Money quote:
But what really set the cat among the philosophical pigeons was one implication of Kuhn’s account of the process of paradigm change. He argued that competing paradigms are “incommensurable”: that is to say, there exists no objective way of assessing their relative merits. There’s no way, for example, that one could make a checklist comparing the merits of Newtonian mechanics (which applies to snooker balls and planets but not to anything that goes on inside the atom) and quantum mechanics (which deals with what happens at the sub-atomic level). But if rival paradigms are really incommensurable, then doesn’t that imply that scientific revolutions must be based – at least in part – on irrational grounds? In which case, are not the paradigm shifts that we celebrate as great intellectual breakthroughs merely the result of outbreaks of mob psychology?
The interview with Italy’s new science minister, Fracesco Profumo is at ScienceInsider, here.
The quote from his which best captures the essence of the problem (although not the way I suspect he intended) is here:
We contributed 15% to the cost of Framework Programme 7, the predecessor to Horizon 2020, but we received only 8.5% of the funding in return—in other words, we lost about €500 million per year. Those are worrisome data.
He then, to be sure, goes on to suggest that Italy needs to submit better proposals.
Enforcing social norms through enhanced citizen journalism, here.
Maria Konnikova on Scientific American’s Blog site, here.
Her thesis is that the tools of science–say statistics or small world network analysis–only detract and distract from our understanding of human artifacts like fiction. Perhaps so–certainly the meaning of Hamlet is not to be found in its word frequency histogram. And yet, without question, some human art forms like music are intensely mathematical and here, the meaning does have close relations with the underlying natural order of the thing.
First, we need to think about how an institute for advanced study fits into the current rapidly evolving American public university. Second, we need to engage far more actively with the private sector so that the resources for our research mission remain stable, even as Federal R&D decreases. Third, we need to tell our story more effectively and certainly more often. Finally, we need to think about how our education mission–at all levels from undergraduate to executive short courses–can take better advantage of technology to reach more learners.
The overarching theme for the Institute remains how human cognition emerges from the biological activity of brains, individually and played out across societies, all of them embedded in the larger biosphere.
The human talent for making Krasnow the special place it is, remains our greatest resource: faculty, students and staff alike.
Discoverers and Discoveries 