Search results

I read the book - loved it - and saw the movie too - meh. But just because I did not like the movie does not mean it is a bad movie. (I do not like chocolates but plenty of people like it). Liking any movie depends on a large part on personal preferences. I think the reason I did not like the...

And while we are at it... http://www.universetoday.com/92547/tatooine-the-sequel-kepler-finds-two-more-exoplanets-orbiting-binary-stars/

To me the fact that there are at least as many planets as stars (and most probably many more planets than stars) always looked more logical. Because (a) It is easier to form a smaller body than a larger body. There are more red dwarfs than there are medium stellar mass stars. There are more...

Touché. Oh don't get me started on that! :) I could go on for hours on that topic (being a sci-fi fan for the last few decades who dreamed about post-scarcity economics). It has happened to a large extent too. Today the average person leads a richer life working for fewer hours than was...

Actually, that is not entirely correct either, is it? It was 8.6% last month and this month it is 8.5%. So is that .1 % decrease in unemployment because we have more jobs or less people looking for jobs? The former would be good, the latter would be bad. In fact unemployment rate could have...

For a statistician who knows the correlation between U3 and U6 what you say is correct. However, to a layman like me U6 conveys the depth of the problem better than U3. In any case IMHO all these U rates are suspect because they do not include many people who have completely dropped out of...

Yup!. It is good to be back! :)

@winner: I share your frustration with our political class. Perhaps that is the subject of another post.

Well... It depends a lot on how you define space program. By sheer numbers we have more probes out today from more countries than ever before. Just check the total number of science missions from NASA http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html. Add to that missions from other countries...

In the unlikely but possible scenario when the garbage had not been picked up for weeks, when there has been no electricity for weeks and all the food in the refrigerator is spoiled and long gone, when there has been no internet and cell phone and no cfc, no running water, when you are raiding...

While that is true of some desirable technologies (fusion, general AI, levitating cars and warp drives are few that come to mind) in reality our predictions of future technological progress are usually ridiculously conservative. Think electronics and communications, genetics, astronomy or even...

And now we are in Jan 2012. A reply after one year. I am still here. :)

I am reading an interesting book on astrobiology that provides a very good overview of our current state of knowledge regarding "aliens" and thought I should share it. Like most good books it is a bit expensive, but you can probably get it in the local library (or if you hunt hard enough get it...

When you know the universal requirements that make a good father, let me know. I could use all the wisdom I can get while trying to raise my two year old. :)

Sure it is a hard problem; I meant it was easy relative to all the other problems that we are facing globally. (Almost all other global problems that we face are harder be they about environment or political). The reason I say it is easier are the following :- We already know the solution...

As El machinae said, yes it is possible to eliminate extreme poverty and it is not that hard a global problem too (relative to the numerous more knotty ones that face us). If you are really intrested in knowing more about this subject spend $11 and get this book by Jeffrey Sachs who has...

It is not much fun, because it is not terribly difficult at all. Since nowadays I have more time to myself than before I attempted this Sudoku thing. Wrote the program in .NET (the zip attached is the Visual Studio solution of the program with full source that you can build). I tested it...

The above sentence does not seem to make any sense to me. What is "cooling rate"? A semantic translation would be rate of temperature decrease -dT/dt. But then the statement is a contradiction. "as any real object gets hotter" (so we are assuming a +ve dT/dt) we have a cooling rate which is -dT/dt?

Not quite. Saving your money is maybe good for some economy even if it is spent and invested wisely; not necessarily your economy. e.g. say you are a Chinese citizen. You save your money and put it in a national bank. The government takes that money and invests it in US T-bills (the best...

[off topic] Thx. Nice to see that nothing much has changed on CFC during the time I was gone. We still have a global warming thread, the babe thread and a thread on a physics question all on the first page. :) [/off topic]