Science Made Cool

Team Einstein Close Enough For A Field Goal

In the ongoing faster-than-light neutrino struggle between the OPERA experiment at CERN and General Relativity, there's been a major development. A new press release from the OPERA team has identified possible equipment issues as the source of the timing error which suggested that neutrinos were moving faster than light.

If you were hoping to see Einstein overthrown, it's bad news. Loose cables don't equal major paradigm shifts.

This, by the way, is exactly how science is supposed to work.

Life Imitates Art

A team of Russian scientists are boring through miles of ice into a twenty million year old lake in Antarctica. They haven't been heard from for a week now.

It's pretty obvious that the Shoggoths have gotten them.

(Note: Lovecraftian humor aside, I hope that nothing actually has happened to these brave researchers, and that they succeed in getting uncontaminated samples from Lake Vostok.)

Update: As of February 13, they're reporting success, and no Shoggoths. (Of course, that's just what they would say if the Thing has replaced them all.)

The Information Age Finally Arrives

Back in the 1980s, when personal computers first appeared on the market and people began plugging them into modems to communicate with other computers, there was a lot of excited talk about what this new "Information Age" would bring to us.

Some of the ideas were stupid even at the time: I recall that a selling point for early home computers was that they could be used to organize recipes and compose shopping lists. Organize recipes? I was not aware that disorganized recipes was a problem worth $1000 in 1980s money to solve. Shopping lists had to wait for pocket devices like the iPod or Blackberry, but recipes remain unorganized to this day.

Another big idea for the Information Age was that we would have access to school and college courses, making brick and mortar academies obsolete. That took a while to manage. "Distance Learning" began early on, but those pesky schools and professors did insist on being paid for their work, so most were subscription-based, or part of college tuition. Online encyclopedias and archives also demanded money -- which is why the error-riddled Wikipedia has become the resource of choice for everyone. It may be wrong, but it's free.

Well, now the Information Age has finally realized its potential. You can now take courses at MIT online, for free. So stop reading this, go follow the link, and get educated. Build your own damned flying car.