Author: David Wright

sigh

Just watched District 9 (aka the prequel to independence day).

Wish it wasn’t so medical. Creepy.

It’s an age old truth, apparently.

I remember I first shot left and my dad made me change over to a right handed stick. It was awkward at first. I much preferred the left handed stick. I choose left before I ever set foot on the ice. I was playing road hockey with all the neighborhood kids and borrowed another kid’s stick.

They all shot left.

Great site.

She’s stroking your ego? Of course. And Signalling Low Power

And more Barker: a pound of lead weighs more than a pound of feathers.

My take from this is that the patent system in the drug industry could use a good look over. Anyone trust the guv to do it right? Sigh

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fdoc%2F201002u%2Fdrug-development

Great article on the dark energy debate. Good primer on the ideas here.

A few things strike me about this debate. One, relativity is mega-weird. Two, it’s interesting how whenever I read articles on some of the more esoteric hard sciences, they less frequently feature academics from the big, famous American Universities (Harvard, etc) than the softer sciences. Is this because the signaling value of being known as a “smart guy” is lessened in more meritocratic fields?

Lastly, we have people betting on the outcome!

Wiltshire made a wager with Thanu Padmanabhan, a physicist at the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India. Padmanabhan wagered that within 10 years dark energy would be revealed as a true cosmological constant and not as an artefact of matter distribution.

Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan would be pleased.

Earth has been, periodically, an extremely unfriendly place.

Via Barker we learn that parents “invest” more in adopted kids than their genetic spawn.

The headline comes from an unconfirmed report that “Angie” (!) said she resents her spawn because they haven’t had a tough life like her adoptees.

that’s what she said.

Tkacik on Wall Street. I haven’t even read it yet and I’m recommending it.