Freeman Dyson, and 99 others:

We should give up futile attempts to combat climate change.

You might call him the antijoy.

Don't fight, adapt

Find a science cafe by rolling over locations on the map. Click on a cafe's link to find out more. Zoom in on your region to make sure you don't miss a cafe.

Science cafe

What is called the music business today is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that's not bad news for music, and it's certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists.

Where are things going?

David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars

Yesterday, Gore’s silly electronically-signed whine was presented to the waning UN Climate conference along with his requisite repent-or-perish speech, this time climaxing with these euphoric-applause and hoorah inspiring words:

"My own country the United States is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali. We all know that.”

The freshly minted Laureate was singling out the country he had once aspired to lead for its refusal to commit to unnecessary and unattainable greenhouse gas abatement goals throughout the 2 week climate festival. Of course, Japan and Canada had stood the same ground, as did “developing” nations China and India. But why quibble? There’re plenty of accolades to go around.

That’s right – three cheers for all nations responsible for gridlocking the progress of the world’s worst idea since Hydrogen-filled blimps.

Bali Finale Papers: Vision vs Precision

Some questions we've posed persistently through the ages have remained largely unanswered: Why are we here? Is there a purpose to our lives? Is there a Creator who brought us here?

All of us have asked these questions sometime in our lives. That's when we have traditionally turned to spirituality to find the answers. However, since we live in the age of science that pervades our daily lives, it would be essential to ask: Can science support our belief in spirituality?

You might ask: Aren't science and spirituality like apples and oranges? Most people including many scientists think science and spirituality are just too different to be mixed. This apparent perception of conflict is perhaps not without some justification.

Science Could Support Spiritual Beliefs

Atul Gawande:

If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?

(See companion thread for additional comments)

Annals of Medicine: The Checklist

Realizing that the corpse, known as the world financial system, is quickly getting cold, LaRouche PAC organizers over the past few weeks have been acting on Lyndon LaRouche's principle of the mass effect, to galvanize the population into action. Contrary to the presently popular, nonetheless ineffective model of "poll watching," the mass effect is a universal physical principle. As Johannes Kepler's principle of universal gravitation governs the changing relations of bodies in physical space-time, the mass effect governs human social relations, specifically the way in which new ideas in an individual human mind are transmitted to a population, to create revolutionary political effects. This dynamic principle, when acted upon by people, stirs up society, especially in times of crisis, and frees individual members of society to think more clearly about what might be done.

Outflanking the British Empire: The Mass Effect

The surprising force behind torture: democracies

Torture, American style

Why are some computational problems so hard and others easy? This may sound like a childish, whining question, to be dismissed with a shrug or a wisecrack, but if you dress it up in the fancy jargon of computational complexity theory, it becomes quite a serious and grownup question: Is P equal to NP? An answer—accompanied by a proof—will get you a million bucks from the Clay Mathematics Institute.

Accidental Algorithms

The SimpleDB API is neither resource oriented nor HTTP friendly.

A RESTful version of Amazon's SimpleDB