Screaming Penguin

I am writing to you with a sense of dismay right now. We certainly all understand the fiscal problems that face our nation at this point in time, but recent actions by the House Appropriations Committee are deeply troubling. Specifically, zeroing out the budget for the James Webb Space Telescope.

Since I am back to blogging, somewhat, I just want to note what Pam Gay from Astronomy Cast explained to me. So, there are two big lies in common science literature about The Big Bang (or inflation) and Dark Energy. I always knew they were bullshit, but I never knew what the real problem was. Pam cleared me up.

Man, I miss Carl Sagan.

If you have seen the interwebs recently, you can't help but know that the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing is upon us. In a sadly poetic turn, Walter Cronkite, the man who is universally known as the the voice of the moon landing died this week. There are great personal rememberances, mockeries of the moon hoaxers, and conversations with the astronauts online.

Maybe Ray Kurzweil isn't just some nut. Seem like there are a lot of AI/Expert System related things in the news the last few weeks. Here is a sampling of the things that blipped my radar:

• Cornell has an AI that can derive physical laws from raw data
• Wolfram Alpha (which seems like maybe not vaporware) can perform analysis on arbitrary datasets to answer questions
• IBM wants Watson to compete against Jeopardy contestants as a "Deep Blue" of natural language processing
• Univ. of Paderborn is attempting to pass a Turing Test in Second Life

On August 23rd, a UCLA computer discovered the 45th known Mersenne prime, 2^43,112,609-1, a mammoth 12,978,189 digit number!

The prime number qualifies for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's $100,000 award for discovery of the first 10 million digit prime number.

I write, therefore the LHC hasn't destroyed the planet.

Fun bit from NdGT: