Monthly Archives: September 2010

Update: Our discovery prediction paper is officially out, so please use this version. A team of scientists discovered a planet in the Gliese 581 system that appears to be potentially habitable! This planet Gliese 581 g is part of a large multi-planet star system less than 21 light-years away. Courtesy of the press release: The [...]

Christopher Robichaud, a philosopher, answers the following question: Does Peter Park Have a Moral Responsibility to Be Spider-Man? Walking down that path, I think that Peter is morally permitted to choose a career in science and a relationship with Mary Jane over a career as the wallcrawler. Most of us take seriously the importance of [...]

A professor of mine in graduate school, Carlos D. Bustamante (currently at Stanford), just won a MacArthur “Genius” Award. An expert in population genetics in humans, he taught me probability and statistics: Congratulations Carlos! Here’s more about him and his award.

Big Questions Online recently asked me Why Bother Predicting Future Discoveries? I gave a multi-part answer, but the most important part (from my perspective) is at the end: But ultimately, these predictions are important because they provide testable cases for how well we understand the process of scientific discovery. If we can quantify the path [...]

A great tumbleblog is It’s Full of Stars. If you enjoy outer space and really pretty pictures with insightful commentary, I recommend you check it out.

I have an essay in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe this weekend, entitled The Me-Sized Universe, about how to bridge the gap between the scale of the universe and the scale within which humans exist. It’s an exploration of some fun facts about the cosmos that are within our grasp and that don’t [...]

While there is no eating or drinking in the House of Commons, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is allowed to drink alcohol while delivering the budget: Previous Chancellors have chosen whisky (Kenneth Clarke), gin and tonic (Geoffrey Howe), brandy and water (Benjamin Disraeli), sherry and beaten egg (Gladstone) and spritzer (Nigel Lawson). Gordon Brown chose [...]

With news of new extrasolar planets being released nearly weekly, there is a general feeling that we are in the midst of a singular moment in cosmic discovery. And the news a few weeks ago of a planet that is about the same size as Earth has provided the sense that the discovery of a [...]

Greg Laughlin has a great post at oklo.org about detecting life on other planets, including Titan (a moon of Saturn, not a planet). He discusses the descent to the surface of Titan by the Huygens probe (which did not find evidence of life) and contrasts this with a similar hypothetical descent to a randomly chosen [...]

In an interview, Rodney Brooks discusses a fun and very clear example of Moore’s Law in robotics – how fast they  move: When I first came to the United States, I was sort of a gopher for Hans Moravec, who has been part of the robotics institute here at Carnegie Mellon for many years. Back [...]