Queue swirling lights and rushing sound effects as we go back in time to stop regretting things and make our lives go how we wish they could have gone, with all of the wisdom and hindsight of our later years. After an arbitrary passage through time and space, we find our former self, and we say something like “hey, don’t invest your money there, use it to start the business you’ve always dreamt of.” Then, ignoring all considerations of paradox, physics, entropy, and causality, we zip back to the present time to see how much better our life us now that we made the choice we always wished we had.
New Carbon Nanotube Technology
The research paper is “Versatile acid solvents for pristine carbon nanotube assembly,” and it describes a new acid solvent system that does not feature the extremely challenging types of acids traditionally used in carbon nanotube production.
What is Life?
This might sound like a philosophical question, but I intend it more like a scientific question. We’ve discussed this somewhat before, like in our post about the universe’s habitable zone, but I want to focus in a little closer on what life really is, on what makes one thing alive and one thing not alive, how we might go about defining the difference, and whether what we call life deserves the distinction we have hitherto applied.
Not-so-standard Model
While this is being hailed as the first potentially significant failure of the Standard Model, the Standard Model has really been struggling for years with a variety of problems
Writing 21st Century Fiction Review
I wish that the human brain was a better tool for diagnosing itself, because I would be very interested to know how much of my distaste for this book arose from the writing style, rather than the contents. To be honest, the writing sounded juvenile. It is my hope that the author adopted this style in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience, rather than it being an actual reflection of their intellectual capacity, but I found it quite off-putting, and rather undermining to those parts of the book that are valid. While I realize that an inaccurate understanding of electromagnetism does not preclude wisdom in the area of fiction writing, making a blatantly invalid analogy does make me question how well the rest of the book was thought through before being published. And that was just the most obvious example; the whole tone of the book conveyed a similar impression.
Endings
It might seem like an oversimplification, but it is very viable to divide a story into just three parts: beginning, middle, and end.
Cybersecurity Warning
With a title like "Google Bans Apps With Hidden Data-Harvesting Software," you might not be expecting a huge, new cybersecurity scare. In this case, the details make the difference.
Solar Flares and Aquatic Suction Cups
I couldn't decide between two articles this week, so I decided to just post two. First up, a research paper I came across in Science Advances that studies how suction cups adhere underwater.
Thoughts on the Publishing Industry
Not my thoughts, for once - I subject you to more than enough of those in the Tuesday blog posts. No, this Saturday I wanted to share with you an article Brandon Sanderson wrote in response to his recent, and unprecedented, Kickstarter campaign.
Space Debris Economics
Why should a private company make a business out of space debris removal? Alternatively, can space debris removal be made into a viable business model? This is one of those complicated questions that I recently saw reduced to a gross oversimplification in a news article. There were a lot of issues with the article, and I don’t want to dwell on it, but I think the biggest problem was its underlying, unstated assumption that the only viable business case for space debris removal as a commercial service was if the government was the customer, or regulated private space industry into becoming customers. The underlying argument of the article, therefore, is that there is no viable business model based on space debris removal.
IGC Publishing 