It is a valuable book, well worth reading for anyone who is engaged in, or plans to engage in, research in any field – or, frankly, if you plan to engage in any kind of nonfiction writing. The sooner you read it, the better.
Funding for Fundamentals
If the conversation is not had, if there are only sides, statements, and declarations, more will be lost than a few years of erratic funding.
Dark Matters
I love considering the possibilities of an entire parallel reality of sorts consisting of the dark realm, with its own physics running alongside conventional physics but quite undetectable.
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.
Hardcore History Recommendation
Since I don't listen to very many of these, I don't have a lot of basis for comparison, but one (and by one, I mean the only) podcast that I listen to more or less consistently is Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. I've alluded to it in review posts before for some of the historical works that I've read, but I decided it would be worthwhile to provide a genuine recommendation. Even if you're not interested in sitting down and actually reading something like Herodotus's Histories, you can still gain much of the knowledge and historical context from listening to these podcasts.
Quantum Computing as a Service
A while back now we posted about 5G technology as part of our efforts to develop educational content here on the site. This post about quantum computing technology and some of the ways in which we can anticipate it being implemented is in the same vein; quantum computing has been increasingly touted as another sort of “miracle” technology about which we hear a great deal of hype, but without a lot of insight into the details. This post will hopefully rectify that a little.
Understanding Belief
It is absolutely essential that we keep our minds open to alternative explanations for the universe in which we live and with which we interact. Just because one explanation is the accepted explanation doesn't mean it is "right" - there may not even be a truly "right" answer to a lot of the deep, probing questions about the universe. If we hew too strongly to a single explanation simply because it is the one that is commonly accepted, then we will inevitably be scoffed at by our ancestors the same way we scoff so readily at those who did not accept Copernicus's teachings.
