Illinois budget standoff nears one-year mark. Illinois faces $7 billion in unpaid bills, nation's lowest credit rating, and little to show for lengthy negotiations. This is what will happen at the last minute in the dead of night: increased taxes on "millionaires," motorists, and soda. And property owners, raising real-estate taxes. A one-cent increase in the state sales tax. California solved all their problems back in 2008 with new taxes; Illinois will follow suit. Too bad the Dakota Access pipeline is't providing a bit of revenue for Illinois; blame it on Iowa.
Mitt Romney: a voice in the wilderness. Romney is on the same list where I put Colin.
UN rejects call to postpone Rio Olympics. The tea leaves suggest that Rio will delay the games one year -- they will blame Zika, but the games will be delayed due to security concerns and lack of facilities.
The JV team seizes territory near Turkish border. The story uses these words: "string of villages'; "rapid advances"; "tens of thousands"; "heavy fighting"; "hospital evacuation"; "within two miles"; "demonstrated Islamic State's ability to stage major offensives and capture new areas despite a string of recent losses in Syria and Iraq.
Verizon, unions reach labor pact.
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Cosmos Sapiens, John Hands
I continue to enjoy the book. I've completed it, but now it's rewarding to go back and re-read portions of it. He begins the book with "I was born and raised a Catholic. I became an atheist. Now I'm agnostic."
His lament: science can't explain everything.
For example: with regard to the "Big Bang," the author says that everything that happened earlier than 10-43 second(s) after the "Big Bang" is "conjecture. Actually, he says that is true until about 10-10 second(s), but then after that, the theory appears to be "pretty good."
Had he written the book one year ago, he would have noted that gravitational waves had not been detected.
Had he written the book two years ago, he would have noted that the Higgs boson had not been detected.
Had he written the book seventy-five years ago, he would not have had an explanation for the radioactivity.
Had he written the book before 1650, he would not have Newton's Laws.
And so it goes. It's an incredibly good book to "bring" everything together in one book, in an easily understood writing style, but, wow, talk about pessimistic. I think I would end up severely depressed if I had to spend an evening with him over a pint of ale.
One could turn the book inside out, upside down, and re-write it to highlight how incredibly fast physics moved in the early 20th century.
What I get a kick out of is all the "coincidences" that had to occur to get from the Big Bang to Starbucks.
I love to read novels by Virginia Woolf -- her novels read like prose poems, but re-reading Richard Feynman is almost the same.
By the way, the current issue of New York Review of Books is particularly good this time around. There's a new book out there on the discovery of the DNA model. Of course, James Watson wrote the first book on the subject, and that has become the "gold standard" against which all new books on that subject are concerned. I have absolutely no interest in buying this new book but I have to admit that I hope to be able to thumb through it at Barnes and Noble sometime. The article: DNA: The Power of the Beautiful Experiment, H. Allen Orr. The book: Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb Basic Books, 2016, 434 pp., $29.99. From the linked article:
Matthew Cobb tells this story in his latest book, Life’s Greatest Secret. Cobb, a professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, is a working geneticist. He is also a student of the history of science who has written several previous books on the history of biology.
Life’s Greatest Secret is aimed at the general reader who may have only a passing familiarity with biology, much less with the detailed molecular mechanics of how DNA does what it does. The book serves as a useful primer for those interested in the brave new world of genetic intervention made possible by the rise of biotechnology.
But Cobb’s book will also be of interest to professional scientists as it recounts events in one of the most transformative periods in the history of science: the rise of a molecular understanding of life.I would read it, not for the science of DNA, but for the author's history of the race to describe it. It would be interesting to see how it compares to how James Watson saw it.
