When they're leasing public land, and that must be stopped: Kevin Lunny’s struggle to keep his family’s oyster farm running in Point Reyes National Seashore appears to be over, closing out an era of oysterman plying the park’s pristine waters and ushering in the nation’s newest ocean wilderness. U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s announcement Thursday …
Pat Robertson not a Creationist? That Depends Upon How You Define the Word
Up in Richmond, they're aghast at this latest oracle from the Tidewater: Televangelist Pat Robertson challenged the idea that Earth is 6,000 years old this week, saying the man who many credit with conceiving the idea, former Archbishop of Ireland James Ussher, “wasn’t inspired by the Lord when he said that it all took 6,000 …
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How to Lower Carbon Emissions: Tank the Economy!
Nothing to it, really: It's a message no one wants to hear: To slow down global warming, we'll either have to put the brakes on economic growth or transform the way the world's economies work. That's the implication of an innovative University of Michigan study examining the evolution of atmospheric CO₂, the most likely cause …
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Rubio's Not a Scientist, but They're Not Either
He fields the usual trick question: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio declined to firmly answer a question of existential importance in an interview released Monday. An interviewer for GQ magazine asked the Republican, a Catholic and potential 2016 presidential candidate, how old planet Earth is. Rubio didn’t give a direct answer, but suggested children should be …
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The Men Who Saved the Computer From the Hippie Radicals
For all the hoopla these days about being "scientific", the history of science still gets the short shrift. We are happier discussing the philosophical advances engendered by the Enlightenment and not the people on the STEM (science, technology, math and engineering) end who actually made those advances a reality. We're also happier lionising those who …
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Taking the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
He's not widely known outside of the fields he specialised in, but Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venant (1797-1886, usually known in the Anglophone world as simply Saint-Venant) was one of the premier scientists, engineers and mathematicians of the nineteenth century. His accomplishments were many and include the following: Successful derivation of the Navier-Stokes Equations …
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The Caldwell Cyclone Stem Snow Plow, or Why We Hate Promoters
With winter coming on us, I felt that this, coming from another of my sites, might be interesting. I always wondered why my family instilled in me such an intense dislike of promoters, those uniquely American creatures so prominent in our landscape. I think I discovered why. Vulcan Iron Works started out as a foundry, …
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Leonhard Euler on the Creator and Mathematics
Quoted in S. Timoshenko's History of Strength of Materials: Since the fabric of the universe is most perfect, and is the work of a most wise Creator, nothing whatsoever takes place in the universe in which some relation of maximum and minimum does not appear. Wherefore there is absolutely no doubt that every effect in …
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A Sea Fight in a Fog: Revisiting the ASCE Controversy about Dynamic Formulae
With another North American academic year getting under way, it’s time for geotechnical professors and practitioners alike to think about where our industry has been and where it’s headed. This past summer three of our most eminent people (Garland Likins, Bengt Fellenius and Robert Holtz) came together and wrote an excellent piece for the 2Q …
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The Palm Beach Way of Exclusivity is in the Animal Kingdom, Too
And why not? Wild bottlenose dolphins bond over their use of tools, with distinct cliques and classes forming over decades as a result of their skills, scientists have found. The communities, which have been compared with societies such as the Bullingdon Club in humans, mean the aquatic animals share their knowledge only with those in …
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Positive Infinity 