No measure, despite how noble the intentions, will 100% protect us from our fellow humans, and comparisons to dangers from knives, cars and baseball bats obfuscates the issue at hand: the warping of the constitution to justify building personal arsenals (with no apparent responsibility to secure them), and the wealth of weapons manufacturers. Mr. LaPierre is a lobbyist, and like so many "chicken hawk patriots" conveniently missed his generations' opportunity to be a "good guy with a gun" and represent his country in Vietnam.

In physics, entropy is why there can be no such thing in nature as 100% efficiency or perpetual motion machines. Thus, no one political party, culture/race has, or should have a complete lock on the Oval Office and the Presidential Mansion (as it was once called).

And by some stretch of sanity, what would be gained if such inane, insane actors were actually successful in what could nakedly be called revolution and armed insurrection? The Pyrrhic ashes of anarchic victories are a poor foundation to rebuild a republic from.

• For starters: how about an ATF Director (not ONE since 2006)?
• Propose Conflict Resolution Skills classes to students and teachers K - 12.  Science teacher Ryan Heber essentially used that to talk a shooter down in California, diminishing casualties.
• Propose rebuilding infrastructure of state mental health services gutted by cuts - obviously, the "free market" has seen no value in filling this need.
• Propose universal background checks for all gun sales (including mental health screens).
• Propose registration of all legally purchased firearms and owning tax.
• Proposal: Digital Grip Recognition Biometric authorizing tech: you shoot it, you own it and the consequences.
• Propose owners spend up to $5,000.00 to secure home arsenals (preferably biometric safes).
• Propose owners liable $500,000.00 if stolen weapons are used in armed robbery.
• Propose owners liable $1,000,000.00 if stolen weapons are used in a murder.

In junior high, Tyson took to using his telescope on the roof of his apartment building. At the sight of a teenager fumbling with a mysterious object in the night, neighbors often thought they saw a thief and called the police, whom he would placate by offering a look through the lens.

In high school, Tyson won summer scholarships to study astrophysics in Africa, Utah, and Scotland. He rubbed elbows with astronaut Neil Armstrong and biochemist and sci-fi writer Isaac Asmiov. At 15 he was invited to give his first lecture, to an extension class at the City University of New York.

“It was as natural as breathing,” Tyson recalls. “I was just talking about what I knew, the way other boys talked about baseball cards.”

Frank Bash, professor emeritus of astronomy and former director of UT’s McDonald Observatory, supervised Tyson as a teaching assistant for Intro to Astronomy. “Neil had a natural gift for teaching,” Bash says. “After he taught, the students would beg for him back. He did crazy stuff—moonwalking in class.”

Doing the moonwalk for his students wasn’t a gag, Tyson says—it was a strategy. “If you’re only using words to communicate as a teacher, why show up?” he says. “Why not just type your notes? Teaching is a full-body performance. The moonwalk was all the rage in 1983, and the students loved it. It made the material work for them.”

Back in the lab, though, things weren’t going as well. Tyson wasn’t making progress on his dissertation, and professors encouraged him to consider alternate careers. He took the criticism hard, and he also faced racial discrimination on campus.

“I was stopped and questioned seven times by University police on my way into the physics building,” he says. “Seven times. Zero times was I stopped going into the gym—and I went to the gym a lot. That says all you need to know about how welcome I felt at Texas.”

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."

Altering the course of climate change is a task that will take decades. It will require innovative new technologies and overhauls of the world’s energy, agricultural, and transportation infrastructure. We don’t suggest that you can reverse the warming trend over the next four years, or even that you will be able to significantly decrease carbon dioxide emissions. But with the help of the world’s best economic, technical, and scientific minds, you can formulate a policy that will show the nation—and the world—how we can begin to make the changes necessary to ensure that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stabilizes at a safe level. Indeed, it is critical that you do so.

• We can't have rational discussions about campaign finance reform;
• can't discuss global warming without invoking or commenting on dinosaur flatulence;
• some kind of market control resembling Glass Steagall;
• rational gun control (at least demand gun owners purchase biometric safes as 1.4 M were lost to home invasion burglaries, and if refused, liable for the crimes committed);
• alternative energy;
• education reform;
• job creation in a global economy;
• Hurricane Sandy relief;
• a give-and-take on fiscal cliffs or raising the debt ceiling.

• A real, not-too-secret cabal, blatant conspiracy and effort of "poll tax style" voter suppression was tried in the 21st Century with evidence of its near success;
• the "End-of-the-world" Mayan apocalypse;
• so-called "faked" moon landings (it interrupted my cartoons the day before: I WAS THERE).

This blog is open to critique: you can list it, and I'll post it (anonymous, misspelled or otherwise). I really don't have to agree with you, but I do sensor abusive insults and advertisements. That is how we all learn: that is what a rational, thinking species does.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates were much longer and far more detailed than our current 90-minute infomercial reality shows by comparison. Sorry for the rant, but this massive, national "dumb down" cannot continue and we resemble a democratic republic for very much longer.

One cubic centimeter of aerographite weighs just 0.2 milligrams, which is four times lighter than the previous record holder, 5,000 times less dense than water, and six times lighter than air. Aerographite is so light that it is difficult to work with it in a normal lab. Any small movement in the lab can create winds that blow the material around.

Last night (other than fiscal cliff theatrics) was the 150^th anniversary, or sesquicentennial, of that tradition; today the same for the Emancipation Proclamation.

It formed the world George Washington Carver would enter a year later: From 1915 to 1923, Carver concentrated on researching and experimenting with new uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, soybeans, pecans, and other crops, as well as having his assistants research and compile existing uses. This work, and especially his speaking to a national conference of the Peanut Growers Association in 1920 and in testimony before Congress in 1921 to support passage of a tariff on imported peanuts, brought him wide publicity and increasing renown. In these years, he became one of the most well-known African Americans of his time. (Wikipedia)

It enabled Edward Alexander Bouchet to enter Yale in 1870, complete his dissertation in geometrical optics in 1876 becoming the first African American to earn a PhD in physics and the sixth American at that time to do so (see link at Edward's name).

There are many more that I could name, many names of note since. They exist because of an innate curiosity of the world around them, and an opportunity courageously presented; a freedom of simply being counted as part of humanity extended: to learn about it.

It was, and is, a world worth creating.

Hmm: ...my 1,013^th posting for this blog, on 01/01/2013. Interesting.

Financial-risk models got us in trouble before the 2008 crash, and they're almost sure to get us in trouble again

When it comes to assigning blame for the current economic doldrums, the quants who build the complicated mathematic financial risk models, and the traders who rely on them, deserve their share of the blame. [See “A Formula For Economic Calamity” in the November 2011 issue]. But what if there were a way to come up with simpler models that perfectly reflected reality? And what if we had perfect financial data to plug into them?

Incredibly, even under those utterly unrealizable conditions, we'd still get bad predictions from models.

The reason is that current methods used to “calibrate” models often render them inaccurate.

Model - Science Definition: A systematic description of an object or phenomenon that shares important characteristics with the object or phenomenon. Scientific models can be material, visual, mathematical, or computational and are often used in the construction of scientific theories. See also hypothesis, theory.

Models are a starting point, then they must bow to the unrelenting outcomes and consequences...of reality.

The educator in me challenges our congress to a simple test: the exit TAKS on social studies. Curious with your displayed acumen on governance what your scores would be.

Scientific American: Why Economic Models Are Always Wrong
Money Morning: Fiscal Cliff 2013

But researchers may have figured out a way to create a chip that spikes. The people at HP labs who have been working on memristors have figured out a combination of memristors and capacitors that can create a spiking output pattern. Although these spikes appear to be more regular than the ones produced by actual neurons, it might be possible to create versions that are a bit more variable than this one. And, more significantly, it should be possible to fabricate them in large numbers, possibly right on a silicon chip.