Children at Risk of Being Bullied

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of Hispanic Americans who have positively influenced and enriched our nation and society.

Each year, Americans observe National Hispanic Heritage Month from September 15 to October 15, by celebrating the histories, cultures and contributions of American citizens whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America.

The observation started in 1968 as Hispanic Heritage Week under President Lyndon Johnson and was expanded by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 to cover a 30-day period starting on September 15 and ending on October 15. It was enacted into law on August 17, 1988, on the approval of Public Law 100-402.

The day of September 15 is significant because it is the anniversary of independence for Latin American countries Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. In addition, Mexico and Chile celebrate their independence days on September 16 and September18, respectively. Also, Columbus Day or Día de la Raza, which is October 12, falls within this 30 day period.

On the American Physical Society (APS) web site, they are celebrating the 2012 Minority Scholarship Recipients. I think I remember being that young once.

E pluribus unum: [still] out of many: one.

The problem is like the dot com bust in the 90s: anybody can throw up a web site and become an online learning center, even when your "university" is in a rented office park.

Education is more social than an Internet connection, and we are by far a social species.

It's a shame we're discussing the "controversy" about evolution, question whether the earth is over four billion years old or six thousand years old. Meanwhile, "back at the ranch" of global competition, countries we helped build up with the Marshall Plan post WWII have no such delusional machinations. They march forward in STEM careers, creating more scientists and engineers than our own universities as we put our heads in ostrich sands; our minds in reverse back to God-knows-where, but I bet where we land won't have a middle class or America as fabled "shining city on a hill." I'm a year younger than you, and I can recall getting more on evolution and sex education during the late seventies than my twenty and thirty year old sons. Science is no threat to religious faith, and any reality created, virtual or imagined, cannot govern.

Related link: William Rivers Pitt - A Nationally-Televised Presidential Fail

I was saddened that names I respect as credible authorities - Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN and PBS News Hour could so botch reporting on cancer cures and climate change. I recall seeing the "possible cure for cancer" on CNN, which put me in a rather melancholy mood: my father died of lung cancer in 1999; my mother had been a smoker and at one time and a breast cancer survivor. She passed in 2009.

This is me typing: You can choose to believe it our not, as this particular post is only my humble opinion. However, when I see someones research I find interesting, I post excerpts of the article or abstract in italics differentiating the originator from my commentary (if any). I only post if I have the originator's permission, avoid it if some written instruction prohibits it. Usually at the end of the post, I provide a link to further review if the blog reader's interested. I give credit and links to photos and their origins.

Nanoantennas convert light to electrical power and vice-versa, and are essential in the design of tiny electro-optical devices. They have diverse potential applications in just about anything based on light–matter interaction, including optical sensing and signalling, microscopy, solar-power conversion and quantum cryptography.

Inspired by natural selection, evolutionary optimization algorithms work towards an ideal design rather than evaluating the performance of all possible designs. For the problem tackled by Feichtner's team, the latter would be impossible because more than 10¹³² antenna designs would need to be evaluated using a process that takes 20 minutes per structure. The team's goal was to find a geometry that would enhance the near-field intensity of an illuminating beam of light as much as possible, so they chose this as the "fitness parameter" that they would judge each design against. Just as in nature, the fittest patterns got the chance to pass on their characteristics to the next generation, while the weaker specimens were discarded. The highest-performing five from each batch were used to build a new generation of 20 structures via crossing techniques and mutations. The new structures were in turn pitted against one another, so the overall fitness of the designs improved generation by generation – over 100 generations – until the near-field intensity enhancement registered almost twice that of the reference antenna.

The resulting photograph is called the Pale Blue Dot and shows Earth as a tiny bluish-white speck against the vast emptiness of space. Sagan later used this phrase for the title of a book about his vision of humanity's future in space.

Given Earth's distinctive colour, an interesting question is what colour an alien Earth orbiting another star might be. Today, we get an answer of sorts from Siddharth Hegde at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and Lisa Kaltenegger at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.