I’m reading The Tipping Point & I just finished the chapter on Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. A couple of ideas occurred to me, & here’s where I hope that some poor PhD student in search of a dissertation topic is reading this. Question: In what ways are Connectors like Boundary Objects? What can we learn about Connectors by treating them like Boundary Objects, and vice versa? Question, inspired by my.. Read More
Collapse in Australia
Cathy, this one’s for you: Study: Large fires created Australian desert, from CNN Continuing the ongoing discussion of Collapse, another example of humans fouling their nest. It doesn’t make sense, but it saddens me more to learn about indigenous cultures destroying the environment. I suppose I expect it of modern industrial humans, but have some naïve belief that indigenous cultures were more in touch with the natural world than we.. Read More
Asteroid Douglasadams
The asteroid 2001 DA42 was recently renamed after Douglas Adams, of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame! Apparently there was already an asteroid named after Arthur Dent – named just days before Adams died, in a strangely appropriate bit of fate. Interestingly, Alan Boyle, the author of this MSNBC article, first proposed the name. Asteroid named after ‘Hitchhiker’ humorist, from MSNBC On a side note, I can’t get this story.. Read More
Iapetus = Yonada?
This is wacky. I’m sitting in a meeting & surfing with some small fraction of my attention bandwidth, surfing NASA’s Cassini site, and came across this press release about Iapetus, one of Saturn’s moons. Here’s a better photo. As if Iapetus wasn’t weird enough before, what with having the leading hemisphere completely black and the trailing hemisphere completely white, now it also has a seam? When I was a kid.. Read More
Huygens, a major success
I love that I live in an age when I can be sitting at home on the sofa and looking at a photograph taken on another planet. Okay, so Titan is actually a moon. But it’s still wicked cool. Huygens landed on Titan today, and it was a huge success. Apparently it broadcast for way longer than anyone had expected. CNN’s story reports that scientists were weeping with joy. NASA’s.. Read More
Speak up, I can’t hear you over the Big Bang
Our corner of the universe is apparently very loud. Who knew? Vestiges of Big Bang Waves Are Reported, from the NY Times Astronomers reported on Tuesday that they had convincingly seen, in the patterns of galaxies scattered across the night sky, the vestiges of sound waves that rumbled through the universe after the Big Bang. Stars and galaxies tended to form along the ripples of the sound waves where matter.. Read More