Lifelong Republican and Trump appointee, Chris Krebs, stood up for Democracy…
Trump keeps exhaling his flaming Twitter attacks against Democracy. The survival of our fragile political system of democratic elections depends on a few good people. Including good GOP officials like Chris Krebs. How will this turn out? And who the heck is Chris Krebs?
1. Trump’s attempted coup…
Trump has waged an all-out war against the results of free and fair elections picking Biden as the next President of the United States of America. This no-holds-barred effort included falsely declaring victory in the wee hours of the morning after the elections, pushing the limits of the legal system, false messaging taken up by millions in slogans like #StopTheSteal, to calling state GOP leaders directly demanding that they overturn valid election results. …
Musk shoots for unmanned landing on Mars in two years, and humans in four…
1. SpaceX’s real mission…
With all the news about SpaceX’s crewed missions to the International Space Station, their Starlink satellite internet blanketing the globe with broadband access, and their highly Youtube-friendly self-landing rockets… we sometimes forget why SpaceX was formed in the first place.
SpaceX’s original mission was to have a backup planet, a planet B, in case humans make Earth uninhabitable. The ever-optimistic Musk has a dark, pessimistic streak, and talks about the inevitable “extinction event.” In 2012 Musk talked about building an 80,000-person colony on Mars.
So, we have to keep in mind that the technology SpaceX develops serves two purposes: getting humans safely to Mars at scale, and funding that development and production. For example, we must not think that SpaceX’s mission is to provide broadband internet to the world. Instead, Starlink’s mission is fund SpaceX’s Mars mission (by being a successful satellite internet provider). …
I’m building something and am stuck — I need your thoughts…
I’m in the middle of a woodworking project and I’m stuck. First of all, I have no idea what it is I’m making. It’s simple, so I’m doing this on the fly. It could be a small coffee table, a big end table, a small bench, or a big stool… or a cutting board with legs! And I’m stuck on a very simple question. What shape should I make the legs?
I’d love your opinions on how to design the legs for this thing… as odd, out-there, mundane, boring, brilliant, or not-so as they may be… just let me know your thoughts. …
Did a virus become the nucleus, the heart of complex cells?
One of the enduring mysteries of biology today is the origin of the nucleus. The most controversial hypothesis addressing that mystery says that a giant virus invaded a cell and became the nucleus. Especially today thanks to COVID-19, we think of viruses as ravaging invaders, like the Vikings ravaging England. But could a virus be the origin of the nucleus, the heart of each and every one of our cells?
1. Nucleus or no nucleus?
The defining feature of cells is whether they have a nucleus or not. We call simpler single-celled organisms lacking a nucleus, prokaryotes. Prokaryotes fall into two very broad classes of organisms, the bacteria, and the distantly related but similar-looking archaea. The more complex cells with a nucleus we call eukaryotes. …
According to Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, they do…
The stock market is raging higher while the pandemic-ravaged economy is plumbing new depths. But Nobel-winning Yale economist, Robert Shiller thinks the market may be fairly valued. This is the same economist who published his prescient book Irrational Exuberance (March 2000) just as the Dot Com bubble peaked. And did it again, releasing his revised edition with new information about the housing bubble in 2005, just before the bubble peaked in 2007.
1. The current stock market…
The following image shows the past year’s S&P500 stock index’s price chart. This is amid a terrible viral pandemic which has killed more than a quarter of a million Americans in less than a year. …
Key GOP officials resist Trump’s coup attempt and his calls to overturn election results in states where he lost to Biden…
Trump’s unprecedented assault against Democracy continues. Our collective health and economy is shattered by his denial of science and his incompetence. The survival of our fragile political system of democratic elections depends on a few good people resisting Trump’s demands to overturn Biden’s election win. Including good GOP officials. How will this turn out?
1. Trump’s coup attempts
Trump has repeated calls for GOP leaders to undemocratically overturn election results in states that Joe Biden won. Trump, as usual, ranted on Twitter and in lawsuits devoid of evidence:
“…Why is Joe Biden so quickly forming a Cabinet when my investigators have found hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes, enough to “flip” at least four States, which in turn is more than enough to win the Election? …
We are watching an attempted coup and treason…
1. Coup d’etat
Zimbabwe Defense Force (ZDF) members surrounded the capital of Harare and captured their 93-year-old president, Robert Mugabe, on November 14, 2017. The ZDF controlled the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and key areas of the city. That night, the army arrested the director of the Zimbabwean Central Intelligence Organization and beat him.
The next day, the ZDF raided at least twenty homes of various members of Mugabe’s government including the Minister of Higher Education, Minister of Local Government, Finance Minister, and Police Commissioner.
Mugabe was forced to resign and hand over the presidency to Emmerson Mnanagagwa, his former protégé and until just a few weeks earlier, his vice president. …
The people who are going to shape our lives and future…
What will our future hold? Will science play a decisive role in the biggest problems facing us today — like the COVID-19 pandemic and human-caused global warming? After a four-year-long surreal waking nightmare, we finally have a president who will work to improve the lives of all Americans, whether they voted for him or not. How that plays out depends critically on the team Biden surrounds himself with. Let’s take an early look at some of those key team members
1. Vice President
On June 27, 2019, during the Democratic debates, Kamala Harris turned to Biden and pointed out that he had opposed school busing in the 1970s, despite his claim otherwise. With a prosecutor’s sense of drama and closing in for the kill, Harris looked Biden in the eye and said, “There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. …
My notes to a physicist friend hoping to join me in a yeast lab
The lab where I work is interested in the mechanics of basic biological processes, which we dissect using yeast as a model organism.
A good friend, a physicist and technology marketing executive by training and profession, will hopefully be joining me in the lab. These are my informal notes to him to get him up to speed in a practical way for our lab, starting with classical methods. I hope that he, and others interested in making a career transition into a bio lab, will find this introduction useful as well.
The first installment was on molecular biology which you can find here. …
My notes to a physicist friend hoping to join me in a yeast lab
The lab where I work is interested in the mechanics of basic biological processes, which we dissect using yeast as a model organism.
A good friend, a physicist and technology marketing executive by training and profession, will hopefully be joining me in the lab. These are my informal notes to him to get him up to speed in a practical way for our lab, starting with classical methods. My hope is that he, and others interested in making a career transition into a bio lab, will find this introduction useful as well.
The first installment was on molecular biology which you can find here. …
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