2010 style Christmas
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Monthly Archives: December 2010
The Gaskell affair
Wish List
At Spiked Math
Nasty, brutish and not that short
Medieval warfare was just as terrifying as you might imagine
The soldier now known as Towton 25 had survived battle before. A healed skull fracture points to previous engagements. He was old enough—somewhere between 36 and 45 when he died—to have gained plenty of experience of fighting. But on March 29th 1461, his luck ran out.
Fun with Statistics
One week later: Still digging out
The compost bucket in the kitchen was full. I had to take contents to the big compost bin, behind the shed in the back yard. However, before I could do that I had to clear a path to the bin. Picture behind cut
Progress in Physics
LHC’s Lack of Black Holes Rules Out Some Versions of String Theory
the LHC doesn’t seem to be making black holes at all—their decay signature is markedly absent from the data collected so far.
[This is] helping physicists make up their minds about how many dimensions there are in our universe. The lack of black holes at the LHC nullifies some of the wackier versions of string theory which depend on multiple dimensions.
Cuba banned Sicko for depicting ‘mythical’ healthcare system
From the Guardian:
Authorities feared footage of gleaming hospital in Michael Moore’s Oscar-nominated film would provoke a popular backlash
The Holidays for Computer Scientists
At xkcd
45 million people died…
… in Mao’s Great Leap to Famine
This reminds me of Stalin’s terror, especially in the Ukraine, which I recently read about in Bloodlands, but on a vastly greater scale.
…the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.
Mao was sent many reports about what was happening in the countryside, some of them scribbled in longhand. He knew about the horror, but pushed for even greater extractions of food.
At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever before. The minutes of the meeting reveal a chairman insensitive to human loss: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”
Via Ann Althouse.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 