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Category: Science

  • SETI’s Copernican Que (updated 22feb20)

    “Where are they?”, Enrico Fermi George Rebane Since my previous foray into Fermi’s famous query, I have had occasion to reconsider the numbers that I generated when first applying copernican arguments to the sound of silence experienced by the various Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence efforts that started about the middle of the last century.  My…

  • Berkeley SETI Research Center visit

    ‘Any sufficiently advanced civilization will have capabilities that seem like magic to us.’ A.C. Clarke. ‘Where are they?’  Enrico Fermi George Rebane “The Breakthrough Listen Initiative is a ten-year program that represents humanity’s most significant effort to date to quantify the distribution of advanced life in the Universe.  Listen uses the world’s most powerful observing…

  • ‘A copernican answers Fermi’ (updated 21nov18)

    “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – A.C. Clarke’s Third Law George Rebane Last month we were encamped with two other couples at Hat Creek in northern California.  It was a delightful trip – the weather was fine, the food, drink, and the friends superb.  Actually, we’re all experienced “road warriors” having traveled…

  • Agnosticism vs Atheism

    George Rebane [The is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 June 2015.] Our secular humanist brethren misconstrue Darwin as having claimed and conclusively demonstrated that the cosmos was uncreated, and that life arose by chance from the primordial muck.  In fact, Darwin made neither claim, but did present compelling evidence…

  • Walking Back Climate ‘Science’ & Policy (updated 22sep14)

    Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.  Luke 23:34 George Rebane On the front of the 20sep14 edition of WSJ is a top-of-the-page herald that reads ‘Climate Science is NOT Settled’ (emphasis theirs; source of filched photo).  I have waited at least ten years for the world’s preeminent newspaper to publish a…

  • Manmade Global Warming – The Smoking Gun

    George Rebane I recently looked at the most revealing graphic on global warming that I have seen.  The link to it was sent to me by a regular RR reader who was equally amazed by what he saw.  It was assembled by Nir Shaviv of sciencebits.com and is reproduced below. The figure illustrates the uncertainty…

  • Hockeystick Hansen Strikes Again (updated 7aug12)

    “In fact, [climate change] has now driven our climate outside the range that has existed the last 10,000 years…” — Dr. James Hansen (from NPR) George Rebane There’s a coordinated blitz to recover ground lost to climate change skeptics in the past couple of years.  The lost ground is uneven – in fact, in California…

  • Judea Pearl, Turing Laureate

    George Rebane Judea Pearl, Professor of Computer Sciences UCLA, received the A.M. Turing Award last night at the awards banquet of the Association of Computing Machinery at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco.  He now joins the forty-three previous laureates of the ‘Nobel prize of computing’, of whom twenty-five were in attendance to honor him. Jo…

  • The Bayes Surface and more (updated 19jan13)

     George Rebane [This post continues the numeracy series on the Bayes contribution to our civilization.  For more background and examples, please see ‘Making Medical Decisions’.]    What you see here is a 3D graphical illustration of the celebrated Bayes Theorem (or formula).  I have not seen this beautiful surface presented in the literature, so I wrote…

  • Courtroom Evidence – the Z/M case (updated 28apr12)

    George Rebane Reason and logic have always had a low survival rate in courtrooms, especially where poorly understood evidence of a technical nature is presented by self-serving lawyers to innumerate juries.  In recent memory, the OJ Simpson murder trial may serve as a nationally prominent Exhibit A for this proposition. Today we have the much…

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