Rebane's Ruminations
August 2026
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Category: Science

  • George Rebane As promised, I finally finished the V1.0 version of Epidyne during this enforced C19 self-quarantine, or hunkering down period as it is better known.  The stay at home has allowed a lot of things to get accomplished on everyone’s ‘do list’.  At our house we have not had a boring moment – so…

  • “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…

  • ‘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…

  • “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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • “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…

  • 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…

  •  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…