Posts by mightykipper

Google hits 'prove we killed no Afghans' – Assange™

blood on hands per year...

Any analysis of Assange's ridiculous assertion that the number of hits on google for "Pentagon"/"Wikileaks" and "Blood on their hands" is indicative of how relatively bad they are should take account of the amount of time each institution has been around for.

For ease, (and because it's as sensible as the assertion itself) I'm using the 'housing' for each institution rather than the institution itself (so the wikileaks website rather than whatever 'whistleblower' network they had set up, and The Pentagon, rather the the Department of Defense) we have:

The Pentagon:

Finished building in 1943.

125000 / (2011-1942) = 1 850 (roughly)

Wikileaks:

Launched 2006.

30000 / (2011-2006) = 6000

Previously I was on wikileaks' side, but having taken Assange's words as gospel I must conclude that he is more relatively evil and in need of stopping than The Pentagon.

Scientist who named the black hole dies aged 96

Too few giants

There are still one or two giants left but there seems to be an increasingly limited pool of them.

Stephen Hawking is certainly a giant in the Black Hole arena and a damned sight cleverer than I'll ever be but I'm unsure if he can be classed a giant as he hasn't really done enough cross discipline work. His collaborator, the mathematician Roger Penrose, could be considered a giant in physics due to the way he seems to disregard what are often seen as fairly strict boundaries between disciplines in physics.

I don't feel we've seen our generation's true genius yet but I hope it's only a matter of time before we see someone dabbling as competantly in stellar evolution, solid state physics and SuperString Theory as they do in optics.

The giant is dead - long live the giants.