Spring Break...

Why America Is In Trouble...

The Internet makes information available to everyone, free of charge.  Sometimes it does much more, as (for instance) with the free educational material that's popping up all over the place.  What a wonderful opportunity people have today – with just a few clicks, they can sign up for (say) a course on calculus, or physics, or electronics.  How could anyone be against this? What a fine thing!

Whoops.

Minnesota has decided that this is most definitely not okay.  They've ordered Coursera (a free educational site) to stop delivering their content to Minnesota residents.

Doomed.  We're doomed.  Estonia is going to win...

Wine Corks...

I recently had a conversation with a colleague who didn't know where wine corks came from.  When I asked him to guess, he thought they were manufactured from some sort of plastic.  When I told him that they were actually made from the bark of oak trees, he was very skeptical.  So we did a little googling and found this great explanation, with lots of photos.

Something else that was a surprise to my colleague: the word “cork” derives from the Latin word quercus, for “oak tree”.  The genus name for oaks is also quercus, and the species that is most often harvested for cork is Quercus suber (though many other oak species can be used to produce cork as well).  Quercus suber is native to the western Mediterranean area, but there are some fine examples in the arboreta of San Diego County, as well as in parks and in landscaping.  It's commonly available in our nurseries...

NGC 2623...

Hubble imagery showing two galaxies, merging into one.  Via APOD, of course...

African Orchids...

Via Botany Photo of the Day, of course...

Curiosity: Bright Particles...

Curiosity took some scoops of Martian dirt, and turned up a few anomalous bright particles.  The science teams were worried at first that these particles were pieces of Curiosity falling into the soil.  On close inspection, though, the particles were clearly Martian in origin.  Another interesting thing to go figure out: why are there a tiny number of bright, white particles in the Martian dirt?

Iowa Electronic Market...

Bouncing around, not much movement...

Mitt Romney, Robot? Not...

Via reader Simi L.  Here's Mitt Romney at last night's Al Smith dinner (a Catholic charity organization).  This dinner traditionally invites the presidential candidates, asking that they make some “light-hearted” remarks, and keep the blatant politicking out.  Romney did a superb job of balancing the humor and the political points, using humor to drive home some real jabs.  Then he ended it on a sweet, upbeat note.  Just perfect.

The Obama campaign has been painting Romney as a parody of a real man, as a rich guy who's just completely out of touch.  His remarks at the Al Smith dinner smashes that false portrait...