The Sound of Comprehension

"I feel [laughs] are important because, apart from anything else, I think of laughter as the sound of comprehension."
- Tom Stoppard

Four Elements of Critical Thinking

My favorite Bumper Sticker Motto is "Question Authority," so it shouldn't come as any surprise that I'm a big fan of critical thinking. With this in mind, I liked Paul Schoemaker's article 4 Secrets of Critical Thinkers, where he writes:

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman attributes shallow framing to people substituting easy questions for hard ones. We often miss the crux of the issue by drawing imaginary connections between what we see and what we expect to see. As our own book Winning Decisions explains, the essence of critical thinking is to slow down this process, learn how to reframe problems, see beyond the familiar and focus on what is unique in any important decision situation. Here are four ways to hone these critical thinking skills:

1. Slow down
2. Break from the pack. 
3. Encourage disagreement. 
4. Engage with mavericks. 

These four points are expanded in the article. I know that i'd be ecstatic if my company committed to even two of these important four points.

Flip the Pole!

I didn't know this:

The Sun essentially sheds its current magnetic field and regrows a new one every 11 years.

But this time around, it's different:

The Sun’s magnetic field is reversing, South becoming North, as it does approximately every 11 years on a cycle, but this time, something even stranger is going on: The North is moving much faster than the South, and space scientists aren’t sure why.

“Right now, there’s an imbalance between the north and the south poles,” Jonathan Cirtain, NASA’s project scientist for a Japanese solar mission called Hinode, in a recent article on NASA’s website. “The north is already in transition, well ahead of the south pole, and we don’t understand why.”

Welcome Miles Vincent Meigs!

Yesterday at 8:00 AM on the nose, we welcomed Miles, our third son, into the world! He was 7 pounds, 13 ounces and has been the mellowest kid in the 28 hours he's been with us. He even let me sleep four and a half hours last night! I'm sure i'll write more about him later, but for now expect posting to be light as I spend some quiet happy time with my family.

Crappy Google Searches

Is it me or have Google searches been more ineffective ever since they started prioritizing more recent news in their search algorithm? It certainly seems like i'm getting a higher percentage of crap in my search results over the last few months.

Banana Fungus, Go Away

I've known for some time now that there's a potential threat to my favorite food: the bannana. Boing Boing gives us a quick run-down of why this is:

Bananas, as we know them, cannot reproduce. The ones we eat are sterile hybrids. Like mules. The only way that there are more bananas is that humans take offshoots from the stems of existing banana trees, transplant them, and allow them to grow into a tree of their own. It's basically a cheap, low-tech version of cloning, and it has a long history in agriculture. ...

The downside to this is that clones are, shall we say, not terribly genetically diverse. Turns out, a lack of genetic diversity is a great way to make yourself vulnerable to disease. Back in the 1950s, a fungus all but wiped out a variety of banana called the Gros Michael. Up until then, the Gros Michel had been the top-selling banana in the world. It was the banana your grandparents ate. You eat the Cavendish, a different variety that replaced Gros Michael largely on the strength of its resistance to the killer fungus.

According to the article, a fungus called Black Sigatoka can kill banana trees and reduce yields in the survivors, and so efforts are underway to develop a replacement strain of banana just in case the Black Sigatoka is successful: the Goldfinger. Click through to see a picture.

Here's hoping that the Goldfinger tastes as good as the Cavendish!

Rain on the Sun

Check out this amazing video that Bad Astronomy posted the other day:

Here's the explanation of what we're looking at:

"A lot of the material ... that falls back onto the Sun [is] because of the Sun’s strong gravity. Since the material is an ionized plasma – a gas stripped of one or more electrons — it follows the magnetic field lines of the Sun, so you can see graceful arcs of this stuff falling back down after the blast. ...
Gravity does the work, but magnetism does the steering."