Your daily ebola update and a bit more..The Sciencey Olympics!

First, West African ebola death toll officially passes 1200. I will extend my little graphic found in this post at the end of August to reflect the new reality. Any reader can see that the slope is headed towards the vertical in the y axis. Things are so bad that no news source is reporting that the worst is past, and the WHO--according to this report is only admitting to some 'encouraging signs.'

Oh, that remainds me, if you use a news aggregator to follow things, news.google, bing news, and Yahoo! news, all pale in comparison to newsnow.co.uk. More sources, and NewsNow's feed setup--presumably an AJAX function--is fresher than fresh. NewsNow gets you the story before it hits the 'Net.

I think I'll call this one "The Sport of Science"

I know just how big a part a some people's lives the viewing of sports is..sports viewing, along with religion and politics are the three things that most people seem to care about as it is these areas where they have the deepest knowledge bases. Of course most of what people think that they really know about both politics and religion can easily be disassembled via facts and/or reason. Not so with sports.

In the end none of what they believe sans data to back it up is worth anything at all. That's why I get a wee bit excited when scientific disciplines get sportsy labels. These events have been going on since 1959--in mathematics, at least--yet who knows about the International Science Olympiad?

In the USA, where almost everything is dependent on science and technology, almost no one knows anything substantive about science and technology. Lest you think I jest, ask a fellow citizen for a working description of radio. A technology that has been with us for more than a century. It may as well be magic to most. I know that I am not going to make any difference, as I don't believe anyone reads this blog, but it is good to read that in some parts of the world science and technology indeed have their superstars.

I have intellectual heroes. Two living Americans that I admire greatly for their intellectual agility are Stephen Wolfram and Alan Guth. I met Alan Guth and Noam Chomsky while I did summer work at MIT. Chomsky is certainly no intellectual lightweight, but mathematicians are a special kind of genius. Murray Gell-Mann has to receive a word as well.

I am not often thought a blockhead, but intelligence is a sliding scale. These people are giants.