Gordon's Notes

Europeans used to have more Neanderthal DNA than we have now ... Ancient DNA from last Ice Age unveils distant ancestors underwent signifi...

The extremophiles  are at home in near boiling water and the deep crust of the earth. Every ecological niche is colonized by life; and life ...

How would a cetacean live with a blocked blowhole?  The question was asked in a 1986 newspaper column ... A--Whales and dolphins breathe...

At the “ Spherical Cow ” level of simplification, human pregnancy is a dynamic tension control system , a kind of brain and gene motivated c...

I haven’t read Picketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century . I’ll skim it in the library some day, but I’m fine outsourcing that work to...

Jupiter's red spot is a transient thing. One day the storm will dissipate -- though probably not in our lifetimes. Life is a transient ...

It is always this way, on the micro and the macro. I didn't understand high school until college. I didn't understand medical school...

Eight years ago, I wondered if European Distemper killed the Native American dog  and added a footnote on an old personal hypothesis ... H...

The American Economic Review tells us large corporations are taking up a larger share of our GDP ... The American Economic Review, Vol. 21...

Biologists study evolutionary "strategies", such as r and K selection . These are the strategies deployed the Great Programmer as...

I finally read the entire How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo Vanity Fair article. It's worth a read for all geeks over 40, despite some obviou...

There may be atheists in foxholes, but there are few realists in the C-suite - or the White House. Optimists rule, and they scorn realists ...

The good news is that it's still hard to design a lethal plague. The 'cost of havoc' is higher than I once thought. Yes,  influ...

Brains have a big return on investment ... Tiniest of Spiders Are Loaded With Brains, Researchers Find - NYTimes ... In the smallest spid...

Do the great stagnation failures of the research enterprise and the modern publicly traded corporation have the same roots? Are not both ...

Steve Jobs bachelor party consisted of him, a reluctant Avie Tevanian, and one other guy. At that point in his life, he had no true friends....

My paper magazine has another article on the Argentinification of America -  Can the Middle Class Be Saved? - The Atlantic . I'll skim ...

I missed something new and important when I wrote ... Complexity and air fare pricing: Houston, we have a problem ... planning a plane trip ...

Early in my life air travel was almost as expensive as today. At that time, however, we had travel agents and competitive service. It was ha...

Florida's years of GOP misrule have produced libertarian innovations in the care of the aged ... Investigation Finds Dozens Of Questiona...