NightBlogger

Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory. More

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Transcripts of 210,000 trials held at Britain’s famous Old Bailey court from 1674 to 1913 are now available online

The transcript from Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency at London’s Old Bailey court went online for the first time yesterday alongside a raft of murder, robbery and abduction cases. Up for free examination are 110,000 pages of transcripts - including Wilde’s trial and the notorious story of Dr. Crippen and the murder of his wife. Lurid tales of murder and rape, stories of pickpocketing and robbery - every type of crime was paraded before the London court.

The Oldbaileyonline.org site was billed as the largest single source of searchable historical information about British lives that has been published. The transcripts cover every one of the 210,000 trials held at the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913. The court is still in operation.
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Pic courtesy of Pedro

In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12 percent of the nation’s women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study published today. The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas. The most dramatic change occurred in two areas in southwestern Virginia (Radford City and Pulaski County), where women’s life expectancy has decreased by more than five years since 1983.
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Photo courtesy of PPDIGITAL

Among the nightmares lurking around the corner for the already battered housing and credit markets would be a meltdown at mortgage financing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Although few are predicting an imminent need for a bailout just yet, credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s recently placed an estimated price tag on this worst case scenario — $420 billion to $1.1 trillion of taxpayer’s money.
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