Month: November 2025
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Happy Thanksgiving (Weekend)
Thanksgiving here in the U.S. is celebrated the fourth Thursday in November. It used to be the last Thursday, but was moved, by presidential proclamation, to make sure there was enough time for holiday shopping before Christmas. Now Thanksgiving is a whole weekend, and even into the next week, for that holiday shopping purpose: It’s…
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A more concrete Future
The late James Watson’s seminal one-page Nature article on the structure of DNA simply and modestly pointed to a Future that surpassed even its authors’ expectations. The much longer, more complex recent Nature article on quantum computing boldly predicts that its seemingly subtle accomplishments will ultimately have similar effects. Another recent Nature article, “Personalized gene…
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James Watson 1928-2025
James Watson, the co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, has passed away. His research with Francis Crick and others culminated in one of the most important papers ever. The 1953 paper, published in Nature, is also one of the shortest ever. It begins and ends with two of the greatest understatements of all time:…
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The Future is indeterminate…
… and at times incomprehensible too. One of the more “far out” (or so we thought) items on our Future Bucket list was quantum computing. It’s also one of the more “technically challenging,” to put it mildly. A recent paper on the subject in Nature is entitled “Observation of constructive interference at the edge of…
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