Unbelievable Statistics on Unwed Mothers

Janell Ross: In Tennessee, about 9 percent of white mothers delivered out of wedlock in 1980, compared with 34 percent in 2007, the new state Department of Health data show. In the same period, unmarried black women went from representing a narrow majority of black mothers to 77 percent.

The state began collecting data on Hispanic births in 1982, when 11 percent were to unwed mothers. It was 53 percent in 2007.


Has no one heard of birth control?

"I'm with the government, and I'm here to help...

...protect you from the pitchforks."


Because, you know, only the government should be allowed to "fork" anyone.

Deep Solar Minimum

Solar physicist Dean Pensell of the Goddard space Flight Centre of NASA, said, "We are experiencing a very deep solar minimum." Marshall Space Flight Center sunspot expert David Hathaway said, “This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century. Since the Space Age began in the 1950s, solar activity has been generally high. Five of the ten most intense solar cycles on record have occurred in the last 50 years. We're just not used to this kind of deep calm.”

Robot Scientist

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.

Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.

The result was a series of “simple but useful” discoveries, confirmed by human scientists, about the gene coding for yeast enzymes. The research is published in the journal Science.

Challenging Kurzweil...

...on the singularity.

Respectfully, I think Aamodt and Wang miss the point. Kurzweil doesn't suggest that his vision will be achieved using supersized versions of today's computers, but rather through the development of radical new computational technologies.