Coming in a distant second to my love of baseball is college football, which officially began the season last night. What football season also means is that my favorite non-baseball blog also starts. Tuesday Morning Quarterback, which comes out on Tuesday's (I know shocking) covers the weekends NFL games, but more interestingly also covers everything else going on in the world. The author, Gregg Easterbrook, is a fellow at the Brookings Institute and a contributing editor for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly and The Washington Monthly. Even if you don't like football it is a must read, and you can skip over the football parts. You can find him here.
Here is a bit from one of his most recent postings:
A Cosmic Thought: Researchers led by Swinburne University of Technology, in Australia, released this map of the "nearby" cosmos. The map contains about 100,000 dots. The dots are not stars; each dot represents a galaxy, and galaxies are thought to average about 100 billion stars each. Thus the area depicted contains holds roughly 10 to the 15th power stars, a number far too huge to bother attempting to fathom. And the map merely shows galaxies nearby. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is at the center of the map. On the cosmic scale, a place with 100 billion stars is a dot.
His book The Progress Paradox is excellent. Read it some time when you are pessimistic about the world. Go here for some of his other writings.
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