I’ve seen a bunch of people linking approvingly to this piece about the “Fermi paradox,” (the question of why we haven’t seen any evidence of other advanced civilizations) and I can’t quite understand why. The author expends a good deal of snark taking astronomers and physicists to task for constructing elaborate solutions to Fermi paradox […]
Category: Life Science
“Earthing” Is a Bunch of Crap
A little while back, I was put in touch with a Wall Street Journal writer who was looking into a new-ish health fad called “earthing,” which involves people sleeping on special grounded mats and that sort of thing. The basis of this particular bit of quackery is the notion that spending time indoors, out of […]
Flame Challenge Finalists 2014: What Is Color?
The finalists for the 2014 “Flame Challenge” have been selected, three written entries and three visual entries. None of these is my entry, alas, but it was worth a shot. I watched the videos last night, and it was sort of interesting to compare what ended up working well with the test audience of 11-year-olds […]
Cosmos Reboot Gets Small
A diabolical psychologist brings a mathematician in for an experiment. The mathematician is seated in a chair on a track leading to a bed on which there is an extremely attractive person of the appropriate gender, completely naked. The psychologist explains “This person will do absolutely anything you want, subject to one condition: every five […]
Cosmos Reboot, Episode 2
This week’s Cosmos was all about the evolution of life, and was viewed by millions of people outside of Oklahoma, where they presumably got an hour-long local news promo, or analysis of the Oklahoma State’s chances in the NCAA Tournament. As such, it was a bit outside my area of expertise, but that never stopped […]
What Is Color?
This year’s “Flame Challenge” asks scientists to explain color in terms an 11-year-old can understand. The rules limit answers to either 300 words of text or a 6-minute video. 300 words is ridiculously short, so video is clearly the way to go. Of course, I’m not much of a video expert, but then, one of […]
On Computer Color
This year’s “Flame Challenge” is to explain color in terms an 11-year-old can follow. I have opinions on this subject, a background in AMO physics, and access to scientific equipment, so I’m putting something together. In the course of this, though, it occurred to me to wonder how my different portable computing devices process color. […]
Old Thesis Club: A Specific Effect of X-Rays on Bacteria, by Thomas J. Dietz, 1934
Back in the fall, I did a bunch of write-ups of old Master’s theses that we found when clearing some space in a storage room. I got away from this because I was busy working on the book, but I have a few more that I pulled out to look at, and since all the […]
Five Billion Years of Solitude by Lee Billings
It’s taken me a disgracefully long time to finish the review copy of Lee Billings’s Five Billion Years of Solitude I was sent back in the fall, mostly because I didn’t read anything not immediately related to the book-in-progress for most of November and all of December. Which is to say, the long delay is […]
Missing the Eureka Moment
Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev hit on the idea of the Periodic Table as an organizing theme for a textbook he began writing in 1868. He did some work on refining the idea, and in 1870 presented a paper on it to a meeting of the Russian Chemical Society. Well, actually, that’s not quite true– Mendeleev did […]