Mad Physics is a neat science education
Mad Physics is a neat science education site run by a couple of high school students.
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kottke.org posts about science
Pitching slow to a young child is
Pitching slow to a young child is actually worse than pitching a little faster. “When you throw something slowly to a child, you think you’re doing them a favour by trying to be helpful. Slow balls actually appear stationary to a child.”
The Oh-My-God particle is a proton with
The Oh-My-God particle is a proton with the energy of a slow-pitched baseball. And it’s moving so fast that after travelling for a year, it would only be a few nanometers behind a photon travelling at the speed of light.
“Fads, fashions and dramatic shifts in public
“Fads, fashions and dramatic shifts in public opinion all appear to follow a physical law: one of the laws of magnetism”. “Michard and Bouchaud checked this prediction against their model and found that the trends in birth rates and cellphone usage in European nations conformed quite accurately to this pattern. The same was true of the rate at which clapping died away in concerts.”
Advancing scientific research means that chimeric animals
Advancing scientific research means that chimeric animals are on the way. “In the case of human cells’ invading the germ line, the chimeric animals might then carry human eggs and sperm, and in mating could therefore generate a fertilized human egg. Hardly anyone would desire to be conceived by a pair of mice.”
Scientists at Princeton have made a crude
Scientists at Princeton have made a crude computer out of bacteria. Earlier work showed “they could insert DNA into cells to make them behave like digital circuits [and] perform basic mathematical logic. The latest work expands this concept to vast numbers of bacteria responding in concert.”
The second of Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part series
The second of Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part series on global warming for the New Yorker. This one’s about how relatively short-term climate change can affect entire civilizations.
A near perfect Einstein Ring found
A near perfect Einstein Ring found. Close galaxies can act as a lens for farther galaxies, focusing the distant light with an “Einstein Ring”.
An ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to be extinct
An ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to be extinct since 1920, found alive in Arkansas. Ok, now rustle us up some passenger pigeons.
Part one of Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part series
Part one of Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part series on global warming for the New Yorker. “Disappearing islands, thawing permafrost, melting polar ice. How the earth is changing.”
Steven Johnson says watching TV makes you smarter
Steven Johnson says watching TV makes you smarter. The argument is that media has had to get more cognitively challenging to hold the attention of viewers. Evolutionarily speaking, attention is the scarce commodity that creates competition here, driving adaptation in the direction of more social and narrative complexity to hold that attention.
And if you ever need to move
And if you ever need to move the Earth, here’s how you might accomplish that. “The Earth is very big, moving very fast, and therefore very difficult to stop or even slow down.”
Forget how life will end, here’s a
Forget how life will end, here’s a bunch of ways you can destroy the entire Earth. This is a really fun read: “keeping the strangelet stable is incredibly difficult once it has absorbed the stabilising machinery, but creative solutions may be possible.”
Ten scientists on how human life on
Ten scientists on how human life on earth might end (or be severely curtailed). Super volcanos, killer robots, viral pandemic, oh my!
Some bacteria in Africa beat Fermi to
Some bacteria in Africa beat Fermi to the first stable nuclear reactor on Earth by almost 2 billion years. The bacteria enriched the uranium into a critical mass and the flow of water through the reactor kept the reaction going for millions of years.
Electric Universe
This biography of electricity — and of the men and women who had a hand in uncovering its inner workings — begins in the first moments after the Big Bang. Which is probably not where your high school textbook started its exploration of the subject, nor will you find many of the oftentimes surprising stories Bodanis uses to illustrate his tale.
The first mobile phone was developed in 1879? Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, “had a vacuum where his conscience ought to be”? Alexander Graham Bell, in part, invented the telephone to impress a girl (well, acutally the girl’s parents)? Samuel Morse stole the telegraph from a guy named Joseph Henry and patented it, but not before he ran for mayor of New York City on an anti-black, anti-Jew, and, most especially, anti-Catholic platform? None of that was in my high school science textbook and such is the authority of the textbook that I have a hard time believing some of it. You’re thinking maybe Bodanis is embellishing for the sake of making a more exciting story (history + electricity? wake me when it’s over!), but then you get to the 50 pages of notes and further reading on the subject and realize he’s shooting straight and science is more strange, exciting, and sometime seedy than your teachers let on.
Poetry takes more brain power to read than prose
Poetry takes more brain power to read than prose. “Subjects were found to read poems slowly, concentrating and re-reading individual lines more than they did with prose.”
Life’s top ten greatest inventions
Life’s top ten greatest inventions. Includes the eye, sexual reproduction, photosynthesis, and language.
13 things that science doesn’t have the answers for
13 things that science doesn’t have the answers for. Dark matter, the Pioneer anomaly, cold fusion, the placebo effect, etc. Some great opportunities for discovery.
Update: New Scientist recently published a list of 13 more things that don’t make sense.
Biomimicry
One of my favorite talks at Poptech was Janice Benyus’ presentation on biomimicry, or innovation inspired by nature:
Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf. [It] uses an ecological standard to judge the “rightness” of our innovations. After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned: What works. What is appropriate. What lasts. Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valuing nature. It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it.
In the talk, Janine outlined 12 ways in which nature can inform the development of technology:
1. Self assembly
2. Chemistry in water
3. Solar transformations
4. The power of shape
5. Materials as systems
6. Natural selection as an innovation engine
7. Material recycling
8. Ecosystems that grow food
9. Energy savvy movement and transport
10. Resilience and healing
11. Sensing and responding
12. Life creates conditions conducive to life
Those are a little vague and I wish I’d written down more notes, but it was hard to type and really listen at the same time. To fill in the gaps, you can listen to the audio of her 30 minute presentation.
Genius
This seems familiar:
It made Feynman think wistfully about the days before the future of science had begun to feel like his mission — the days before physicists changed the universe and became the most potent political force within American science, before institutions with fast-expanding budgets began chasing nuclear physicists like Hollywood stars. He remembered when physics was a game, when he could look at the graceful narrowing curve in three dimensions that water makes as it streams from a tap, and he could take the time to understand why.
Best American Science Writing 2003
I was somewhat disappointed in the 2003 edition of this collection, especially after enjoying so much the last three editions. Perhaps Oliver Sacks and I disagree on what makes science writing good. The two best articles were 1491 by Charles Mann about what the Americas were like before Columbus landed and the effect of the European arrival:
In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the Indians changed the Americas more than the invading Europeans did? “The answer is probably yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so” after Columbus, William Denevan wrote, “and for some regions right up to the present time.”
and Atul Gawande’s The Learning Curve, an article on how doctors need to learn on the job (while potentially making costly mistakes) in order to become more effective overall:
In medicine, there has long been a conflict betwenn the imperative to give patients the best possible care and the need to provide novices with expericne. Residencies attempt to mitigate potential harm through supervision and graduated responsibility. And there is reason to think that patients actually benefit from teaching. But there is no avoiding those first few unsteady times a young physician tries to put in a central line, removes a breast cancer, or sew together two segments of colon. No matter how many protections are in place, on average these cases go less well with the novice than with someone experienced.
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
Rhodes’ followup to The Making of the Atomic Bomb (for which he won a Pulitzer), while not as tight a narrative as its predecessor, was more interesting to me because I was less familiar with the story. In particular, the Soviet espionage effort during WWII was fascinating.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond has written a fantastic book that lays out in simple terms how Europeans came to dominate the rest of the world without resorting to racist notions of Europeans being intrinsically smarter or more gifted than the inhabitants of the rest of the world. Diamond’s thesis is so simple and powerful, it seems, as Erdos would say, to come from “God’s book of proofs”. An illustration of this powerful simplicity is how the orientation of the continents affected the spread of domestication of crops, animals, germs, and ideas (which in turn influenced how fast difference cultures matured):
Why was the spread of crops from the Fertile Crescent so rapid? The answer partly depends on that east-west axis of Eurasia with which I opened this chapter. Localities distributed east and west of each other at the same latitude share exactly the same day length and its seasonal variations. To a lesser degree, they also tend to share similar diseases, regimes of temperature and rainfall, and habitats or biomes (types of vegetation). That’s part of the reason why Fertile Crescent [crops and animals] spread west and east so rapidly: they were already well adapted to the climates of the regions to which they were spreading.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
I’ve read so much about science that I was reluctant to pick up Bryson’s book, but I’m a sucker for good but accessible science writing, so I forged ahead anyway. The beginning of the book was interesting but nothing I hadn’t heard before, but once Bryson got to the more recent developments in everything from physics to evolutionary biology, I was hooked. I try to keep up with where science stands today by reading magazine and newspaper articles, but the big picture is hard to visualize that way. Bryson painted that big picture…the last few chapters of the book should be required reading for high school science students who may have learned that protons, neutrons, and electrons are indivisible or that Darwin had the first and final say on how evolution works.
Nonzero
The main thesis of Nonzero is that social complexity of human culture has been increasing since the dawn of man and will continue to do so until forever. Wright argues that non-zero sum games are the culprit: societies get more complex (moving from tribes of hunter gatherers to mutli-trillion dollar global economy) because in order to play ever more lucrative non-zero sum games with an increasing number of people, that’s the way it has to be. It makes a lot of sense.
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