December 2012
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Dec 1st
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Dec 1st
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Dec 1st
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November 2012
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Well it's almost December . . .
I guess it’s time for like a thousand posts talking about the science behind the 2012 Maya Apocalypse thing … How about this instead:
Nov 30th
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Nov 30th
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Nov 30th
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Nov 30th
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Nov 30th
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Nov 30th
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A History of Violence, and Its Decline  →
Although it might not seem that way, judging from the images of war and pain that are so relentlessly beamed into our eyes each day, Steven Pinker argues that humans have actually become far less violent in recent times. In a long but enthralling essay from 2007, he offers several explanations, philosophical and biological, for this pattern of progress. One of my favorite tidbits, offered by...
Nov 30th
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Nov 30th
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Nov 30th
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Nov 30th
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Nov 29th
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Nov 29th
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Nov 29th
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Nov 29th
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Nov 29th
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Nov 29th
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The greatest scientific typo in history →
Or how the 1934 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary accidentally created the word “Dord” as a scientific term for density…
Nov 29th
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Nov 29th
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Nov 29th
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Nov 29th
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NASA's Announcement of a Mars Discovery Was a... →
Remember last week when everyone reported that John Grotzinger, one of the NASA scientists manning the Curiosity mission, told an NPR reporter that a recent find would be “one for the history books”? Well, that was all a giant misunderstanding, apparently. Those pesky reporters and their pesky tape recorders!! NASA has since been backpedaling away from that comment like Michael...
Nov 29th
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Nov 28th
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Nov 28th
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Nov 28th
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Infinite Jest is a literary fractal →
In a 1996 interview, David Foster Wallace (a student of advanced mathematics in college in addition to being, you know, a writer) revealed that the structure of his career-defining work Infinite Jest was devised as a literary fractal. It’s actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a...
Nov 28th
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Nov 28th
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“Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand...”
– Michio Kaku  (via ratak-monodosico) Then biologists are an attempt by bags of chemical goo to figure out how bags of chemical goo work.
Nov 28th
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Nov 28th
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Nov 28th
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"Maybe." →
SpaceX founder Elon Musk, speaking about a new plan to send humans to Mars to create a self-sustaining colony on the Red Planet. His plan uses technology developed by his private spaceflight firm. Specifically, a reusable rocket currently in development called MCT. Does MCT stand for Mass Cargo Transport or Mars Colony Transport? Both are rumored to be true. Read all about it at Scientific...
Nov 28th
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Nov 27th
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Nov 26th
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Nov 26th
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Nov 26th
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Nov 26th
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Nov 26th
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Nov 26th
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0.17% →
or… “Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility - In One Number” Deniers of climate science are fond of the following wacky idea: That the scientific community does not agree on the cause of climate change. It’s time to bury that idea like a senile dog hiding a ham bone: Somewhere where we’ll forget about it forever. According to some recent data-mining of the...
Nov 26th
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