October 2012
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September 2012
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A Conversation With Randall Munroe, the Creator of... →
“What I like doing is finding the places in those questions where normal people — or, people who have less spare time than I do — think, “This is stupid,” and stop. I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals — or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them.”
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The Benjamin Franklin Effect →
Utterly fascinating account of how we end up liking those we do nice things for, and hating those we harm, which is exactly the opposite of what we think we are doing, from the book/blog You Are Not So Smart (which is in some ways both exactly the same and completely the opposite of this blog).
“Let’s start with your attitudes. Attitude is the psychological term for the the bundle of...
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Totally tricked you guys.
Don’t be mad.
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WatchFalling For It
So are you ready for the answer to the earlier pop quiz about the falling ladder-chains? The video spoils the ending, but here’s what’s up:
It’s been well-known since Newton’s time, and likely long before, that two objects dropped simultaneously from the same height will hit the ground at the same time regardless of their mass.
Go ahead, try it. Take...
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Whoops. Fact-checking myself.
EDIT for this post: Guys, I made a mistake in my original post about the Buddhist meteorite carving that I have since edited. Many of you pointed this out, and I should have known better.
The “swastika”-type symbol on this carving’s chest is not the Nazi symbol, but rather the Buddhist symbol sometimes called “manji” that represents harmony. This symbol was later...
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Guitar Zero: A Neuroscientist Debunks the Myth of... →
Bigfoot. Santa Claus. The Tooth Fairy.
“Musical instinct” may be joining their ranks soon, according to the observations unleashed within a new book by Gary Marcus called Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. It’s not that he implies that musical instinct doesn’t exist. What’s really interesting about Marcus’ book, and life experience, is that he found it isn’t necessary. In...
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I hate when I mess up my post times and push the button too soon. Cool meteorite story coming later once I verify something in it.
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WatchA tale of design informing science, in two parts…
Part 2: Meet Doug Dietz, the Stanford d.School designer who witnessed a terrified child and knew he had to do something to make MRIs less scary.
Love this story.
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Science, It’s a Girl Thing! Can You Create a... →
Remember that awful, pink high-heels and boy-crushing video for the Science, It’s A Girls Thing campaign? Yeah, that one.
It was bad, and didn’t deliver the message they were trying to get across. That message is that being into science doesn’t mean having to separate what you learn from what it means to be a girl, because what it means to be a girl can be anything you want. The...
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How to Survive Mass Extinction →
Why did some species in the Age of Dinosaurs go extinct, and some evolved into chickens? Plenty of species, from early mammals to feathered reptiles, or multitudes of microbes and fungi, all “made it”.
Why us, and not them?
Let Dave Hone list some traits a species might want to start developing in order to survive the next mass extinction.
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149,597,870,700 meters
That’s the official distance from the Earth to the Sun, as recently announced by the International Astronomical Union. Why pick a specific value when the Earth revolves in an elliptical path and the Sun is losing mass over time?
Because scientific calculations from relativity to orbital predictions rely on having an accepted constant. The last time the number was revised was 1976, and we...
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When You Can't Sleep, How Good Is Lying in Bed... →
This was basically me last night.
Clearly exhausted, as I have been a lot lately (dissertations don’t write themselves and genetics classes don’t teach themselves), I closed my eyes expecting sleep, only to lie there for over an hour in a stage of quiet, semi-conscious rest instead of churning out the Z’s. How useful is that for our brains? Are we experiencing any “neural...
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