Posts tagged “science”
I love that weightless feeling in a decelerating elevator. Also: the Antikythera mechanism blows my mind. The ancient Greeks were thousands of years ahead of their time, yet their civilization collapsed while China's persisted. What happened? Someone explain European history to me.
Today my brain wouldn't stop firing. A single Economist article on evolution sparked ideas about the Garden of Eden, Neanderthals undone by stupid-but-vicious Homo Sapiens, optimal village sizes as a social network concept, anti-aging diets as lifestyle choice, and whether cultural complexity has already exceeded our cognitive limits.
On a rainy British afternoon, it hits me: we're just interesting foam on a wet rock, hurtling through space around a giant furnace. Earth's liquid-covered existence is a cosmic fluke, and all life a thin, unlikely residue of it. We should probably remember this more often.
Fingers crossed for this thing to work.
The long-term benefits of sunscreen are now in doubt, so it's no longer the one tip I'd offer for the future. It's now about as reliable as any other advice I might give.
We're more like panicking mice than we'd like to admit. Wider doors cause jams, narrow ones create orderly queues, and clustered exits block each other. Turns out human evacuation behavior is far less rational than we imagine.
Slow day at work, so I cleared my massive blog backlog. Highlights: artificial diamonds disrupting De Beers, doctor secret slang, Russia building a Mars nuclear plant, giant gerbils devastating China, and the world's most unsettling fluffy rabbits. Plus 20-odd other links. Productive afternoon, really.
Parallel universes, USB watches with analog faces, Hillary's presidential inevitability, virus-killing brain cancer, and Christian ministries warning kids away from grumpy atheists. Another day, another backlog cleared. Professor Giraffenstein assures us dinosaurs still roam the earth. Who am I to argue?
Reflecting on the Columbia disaster through newly released transcripts. It was tragic, but we must press on with space exploration.
Catching up on a backlog of links: cloning circuses, botox deodorant, dumb food laws, Putin-elf controversies, Harry Potter's questionable morals, AOL's staggering losses, and Bush funding a sun on Earth. Plus games, books, and a testicle shortage. You're welcome.
We've discovered a new planet called Quaoar, which is either the coolest name ever or proof that Pluto isn't really a planet. Either way, astronomy will figure it out eventually.
Brr. Yesterday felt like the start of a new ice age. Maybe it was.
Last day at IBM Hursley, back to Warwick! Also: possible life on Venus (just microbes, but still), everything we know is wrong, and the Weekly World News has infiltrated Al-Qaeda. Quite a day.
Space elevators could make low earth orbit a four-hour ride and geosynchronous orbit reachable in a week, all at a fraction of current rocket costs. This is genuinely exciting stuff.
A roundup of links: invisible comets, powers of 10, a great domain name, Television Without Pity's Sex and the City recaps, and fat people suing everyone. Also, I'm not alone in threatening to kill people with a spoon. Finally got a work project, but clearly not too busy to blog.
Highlights from the Scientific American Web Awards: Living Internet is a fantastic resource for internet newbies, ALICE the AI bot is surprisingly lifelike, there's a cool X-Men retrospective gallery, and Schedler Shebeen offers jokes and viral clips galore.
Revising all day killed my blogging mojo, but here's what I've got: reasons to ban cloning white people, ice oceans discovered on Mars (hello, terraforming potential!), and my dream of sightseeing through Valles Marineris. Mondays still suck.
A frustrated challenge to those who understand science yet still cling to religious belief. How can you know the chemistry of life, the neuroscience of thought, the physics of the universe, and still need God to explain the stars?
A timeline of the future from someone who was 85% accurate last time is worth reading. Highlights include "25% of TV celebrities synthetic" by 2010, which made me laugh. I thought they already were.
Procrastinating on work with a roundup of tech links: the Rio Riot's 20GB looks great, CWB is evil, dolphins beat porpoises, China got bugged jets, gravastars may replace black holes, and I won my first eBay auction. Also, trees kill.
Astronomers say the universe's average color is light turquoise. Terry Pratchett's Death got there first, calling it "duck egg blue." Science catches up with Discworld once again.
Son of Star Wars has a fun new flaw: intercepted missiles don't just disappear, they land *somewhere* untracked between launch site and target. Could be your backyard in middle America. Or Europe. Nice.
Accidental nanotubes, undetected nuclear smuggling, Bush wants more reactors, and we're basically screwed on energy either way. On the bright side, my font choices reveal I'm boring, and someone's planning an interplanetary Internet.
Found an amusing Telegraph piece about Telford being wiped out by an asteroid. The article is ostensibly serious, but the list of things that would be "tragically lost" from this middling English town is priceless. Also: genetically modified babies with three biological parents are apparently a thing now.
