Saving this article. What a story. Nowhere does the reporter insert an opinion, but the take-away message is powerful. “I think it’s phenomenal,” Dieter said. “If you don’t think out of the box, you can’t get anything done out of the box.” Dieter and about 75 other conference delegates were clearly hoping for an entertaining…
When I teach creative writing, I notice that novices frequently write as if describing a what a TV screen would show if a camera had zoomed in for a close-up of their narrator’s face. By contrast, an experienced writer would rely on a much wider range of storytelling techniqes, including dialogue and interior thoughts. “What do…
And he was even offered a seat as Big Bird on the ill-fated Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 in a bid to get children more interested in the NASA program when Star Wars was all the rage. | But there wasn’t enough room for the costume, which is more than eight feet tall, sparing Spinney from the tragedy…
Most of our brain’s patterns are solidified by our mid-20s, but it’s possible to change your brain’s pathways and patterns with these methods. Source: What It Takes To Change Your Brain’s Patterns After Age 25 Similar:How We Found Tom Price’s Private JetsGreat behind-the-scenes story of the har…Current_EventsToasty Warm Bed (designed by drunk AI neural net)AestheticsElderly…
So what if a WaPo story about huge flaws in FBI lab testimony shakes the foundation of the justice system, calling into question death sentences that have already been carried out? We are all too busy looking at Upworthy articles about the genius thing these blogging kittens did. Who needs the professional journalists? Similar:Let He…
Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a “destructive myth” had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies. He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a “kind of paganism” because it…
This is good news. It’s unfair that government-funded studies get published in private databases that make money off of the public’s desire to access results of studies paid for by our taxes. NSF will require that articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers in juried conference proceedings or transactions be deposited in a public access…
Wired summarizes an egghead study for the rest of us. Parents may benefit from understanding that when they criticize their adolescents, adolescents may experience strong negative emotional reaction, may have difficulty cognitively controlling this emotion and may also find it challenging to understand the parent’s perspective or mental state. (From a study summarized in Wired.) Similar:Dani…
You see less than 20 color nuances: you are a dichromats, like dogs, which means you have 2 types of cones only. You are likely to wear black, beige, and blue. 25% of the population is dichromat. You see between 20 and 32 color nuances: you are a trichromat, you have 3 types of cones…
What’s significant in this story is not that a computer can perform tasks more efficiently than a human, but that the computer in question is not deploying a pre-programmed strategy; it is instead teaching itself how to win. When IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, and the artificially intelligent Watson…
I remember, as a kid, being thrilled by the images that came in from the Voyager flybys in the late 70s and 80s. I wrote a fan letter to NASA when I was about 11, and received a big stack of glossy publications on the Space Shuttle and commercial technologies spun off from NASA inventions.…
A chemist celebrates the liberal arts. Our culture has drawn an artificial line between art and science, one that did not exist for innovators like Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs. Leonardo’s curiosity and passion for painting, writing, engineering and biology helped him triumph in both art and science; his study of anatomy and dissections…
Reading each other’s facial expressions is so important to our survival as a species that our brains are hardwired to respond to expressions on faces that aren’t even there. This adorable image — in which the galaxy cluster SDSS J1038+4849 seems to be smiling at the camera — comes courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope. It was spotted…
A number of people who’ve seen NASA’s annual lunar phase and libration videos have asked what the other side of the Moon looks like, the side that can’t be seen from the Earth. This video answers that question. The imagery was created using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data. A number of people who’ve seen NASA’s annual…
On this day in 1986, the Challenger space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. All seven of the Challenger astronauts, who had blasted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, perished. One of the crew members, Christa McAuliffe, had won a nationwide NASA competition to be the first…
Sure, Saturn’s rings are cool, but the Earth is pretty awesome too, what with the water, the oxygen, the life, the chocolate. So let’s imagine just how awesome Earth would be if it also had rings. Ron Miller’s illustrations show various views of the earth with what that lucky planet Saturn has. —Ron Miller/Black Cat…
If the pre-1978 laws were still in effect, we could have seen 85% of the works published in 1986 enter the public domain on January 1, 2015. Imagine what that would mean to our archives, our libraries, our schools and our culture. Such works could be digitized, preserved, and made available for education, for research,…
These are straight vertical and horizontal lines. It’s your mind that’s twisted. Researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute made a Lego checkerboard and placed white and purple M&Ms on the squares in a way that makes the board appear to bulge. Illusion Chasers, Scientific American Blog Network. Similar:Vote for your favorite Monopoly token — or else!One…
Microchimerism most commonly results from the exchange of cells across the placenta during pregnancy, however there is also evidence that cells may be transferred from mother to infant through nursing. In addition to exchange between mother and fetus, there may be exchange of cells between twins in utero, and there is also the possibility that…
Idea for a scientist pull-cord doll: “Fashion is hard!” Very interesting in the light of this: I made a shirt for one of my close pals @mggtTaylor for his b’day. Did not expect this!! #shirtgate #shirtstorm #Rosetta #Shirt #sewing — Elly PriZeMaN (@ellypriZeMaN) November 13, 2014 Here’s Glenn Reynolds’s take: So how are things going for…