27 Aug 2019 — Updated with a fresh link. Similar:Alike (2015)This short film reminds us why art matte…AestheticsNASA astronaut: Russians were ‘blindsided’ by reaction to yellow suitsI posted a while back about the yellow a…AestheticsThe Psychology of Getting More Done In Less TimeSummary of not-so-new scholarship, but p…CultureAnne Of Green Gables Blond On Book CoverEr..…
Federation of American Scientists (FAS) makes a First-Person Shooter (FPS). Whoever wrote the description of the game won’t get a job at PC Gamer anytime soon, but the game itself looks interesting. Players navigate a nanobot through a 3D environment of blood vessels and connective tissue in an attempt to save an ailing patient by…
Science Journal (WSJ): “We think our decisions are conscious,” said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. “But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn’t rule out free will, but it does make it implausible.” Through a series…
Wired: The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy…
Best evidence of ice on mars: “It must be ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can’t do…
Chronicle Kristin Roovers, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ottawa Health Research Institute who was found by U.S. investigators last year to have wrongfully doctored images published with her scientific research while at the University of Pennsylvania, was suspended last week pending an investigation into her work at the Canadian institution. Similar:In April, 2001 I was…
A fascinating exploration of learning at a very early stage. Thanks for the link, Robert. (BBC) Usually, cuttlefish eggs lie in an envelope full of black ink. But this clears as the embryos grow older, leaving them growing within translucent eggs. These unborn cuttlefish also have fully developed eyes. That leads the researchers to conclude…
From NASA: NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander can be seen parachuting down to Mars, in this image captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is the first time that a spacecraft has imaged the final descent of another spacecraft onto a planetary body. From a distance of…
Good news from the NYT: Just before 8 p.m. Eastern time, mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here received a radio signal from the Phoenix on the ground in the icy plains north of Mars’ Arctic circle. Similar:Wet Book Rescuehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9_fwmdC…BooksDefunct Web Pages are Not Dead Ends to JournalistsIn my “News Writing” class, I first…
I just took the kids outside to watch the International Space Station fly overhead. It was visible for about five minutes, and at its brightest I thought I could see some details (the solar panels?), but it was mostly just a bright dot. It rose from the southwest, went by almost overhead, and disappeared to…
I saw a teaser that’s got me wondering what’s going on at NASA… WASHINGTON — NASA has scheduled a media teleconference Wednesday, May 14, at 1 p.m. EDT, to announce the discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years. This finding was made by combining data from…
Boston Globe: Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition – no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, “the natural history of our species” is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and…
Wired just loves technology. Here’s an article about a technological solution to forgetting. As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular — or supremely practical —…
NYT: T. rex shared more of its genetic makeup with ostriches and chickens than with living reptiles, like alligators. On this basis, the research team has redrawn the family tree of major vertebrate groups, assigning the dinosaur a new place in evolutionary relationships. Similar molecular tests on tissues from the extinct mastodon confirmed its close…
This game sounds great. Created by a 14-year-old, says Wired. With Elementeo, we inject fun into education! Welcome to the Elementeo game! In this action-packed game, two or more players wage a chemical war with just one goal in mind – destroy their opponent’s electrons to zero! Armed with their arsenal of elements, compounds, and…
My ten-year-old has wanted to be a scientist since he was four, but he’s bored by math. Paul Lockhart (PDF) helps me understand why. But what do I do now? The difference between math and the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such. Everyone understands…
The Australian publishes an interesting detail about coverage of climate change: Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?” She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not whethat you’d…
Sky News: The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote more than 100 books including 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90, according to an aide. Similar:15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look SillyBeautiful synergy of word and image. Pro…AestheticsWhy We’ll Never Live in SpaceAs much as…
According to Bloomberg, the Vatican has announced a new list of “social sins.” Consistent with much of the church’s social teachings in the modern age, the list is an interesting mix of traditionally conservative and traditionally liberal ideas. It seems to me that 6 and 7 are already contained in 5, but the Bloomberg article…
From Michael White, of Adaptive Complexity: There is a particular narrative about science that science journalists love to write about, and Americans love to hear. I call it the ‘oppressed underdog’ narrative, and it would be great except for the fact that it’s usually wrong. The narrative goes like this: 1. The famous, brilliant scientist…