“It’s disappointing in a way, and confusing,” said Patricia Tombaugh, the 93-year-old widow of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh. “I don’t know just how you handle it. It kind of sounds like I just lost my job,” she said from Las Cruces, N.M. “But I understand science is not something that just sits there. It goes…
Jenny Jenny, you should know better; This is not just another Greek letter. It’s a term that relates two important parameters; If you know the circumference, you can find the diameter. Jenny, you need this number; You should keep it in mind. Jenny, plug in this number: Three point one four one five nine. (Three…
Those discovered before 1900 would be called simply “planets” while a new sub-category of “plutons” would be introduced as a compromise between those who want to banish Pluto from the planetary club and those who want its status maintained. The move would result in three new “pluton” planets being created along with Pluto: Pluto’s moon,…
In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks. A mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said, even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours…
Within a year of birth, boys and girls also prefer different toys. Boys prefer cars, trucks, balls and guns. Girls prefer dolls and tea sets. Although evolution has clearly not had the opportunity to mould a preference for tea sets, there is evidence from another species which suggests that human infants might be predisposed to…
Some have appealed to Gingerich’s group not to downgrade Pluto, saying it would disappoint children and throw our understanding of the universe into chaos. Others say let the chips fall where they may and seem to relish the idea of overturning our current view of the universe. –Alan Crosby —Pluto’s status attacked (Boston.com) The debate over…
They sliced a piece of tough beef in two, bagged half of it in plastic, and dropped it into the bottom of a 50-gallon paperboard drum of water. Then they suspended conventional explosives in the water and retired to a nearby bunker. From there, they watched in safety as a television displayed the ensuing detonation.…
Looking at the last two semesters taught by the author before the text adventure game and the most recent two semesters, every measure of student satisfaction is better. The only measure that might be troubling is perceived student workload. This project is very large. Even with high-level architectural design and many useful snippets of code…
“Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor,” Hein marveled. It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended…
The former vice president’s movie — replete with the prospect of a flooded New York City, an inundated Florida, more and nastier hurricanes, worsening droughts, retreating glaciers and disappearing ice sheets — mostly got the science right, said all 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie or read the book and answered questions from…
666 is the occult “number of the beast,” also called the “sign of the devil” (Wang 1994), associated in the Bible with the Antichrist. It has figured in many numerological studies. It is mentioned in Revelation 13:18: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the…
“In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world’s worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE],” the sheet said. The Greenpeace spokesman who issued the memo, Steve Smith, told the Web site that a colleague was making a joke in a draft that was then mistakenly released.…
“It shows that these forgotten people of the ’90s had many of the same concerns as modern man, such as b-days, and slow periods at work,” Caspari said. “The presence of the archaic slang verbalization ‘what’s up’ appears to indicate that they cared about the immediate welfare of others in their closely knit community, much…
With their mouths largely shut but their laptops and flip phones open, teenagers’ bedrooms are beginning to sound like the library. So is the dinner table. On her show May 10, Ellen DeGeneres ribbed guest Lindsay Lohan: “Every time I’ve seen you, you’re out with eight or nine girls, having dinner. You’re all sitting around…
The disasters that have occurred so far have been on the local or regional level. They have been horribly damaging to lives and properties in the regions in which they occurred, but they have not been the paradigm-shifting harbingers of doom that the pessimists, like Kunstler, continually warn about. In fact, so far the pessimists…
The archetype of the mad scientist was Rotwang in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). Played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Rotwang had unruly hair, a disabled hand, and obsessive research interests. He worked alone, and although he lived in a modern city that his inventions made function, he was like a 16th-century alchemist. —The Scientist on Camera (Slate) Hmm……
Photon vs Electron (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My son at age 8 is turning out to be quite the science geek. While I was driving him home from piano lesson today, he asked me whether an electron is the smallest thing in the universe. I took at stab at it and guessed that maybe a photon is…
CHERYL: Wait a minute! Did you see that? An apple fell out of that tree! [dramatic music; slow motion shot of falling apple] This means there must be some sort of FORCE! DARREN: A force — a gravitational force! CHERYL: Yes — and wait a minute — suppose the force stretched all the way to…
Science for non-majors offers an important chance to reach out to students outside the sciences, and try to give them some appreciation for scientific inquiry. This is critically important, as we live in a time where science itself is under political assault from both the left and right. People with political agendas are constantly peddling…
Veteran commander John Young and his rookie pilot Robert Crippen faced a lot of uncertainties April 12, 1981, as they waited for the space shuttle Columbia to lift off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Flight Center. —STS-1: ‘A test pilot’s dream’: Columbia astronaut recalls first shuttle flight on 25th anniversary (CNN) When my class was watching the…