Attitude shaping?

“Science is largely about memorizing facts.” So wrong, so prevalent, so frustrating.
David Wittman teaches introductory astronomy at UC Davis, and he decided to see if his course affected attitudes like this. In a recent preprint he describes the results of a before and after survey covering a range of statements about how science works.
It’s not [...]

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RIP, Frederic M. Richards

I spent most of last week at my grandfather’s memorial service, and associated events.
He was a Yale professor and one of the leading biophysicists of his time — having discovered that proteins were not colloids as had been thought, but were actually much more complicated structures. He was also a wonderful grandfather. In a sign [...]

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Random pieces of pie

What do the phrases: “Jackson Pollock painted the Mona Lisa”, “The homing pigeon luxuriated in the hot bath”, and “That man has a city for a head turkey archeologist” have in common?
As David at Shores of the Dirac Sea explains, they’re all encoded in the digits of pi:
This result states that any message that you [...]

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Scientific progress

I’m going to cap off a week of light blogging with a 6 month old quote from Frankie Boyle, talking about the Large Hadron Collider:
I hope that if the experiment is successful the whole of our reality will dissolve, and a big sign will come up saying “Level 2”

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Strings and strings

Here’s something cool. Physicist Brian Foster and violinist Jack Liebeck have teamed up to produce a lecture series on physics, punctuated by recitals — either simple demonstrations of the concepts, or pieces beloved by the physicists involved. They have video clips (which wordpress apparently won’t let me embed).
They’ve been doing this since 2005, and seem [...]

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Homework!

Carl Zimmer asked his readers to recommend great short science articles for his class on the science writing. The final list is here — definitely worth checking out.

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