Quantum unicorns and antimatter

An emotion is running high as around the world physicists are bracing themselves in anticipation of one of the biggest events of the decade. That emotion is dread, and what they’re bracing themselves against is an enormous flux of annoying questions, because the event is the release of the the movie version of Dan Brown’s [...]

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Two cultures and a bonk

Chirs Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, among others, are organizing a conference on “The Two Cultures in the 21st Century”, in honor of the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s famous lecture of (roughly) the same name. The two cultures in question are the sciences and the humanities. Snow began an exploration of why there is such [...]

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Statistics and doctors

Here’s a paragraph from a recent Scientific American article on the interpretation of statistics:
…only about one out of every 10 women who test positive in screening actually has breast cancer. The other nine are falsely alarmed. Prior to training, most (60 percent) of the gynecologists answered 90 percent or 81 percent [chance that the woman [...]

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Emily Levine

Blending philosophy, science, and a rare medical condition is a tricky proposition. Doing it in a way that is both engaging and hilarious takes extraordinary skill. Luckily for the rest of us, Emily Levine has that skill. She’s currently running a one woman show in New York, “Emily at the Edge of Chaos”, which unfortunately [...]

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Arp 274 Wins!

I know you were all on the edge of your seat to find out the winner of Survivor: Universe. It was a long, drawn-out drama-fest, but in the end it was everyone’s favorite galaxy group Arp 274! I shudder to think about the riot that would have accompanied an NGC 4289 upset.
The NASA site has [...]

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