Cheers, laughs, heckling — drunken heckling. That’s right, it’s a science lecture.
Deep in The Bell House, near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, the Secret Science Club meets. By “secret” and “club” they mean that several hundred people paid the cover and packed the converted warehouse to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about the trials, tribulations, and triumphs [...]
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Stand-up science
Posted in Science and Culture, Uncategorized, tagged Neil deGrasse Tyson, Secret Science Club, Stand-up sicence on March 20, 2009 | 2 Comments »
The Atom Smashers repost
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Cinema, Science blogging on March 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
My review of The Atom Smashers has been reposted at Talking Science. They blog about a variety of science topics; well worth checking out.
Strings and strings
Posted in Uncategorized on February 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Simple ideas
Posted in Uncategorized on January 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
One of the more exciting ideas for how to get stuff up into space is a Space Elevator. Basically, you stretch a rope from the ground to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, and then ferry stuff up and down the rope.
A few weeks ago the BBC published a story about a new technique to lift [...]
XKCD vs. The New Yorker
Posted in Uncategorized on October 16, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Everyone’s favorite science-based cartoonist, Randall Munroe, has been challenged to a cartoon-off by The New Yorker’s Farley Katz. The format:
The Rules—each contender is to draw:
The Internet, as envisioned by the elderly.
String Theory.
1999.
Your favorite animal eating your favorite food.
That’s right, string theory. For those keeping score, XKCD appearing in the New Yorker is one of the [...]
Again, the Universe makes me go “wow!”
Posted in Astronomy, Uncategorized, tagged Astronomy, Hubble, The Sun on October 14, 2008 | 1 Comment »
The Boston Globe runs a beautiful feature called “The Big Picture”. The most recent features images of The Sun which are breathtaking.
One thing I find particularly cool is that many of the most detailed pictures were taken with ground based telescopes, such as the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope. They use the full set of tricks [...]
The best fit is always a straight line
Posted in Science and Culture, Uncategorized, tagged Mathematical Models, Popular media, Statistics on October 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I have no idea what USA Today is thinking with this graphic. They seem to have taken all the polling data from 2008 for Obama vs. McCain and fit them to some arbitrary function. Never mind the convention bumps or that the lead has switched a few times, what they show is two lines with [...]
But the zigwump goes in the foop, not the juglup
Posted in Science and Culture, Uncategorized, tagged Science and Culture, Stoppard, TV on October 3, 2008 | 4 Comments »
My college had a class called “Senior Symposium”. The idea was that all seniors would have a special course where they would read one book a week, with no other assigned work or tests. This was fantastic, largely because it was the only senior course to be taken by people from every discipline.
When I was [...]
LHC suit dismissed. Also: sun rises
Posted in Science and Culture, Uncategorized, tagged Black holes, LHC, Pontification on September 29, 2008 | 7 Comments »
As has been discussed ad nauseum, there has been a suit filed in the Hawaii U.S. District court aiming to stop the Large Hadron Collider from starting operation, on the grounds that it might destroy the world. In a development that will shock no one (and I suspect that includes the plaintiffs) that suit has [...]
