Hemispacial neglect, or hemineglect, is a “condition following brain damage in which patients fail to be aware of items to one side of space.”
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Category Archives: Science
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Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The Killers of Eden was a group of orcas off the coast of Australia that helped the local whalers, the Davidson family in particular. The orcas would go out and round up baleen whales. The orcas would even invite the Davidsons out to join them—they’d swim up the bay and splash their tails when they [...]
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Monday, February 2, 2009
Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville invented the Dreamachine, which I first heard about at last week’s Film Love at Eyedrum. It uses a record player to spin a cylinder with patterns cut in it. With a light inside, it makes a strobe for drug-free psychedelia. I found an online Dreamachine that makes a similar effect. [...]
≡E.O. Wilson on “Darwin and the Future of Biology”
Friday, October 24, 2008
Tonight I went to listen to E.O. Wilson talk about ‚ÄùDarwin and the Future of Biology‚Äù. Biology is most definitely not a strong interest of mine, but it was cool. It also reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read his book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.
He opened with what seemed like an elementary review [...]
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Thursday, August 7, 2008
A New York Times article about boredom reframes it as an opportunity rather than an unavoidable state:
The brain is highly active when disengaged, consuming only about 5 percent less energy in its resting ‚Äúdefault state‚Äù than when involved in routine tasks… That slight reduction can make a big difference in terms of time perception. The [...]
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Thursday, July 10, 2008
I don’t remember how I came across these pictures of rare clouds, but they’re really cool.
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Saturday, July 5, 2008
Tsar Bomba was the biggest man-made explosion we’ve ever had, back in 1961. The mushroom cloud in the video of the Tsar Bomba explosion went almost 40 miles up.
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Wednesday, April 23, 2008
How We’re Wrecking Our Feet. It’s the shoes. Old news, but worth hearing again and again.
Foot freedom is a movement in the ultralight hiking community as well. Once you realize that you don’t need to carry 50lbs for a weekend trip, you realize that you can ditch the leather boots and hike with shoes. And [...]
≡The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2007 (review: 3.5/5)
Friday, April 18, 2008
I found The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2007 when I was out hiking a couple few weeks ago. An Appalachian Trail hiker left it behind, recommending to whoever came by. I snagged it.
Any anthology will have some hits and misses. At least, in contrast with my frustrating experience with Flash Fiction Forward, all [...]
≡The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2007 (review: 3.5/5)
Friday, April 18, 2008
I found The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2007 when I was out hiking a couple few weeks ago. An Appalachian Trail hiker left it behind, recommending to whoever came by. I snagged it.
Any anthology will have some hits and misses. At least, in contrast with my frustrating experience with Flash Fiction Forward, all [...]
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Thursday, April 10, 2008
An interview with Mythbusters:
We’re just trying to see what happens. And we have relatively little time and a whole lot of curiosity, so the most efficient way to get there is what we do, and that often happens to be some form of science… That being said, the fact that we don’t have formal training, [...]
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Thursday, March 27, 2008
Science confirms the runner’s high, which used to be just folk wisdom. It’s connected not only with better mood, but also with tolerance for pain.
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Monday, February 4, 2008
The brown note is (supposedly) the ultra-low frequency at which humans lose control of their bowels.
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Thursday, January 10, 2008
“The electromagnetic field surrounding the power lines is enough to make fluorescent tubes glow.” [via jb]
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Wednesday, January 2, 2008
This year’s question from edge.org: “What have you changed your mind about? Why?” Dozens of scientists, researchers, philosophers, writers, and thinkers respond.
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Thursday, December 27, 2007
How to create an extreme overhang with toy bricks [$]. Via BLDGBLOG, where you’ll find some great images of the crazy stacking and some architectural speculation. I’d love to see some crazy buildings tilting over like that.
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Wednesday, December 26, 2007
“After Darwin, after Einstein—just as after Galileo and Copernicus—we can’t have the same theological ideas about God as we did before.” An interview with theologian John Haught on science, faith, and the troubles of the new atheism.
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Tuesday, December 11, 2007
“History looks more and more like a science fiction novel in which mutants repeatedly arose and displaced normal humans ‚Äì sometimes quietly, by surviving starvation and disease better, sometimes as a conquering horde. And we are those mutants.” Humans are evolving, and there’s a difference even over the small time frame of the past 1000-10,000 [...]
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Wednesday, November 28, 2007
The Cassini spacecraft has recently taken some fantastic photographs of Saturn. [via seat 1a]
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Thursday, November 22, 2007
How clean is the electricity I use? Mine is about 64% coal, 20% nuclear, 10% natural gas, and a smattering of renewable and non-renewable sources. Yeah, that coal bad news.
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Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Haile Gebrselassie set a new marathon record a couple days ago: 2:04:26. That’s almost 13 miles an hour.
Update: Just to put this in perspective, the world’s best sprinters average about 23-24 miles an hour during their few seconds of exertion. Gebrselassie was going half as fast, but 400 times the distance, and 700 times the [...]
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Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Alan Nelson links to a collection of Stephen Hawking’s lectures and colloquia. Cool.
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Thursday, September 27, 2007
Bonobos are in the news again. A while back there was a an article about bonobos in the New Yorker. And in the current issue of The Believer, an interview with primatologist Frans de Waal, who is gently criticized in the New Yorker article. It’s a good read, aside from lousy economics in the third [...]
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Sunday, September 23, 2007
There is a ton of recordings from the 2007 Singularity Summit, featuring all the speakers and panels. [via justin, of course]
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