Going shampoo-free sounds kind of cool.
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Posts for Past 60 Days
Category Archives: Science
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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 […]
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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 – 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]
≡Galileo’s sunspot illustrations
Monday, September 10, 2007
Back in the summer of 1612, Galileo did a series of daily observations of the sun. His illustrations were reproduced in his Letters on Sunspots of 1613. The work, part of an ongoing scientific battle with Christoph Scheiner, settled a lot of the contemporary debate on sunspots, killing the idea that the sun had minor […]
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Tuesday, August 21, 2007
One of my ongoing fascinations is with sense of scale. Here’s a couple other interesting thought experiments to understand the immensity of our universe:
Suppose that our Earth is the ball in the tip of a ball-point pen. How big would the Sun be, and how far away from the pen tip? First, Hold the ball-point […]
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Sunday, July 29, 2007
Time may not exist. What will they think of next? It’s a really cool article. I’m always glad to hear of interesting theoretical physics outside of stri-*yawn* string theory.
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Monday, July 23, 2007
Plates from George Catlin’s 1844 North American Indian Portfolio. And I’m a sucker for celestial atlases, like Johann Rost’s 1723 Atlas Portatilis Coelestis—note the fold-out pages for color illustrations. The Linda Hall Library has a number of other cool digital collections.
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Wednesday, July 18, 2007
What if… Earth’s topography was reversed so that continents were oceans and the oceans were continents? Pretty cool. I’m trying to imagine the societies that would spring up and the new planetary politics.
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Thursday, April 5, 2007
A long essay exploring Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies.
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Tuesday, April 3, 2007
The Universcale guides you from cosmic size all the way down to the immeasurable sub-atomic scale. Kind of like the Powers of Ten film, but this one has chill Musak.
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Tuesday, April 3, 2007
I was reading this profile of Albert Einstein yesterday and came across this mind-blowing bit of trivia. Einstein “calculated how many water molecules existed in 22.4 litres.” That’s pretty cool in and of itself. But going further, “that many unpopped popcorn kernels when spread across the United States would cover the country nine miles deep”.
≡The Trouble with Physics (review: dnf)
Sunday, April 1, 2007
I learned a lot from this book. But at this point, I have neither the time nor the brainpower to finish it off. The half that I read is quite good, though, so I’ll share a bit from that. The title of Lee Smolin’s book foretells much: The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String […]
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Thursday, March 29, 2007
An image of all the objects in our solar system larger than 200 miles in diameter. This is a nice addition to my other links about sense of scale and projects that try to make sense of Really Big Ideas. [via waxy]
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Tuesday, March 27, 2007
“havent slept in 105 hrs. my eyes are burnng horribly an seem to be bloodshot. as far as reaction time goes, its almost nonexistant. i had friend throw something at me, and didnt even bother flinching.”
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Tuesday, March 20, 2007
I’m pretty much fascinated with the Whitney Music Box, which explores some of the ideas in John Whitney’s 1959 book Digital Harmony. I like the microtonal variation, and the sine wave harmonics are cool because harmonics are inherently cool. Jim Bumgardner wrote more about this project and some of the mathematics of the patterns in […]
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Monday, March 5, 2007
The Cassini spacecraft has sent back some new images of Saturn. There’s a cool time-lapse video of making an orbit around the rings, with the moons zipping by in the background.
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