The new look hereabouts is courtesy of a few minor hacks to the new release of Wordpress. Also new is the link across to my Audioscrobbler page on the right there. In Foobar2000 I’ve finally found an audio player that does everything I want (except play the stupidly proprietary RAM and ASX protocols, which I [...]
9 professional climatologists have started up a weblog, Real Climate, where they aim to correct media reporting of climate issues. Judging by the content already there, it looks like essential reading—already one of their posts points out a recent survey of the peer-reviewed scientific literature, finding that all 928 articles picked out with the [...]
I take my title from a Nature article reporting that, contrary to various folk tales you might hear from time to time, people cannot in general postpone their deaths until important events have passed. See:
Donn C. Young and Erinn M. Hade, “Holidays, Birthdays, and Postponement of Cancer Death”, in Journal of the American Medical Association, [...]
In case you thought it was a coincidence that the stupidest president presides over the fattest country, the scientific verdict is now in: fatty foods make you stupid.
If I were a rhymer I’d rhyme hymn with limn. In other news, you really get a sense for the bewildering diversity of contemporary physics when a review of a popular survey book designed for a general audience is recommended to heads of physics departments—on the grounds that it will enable them to more [...]
Since I started writing online a few years back I have for the most part fastidiously avoided writing about technology. Maybe it’s for prosaic reasons, wanting to put my former life as a software engineer behind me. But that’s not exactly true—I’m a closet utopian, I love the frisson of the smooth-functioning machine. [...]
Being just one of several gnomic utterances made during the course of a lecture by Ed Witten in January 1998 at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB. In lieu of reading Brian Greene, whose Elegant Universe is still waiting patiently on the shelf, I thought I’d start with this hours worth of prologue—and [...]
“The essence of Dirac偰魋 problem was simply that:
√(p2c2 + m02c4) ≠ pc + m0c2
and, in general: √(a2 + b2) ≠ a + b (for non-zero a and b), as everyone learns (or should learn) at school. At which point mere mortals give up. Geniuses try harder.”
(Norman McCubbin, “Beauty in physics: the legacy of [...]
“From the dreams of August Kekulé that led to the conception of a simple structure for benzene and Dmitry Mendeleyev that initiated the creation of the periodic table of elements, to the late-night dreamingof Otto Loewi, which inspired the experimental demonstration of neurochemical transmission, examples of creativity occurring during sleep are not uncommon”
Continuing to describe [...]
“This paper models love-making as a signaling game”.
Hugo M. Mialon, “The Economics of Ecstasy”, submitted to European Economic Review. (See the Slate article).
Just discovered: Sedna, the largest object found in solar orbit since Pluto in 1930. There have been a few similar-sized objects found over the last couple of years in the Kuiper Belt, always igniting tedious debate over whether it really is a planet. I wonder, though, how long it will be until children learning elementary [...]
“This suggestion is corroborated by the fact that we were not able to successfully test an adequate number of [Maya] 3-year olds due to their shyness, which does not usually pose problems to American experimenters”.
Knight, Nicola; Sousa, Paulo; Barrett, Justin L; and Atran, Scott. 2004. “Children’s attributions of beliefs to humans and God: cross-cultural evidence”, [...]
Interesting. The authors of a recent journal article cite a junk email which merely purports to reference a scientific study, and then reflect on what changes to current theories might be needed to deal with what it reports. (The email contained text which was scrambled but easily readable). See:
Jonathan Grainger and Carol Whitney, “Does the [...]
Stephen Hawking seems to have recently changed his mind on the prospect of a theory of everything, as witnessed by his Dirac Centennial lecture “G枚del and the end of physics”, given in 2002 but only just posted online. Most interesting is his discussion of the relationship between G枚del’s Theorem and a theory of everything—unless we [...]
“Collective decisions taken by voting or by optimizing the returns in the next turn can lead to worse performance than purely random choices”
(JMR Parrondo and Luis Din铆s, “Brownian motion and gambling: from ratchets to paradoxical games”, in Contemporary Physics , Vol. 45, No. 2, March-April 2004, p. 148).
The static on television sets is partly composed of the background microwave radiation of the big bang, and so we’ve always been able to watch the birth of the universe from the comfort of our own homes. I’m not sure if the sound of the static is similarly constituted, but if that doesn’t satisfy anyone, [...]
“Maybe this is not a subject that would normally be regarded as fundamental”
(M. Marder, “The Shape of the Edge of a Leaf”, in Foundations of Physics, Vol. 33, No. 12, December 2003, p. 1743)
Marder also discusses flowers.
“Shakespeare is just as little about the brain as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is about the weather”
(Beatrice de Gelder and Nouchine Hadjikhani, “Review of The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging”, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 7, Iss. 11 , November 2003, pp. 479-480).
[...]Making the news early in 1996 was the revelation that piles of rice behave in importantly different ways to piles of sand (Frette et al, 1996). Alas, thus it was shown that piles of sand cannot model all of the “omnipresent multi-scale structures throughout the natural world” (Creutz, 1997), as many scientists, perhaps trying too [...]
“Subjects are left alone to watch pornographic videos on a small television in a darkened room where gauges measure their arousal. The subjects also report their own responses by operating an electronic lever.”
(Robin Wilson, “Dr Sex”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 49, Issue 41, p. A8, 20 June 2003).