Archive for the ‘It’s Only Rocket Science’ Category
Friday Soirée IV: Eureka!
With tonight's program we're out for some thrilling exoticism and discovery — in an intimate setting: harpsichord music by one of my favorite Baroque guys and stimulating conversation with a great scientist and thinker. Soler: Sonata in F-Sharp Major Padre Antonio Soler (1729–1783) was a Catalan composer who studied music from the time he was […]
In: All, Eureka!, Friday Soirée, It's Only Rocket Science, Music & Art
The Atoms in Watermelon
I did not plan to become the expert on such an arcane topic–although I can answer the question as it arises–but once I had written a blog posting called "Atoms Are Not Watermelons",* my web was spun, my net set, the trap was ready for the unsuspecting googler who should type such an interesting question […]
In: All, Food Stuff, It's Only Rocket Science
Beard of the Week LXXXIV: Astrology Revealed
This week's beard belongs to the youthful Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who established the intellectual starting point for this short discussion. In Galileo's day [c. 1610], the study of astronomy was used to maintain and reform the calendar. Sufficiently advanced students of astronomy made horoscopes; the alignment of the stars was believed to influence everything from […]
In: All, Beard of the Week, It's Only Rocket Science
"The Buried Nose" and "Eye for Science": Scienticity Updates
I have managed in the last few weeks to make a little progress on matter concerning Ars Hermeneutica. (Updating the company website is not one of them, however.) On the book note front, there were some enhancements and new features that appeared some little while back that I didn't mention. Among all the fascinating notes […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Personal Notebook
Friday Soirée: Feynman & Villa-Lobos
Let us have now a little soirée, a short program of ideas and music to cheer up my rather drab Friday evening. On tonight's program, Richard Feynman and Heitor Villa-Lobos. The Feynman bits are both excerpts from a BBC series called "Fun to Imagine" (1983), in which Feynman is interviewed and talks about all sorts […]
In: All, Friday Soirée, It's Only Rocket Science, Music & Art
Intellectual Abuse & "Insidious Creationism"
Creationist advocates of intellectually dishonest ideas like "teach the controversy", or "evolution is only a theory" are not engaged in a scientific debate. Neither are they engaged in a debate about how science works. Indeed, they are not even participating in good-faith (no pun intended) discourse but are pursuing their own subversive agenda, no holds […]
In: All, Current Events, It's Only Rocket Science, Snake Oil--Cheap!
An Eye for Science
I have been hanging around this blog for the past week but you might not have noticed. Most of my time has gone into the little box on the left (which you won't see if your reading the RSS feed — so visit the site once, already!), with "Eye for Science" at the top and […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Personal Notebook, The Art of Conversation
Beard of the Week LXXXII: Space-Time Expands
This week's beard belongs to* author John R. Gribbin (1946– ), a science writer who started life as an astrophysicist. (His website.) I've read and mentioned a few of his books here in the last year or so, and I've been enjoying them so far. The one that I most recently read and enjoyed is […]
In: All, Beard of the Week, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
On Reading Potter's You Are Here
Another book I read and enjoyed recently was by Christopher Potter: You Are Here : A Portable History of the Universe (New York : HarperCollinsPublishers, 2009; 194 pages). Here is my book note. Potter said he wanted to write the book he wanted to read but no one had ever written. Great idea! His saying […]
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
Beard of the Week LXXX: Magnets & Relativity
This week's beard* belongs to Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879). He did significant work in several fields (including statistical physics and thermodynamics, in which I used to research) but his fame is associated with his electromagnetic theory. Electromagnetism combined the phenomena of electricity and magnetism into one, unified field theory. Unified field theories are […]
In: All, Beard of the Week, It's Only Rocket Science
Open Mind vs. Empty Head
For reasons that we don't need to detail, I was doing some online research today on the topic of perpetual-motion machines (PMMs). This bit that I quote below is an excerpt from his answer to the question given, but it conveyed the idea pretty succinctly, I thought. As you might imagine, being an atheistic, gay […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
On Reading The Age of Entanglement
Reading proceeds apace, but writing about the books seems to happen in big clumps. For instance, my book note on Louisa Gilder's The Age of Entanglement : When Quantum Physics was Reborn (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. xvi + 443 pages). Perhaps if I wrote less I could write sooner. Oddly, I didn't […]
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
Beard of the Week LXXIX: Up, Up, Up and Away
This week's pair of stylish, mid-nineteenth-century beards belong to Les Frères Tissandier,* the brothers Albert Tissandier (1839-1906) on the left, and Gaston Tissandier (1843-1899). Albert was the artist, known as an illustrator, and Gaston was the scientist and aviator.† The Tissandier Brothers were pioneering adventurers (only Gaston did the flying) in high-altitude balloon ascensions. From […]
In: All, Beard of the Week, It's Only Rocket Science
Beard of the Week LXXVIII: Zeppeliner
This week's beard, the best example we've seen so far of an actual "goatee", belongs to Ludwig Dürr (1878–1955), remembered as the chief engineer who built the successful Zeppelin airships. After an unsatisfactory one-year period in the navy, Dürr was hired, on 15 January 1899, as an engineer at Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH, the company that […]
In: All, Beard of the Week, It's Only Rocket Science
GRB 090423
This luminous blob is a "gamma-ray burster", and exceedingly distant from us: slightly over 13 billion light-years. In fact, it is the current record-holder in the "most distant object seen" category. It was spotted recently by NASA's Swift spacecraft (about the spacecraft; and about the Swift mission). Just how a gamma-ray burst happens is still […]
Equality Advances, Pie Charts Decline
Via Joe.My.God I learn that a new CBS News / New York Times poll shows an amazing 42% of those polled in favor of legal marriage for same-sex couples. That's amazing because the previous poll by the same group only one month ago found only 33% in favor of legal marriage. This increase of 9 […]
In: All, Faaabulosity, It's Only Rocket Science
Endangered Species Act Less Endangered
More signs today of a return to policy supported by science rather than science perverted to the will of policy. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today announced that the two departments are revoking an eleventh-hour Bush administration rule that undermined Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections. Their decision requires […]
In: All, Current Events, It's Only Rocket Science, Speaking of Science
Our Spotless Sun
Last week (on 4 April 2009, to be precise), this item came from SpaceWeather.com: SPOTLESS SUNS: Yesterday, NASA announced that the sun has plunged into the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century. Sunspots have all but vanished and consequently the sun has become very quiet. In 2008, the sun had no spots 73% of […]
Beard of the Week LXXV: Two Benfords
This week's beard belongs to physicist and science-fiction author Gregory Benford. His official website, source of the photograph, tells us that Benford [born in Mobile, Alabama, on January 30, 1941] is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. Benford conducts research in plasma […]
In: All, Beard of the Week, It's Only Rocket Science
On Reading Sun in a Bottle
Rather recently I enjoyed reading Charles Seife's Sun in a Bottle : The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking (New York : Viking, 2008; 294 pages). The subtitle is indicative, although I'm not sure just how strange the history of fusion is. Of course, what he means by "the history of […]
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science