Archive for the ‘It’s Only Rocket Science’ Category
Bjørn Jørgensen: Arctic Photo
A recent story from Science@NASA ("Spring is Aurora Season", 20 March 2008) told an interesting story about how the aurora borealis seems to be more active near the equinoxes. The apparent reason has to do with "magnetic tubes" whose creation is favored when the Earth's magnetic poles have the alignment relative to the Sun that […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Music & Art
Huler's Defining the Wind
Back in the days when we roamed at video stores looking for something that might pique my interest, my attention would invariably be drawn to any movie that reviewers blurbed as–and publicists dared print on the package–"quirky". So, when my eyes landed on Scott Huler's Defining the Wind : The Beaufort Scale, and How a […]
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
Lienhard's Inventing Modern
When I went recently on my cultural trip to New York with Bill, I traveled with a couple of books: reading for the train trip and for those quiet moments at the hotel. One of the books I took was John H. Lienhard's Inventing Modern : Growing up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins (Oxford : […]
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
Park's Leap-Day Look at Science & Non-Science
Bob Park seems reinvigorated by all the science-silliness and some non-silliness going on that he reports in the latest (29 February) edition of "What's New". (Subscription information here.) Between feeling lazy and amused, I decided to include it all! 1. FENCES: SOMETHING THERE IS THAT DOESN’T LOVE A WALL. Technology makes us arrogant. A 28-mile […]
In: All, Current Events, It's Only Rocket Science
Science-Book Challenge Update
I just finished reading Edward O. Wilson's The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. My book note is here. It was a charming little book, oddly written in quasi-epistolary, addressed to a generic Southern Baptist pastor. It's more or less a series of essays recounting reasons why humankind might wish to forestall its […]
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
Bodin on Heliocentrism
After Copernicus published De Revolutionibus in 1543, acceptance of the idea that the Earth orbited the Sun was neither immediate nor universal. Some appealed to common sense: No one in his senses, or imbued with the slightest knowledge of physics will ever think that the earth, heavy and unwieldy from its own weight and mass, […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
Park on UFOs
On 1 February 2008, Robert Park (in his What's New) reported this incident: OTHER DIMENSIONS: THE GOVERNMENT’S UFO COVERUP. I was invited this week to join a panel of "experts" on "It’s Your Call with Lynn Doyle," an Emmy Award-winning, viewer-interactive news talk show on the Comcast Cable Television Network. The subject was "Are we […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, It's Only Rocket Science
Laughing At Creationists
Thanks to blogger Tinyfrog* I now know about a series of short videos that go under the collective title "Why do People Laugh at Creationists?" Apparently they were written, produced, and presented by a YouTube user named Thunderf00t. I am delighted to point them out because 1) they get across some terrific scientific ideas, at […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Laughing Matters
Earthrise
This remarkable image of the Earth rising over the lunar horizon is actually what it seems to be. It is a frame captured from an HDTV video taken on 7 November 2007 by the Japanese KAGUYA spacecraft, which is currently orbiting the Moon on a surveying mission. They tell us that the Earth is seen […]
In: All, Eureka!, It's Only Rocket Science
Ceci N'est Pas Une Blog
This is a blog posting about itself. According to my blog-software statistics, this is my one-thousandth posting since the first one I posted on 18 October 2004.* To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that I'm still writing here regularly three-plus years later. Evidently it works for me somehow. I've noticed that one-thousand is an […]
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
Total Lunar Eclipse, 20 February
Before I forget to mention it, this item is from NASA's Science News service: On Wednesday evening, February 20th, the full Moon over the Americas will turn a delightful shade of red and possibly turquoise, too. It's a total lunar eclipse—the last one until Dec. 2010. They have more on the eclipse here, with times […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science
GetPercent
The website GetReligion discusses press coverage of news stories about religion, and how well they exhibit an understanding of the religious issues involved. Their name comes from the idea that "The press…just doesn't get religion." Well, in this little example I'm afraid there's a bit of a need for some GetMath. In a story called […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science
Vogel's Cat's Paws and Catapults
More catching up. Months ago I finished reading Steven Vogel's Cat's Paws and Catapults : Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People (New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 1998, 382 pages). I enjoyed it immensely. Here's my book note. This book comes with a confession on my part, all about judging a book by its […]
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
Long Ago & Far Away
In a recent comment to a post I made about reading Chet Raymo's book Walking Zero, Bill asked an interesting question: Jeff, there's a question that has always bothered me. Raymo's talk about the Hubble Space Telescope's Ultra Deep Field image (page 174) raised it for me again. I'm sure you have the answer, or […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science
When Celsius = Fahrenheit
A while back, someone ended up at a page on this blog by asking Google for "the temperature at which the Celsius scale and Fahrenheit scale are the same number". I don't think they found the answer because I'd never actually discussed that question1, but I thought the question was pretty interesting and discussing the […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science
Easy Entropy
Thermodynamics is the theory that deals with heat and heat flow without reference to the atomic theory; it was developed at the same time as the steam engine and the family resemblances are striking. All concepts about temperature and pressure in terms of our perceptions of atomic or molecular motion came later and properly belong […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science
On Reading Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee
Recently I finished reading Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee : The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York : HarperCollins Publishers, 1992, 407 pages). I quite enjoyed it. It's the third of his books I've read. I previously enjoyed Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I didn't mind that this was a […]
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
On Reading Napoleon's Buttons
Also a few months back, I read the delightful Napoleon's Buttons : How 17 Molecules Changed History, by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson (New York : Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2003, 375 pages). I haven't run across so many popular chemistry books so far, but this clearly is one of the good ones. I enjoyed […]
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
A note on Aspirin
Here's another book that I read some months ago, but only get around to mentioning now: Diarmuid Jeffreys, Aspirin : The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug (New York : Bloomsbury, 2004, 335 pages). Here's my book note about it. This was a book by a journalist rather than a scientist. Occasionally the writing was […]
In: All, Books, It's Only Rocket Science
Beard of the Week XXXI: Beauty in Science
This week's beard belongs to geneticist Sean Carroll, professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of the book Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which is what this post is really about. The book, that is to say, although it does demonstrate that I'm not above finding a scientist attractive for his […]
In: All, Beard of the Week, Books, It's Only Rocket Science