What are some mindblowing scientific concepts? | Ask Metafilter
via somewhere: 'I'm looking for some scientific concepts that people who are stoned or drunk will find absolutely incredible. Something that will captivate their strange attention spans. Any thoughts?'
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Posts tagged with ‘science’
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4 June 2008 – 8:00 pm
Links
12 May 2008 – 9:00 am
CERN Podcast
Science porn.
(del.icio.us tags: cern physics podcasts science )
‘Bones, Rocks and Stars’ by Chris Turney
5 May 2008 – 10:21 am
Or to give it its fuller, more informative title: Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened. It is what it sounds like: a brief (under 200 pages, including the index) overview of dating technologies for a general audience: radio isotope dating, dendrochronology, Antarctic ice cores and so on. And I enjoyed it; [...]
More on the atheism/science malarkey
17 September 2007 – 4:42 pm
At Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers comments on the Jake Young article I linked to earlier. The bit of his post I would pick out is this:
Once again, science is a method. It’s a general set of procedures that rest on skepticism, induction, empiricism, and naturalism. Atheism is a conclusion. We look at the universe using the [...]
Science ≠ Atheism
13 September 2007 – 3:00 pm
There’s a post over at Pure Pedantry about the dangers of presenting science and atheism as equivalent or too closely connected; suggesting, for example, that atheism is the natural or inevitable end result of a scientific mindset.
It’s understandable that they sometimes get run together. There is a connection; it’s not a coincidence that scientists are [...]
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties!
23 August 2007 – 3:35 pm
I’ve just started a book called ‘Irrationality’, about the irrational behaviour of human beings. So far, much of the general drift has been fairly familiar, but no matter how many times you get told about the untrustworthy tendencies of the human mind, the specific experiments are still startling. Three that happened to jump out at [...]
Fucking bootiful
6 February 2007 – 12:28 am
It takes a lot to make me have sympathy for Bernard Matthews, whose company represents everything that’s worst in industrial food production, both the way they rear the turkeys and the revolting processed foods that they make from them. But I did get a twinge of sympathy when bird flu started killing all their turkeys.
I’ve [...]
Crappy journalism in action
24 August 2006 – 1:00 pm
I nearly posted a link to this story on the BBC website about cows having regional accents because I thought it was mildly interesting. But the internet linguistics police quickly debunked it.
The BBC story starts by saying “Cows have regional accents like humans, language specialists have suggested.” What actually happened was that a PR [...]
Bomb-sniffing flowers
15 May 2006 – 10:22 am
Scientists in Denmark, the US and Canada have all been working on producing a genetically-engineered plant whose flowers will come up red instead of white in the presence of underground explosives. The idea, of course, is that you can use them to to test for the presence of landmines by dropping the seeds from the [...]
Intellectuals, science, and the English Channel
7 May 2006 – 9:59 am
Something Todd Swift said pointed me to an article in the Guardian about the lack of public intellectuals in Britain, written by Agnès Poirier, a French journalist working in London. It’s worth reading just for the culture-clash exhibited in the comments.
I noticed that the unspoken assumption, from both sides of the argument, was inevitably that [...]
The ternness of terns
4 May 2006 – 4:38 pm
George Szirtes discusses people’s need to identify things - flowers, birds - something he doesn’t share. Indeed he sets up (but slightly backs away from), an opposition between the botanist’s way of looking and the artists’s way. He ends like this:
Yet all the time I am aware that even an urban citoyen of the imagination [...]
Transitional species
22 March 2006 – 1:40 pm
I was looking back at old PFFA threads yesterday, and there was an argument about religion, evolution and so on during which someone asserted that “there are no verifiable fossil records of transitions from one species to another.” This morning I feel inclined to make a point which I don’t think is always appreciated by [...]
Learning algebra
28 February 2006 – 12:41 pm
Something Kevin said sent me towards an article in the Washington Post about the uselessness of algebra to normal life, and the ensuing mouth-frothing response in the comments over at Pharyngula.
Two things I’d say. It rather makes me despair to see people talk about algebra as though it was advanced mathematics. Algebra is hardly even [...]
Evolution, ID, Carl Zimmer, monkey-men and suchlike. Again.
27 February 2006 – 12:52 pm
I’ve just added The Loom to the linkroll. The Loom is the blog of Carl Zimmer, who wrote the excellent and rivetingly eye-opening Parasite Rex, as well as the excellent but marginally less riveting At the Water’s Edge. They’re both worth reading, but the parasite one would be my recommendation just because the subject matter [...]
103 mutations of drosophila
3 February 2006 – 5:14 pm
act up (preferred name: capulet) adrift always early amalgam amnesiac anachronism arc archipelago argos armadillo armitage arrest arrow asense atonal aubergine aurora baboon bag of marbles bagpipe bantam basket bazooka Bearded beaten path bereft big brain blistered blistery boule brahma brainiac brakeless branchless breathless bric à brac Bride of sevenless brinker broad brother of [...]
Hypergraphia for Poetry in an Epileptic Patient
26 January 2006 – 9:27 pm
I got this link from somewhere - Bookslut, maybe? - but anyway, it’s a letter to The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences.
An epileptic patient “complained of being driven to write poetry. For 5 years, he experienced words as ‘continuously rhyming in his head’ and felt the need to write them down and show [...]
Mutants and the Dutch
2 January 2006 – 11:37 am
I recently read Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi, which is a book that uses mutation as a way of understanding the development of the body. It’s interesting but quite medical; I have a pretty high tolerance for stuff about chemical pathways, gene mutations, hormones and so on, but I still found all the polysyllabic chemical [...]