Now on ScienceBlogs: The Laboratory at Harvard
A blag for math, physics and the New Enlightenment
Blake Stacey is a physics boffin and science-fiction writer who wandered the Earth and eventually settled in the nation-state of Denial.
Category: Evolution
Jen finds a story about a Swiss research group which made a little ecology of robots with neural-network brains and let their wiring be crafted by natural selection. The most entertaining line of the pop-science writeup: At intervals, the robots...
Posted by Blake Stacey at 5:56 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Bibliophilia
My meta-review of S. Eddy's book review in PLoS Biology leads me into familiar curmudgeon territory.
Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:02 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: arXiv
M. B. Kitzbichler et al. (2009). "Broadband Criticality of Human Brain Network Synchronization" PLoS Comput Biol 5, 3: e1000314. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000314. Self-organized criticality is an attractive model for human brain dynamics, but there has been little direct evidence for its existence...
Posted by Blake Stacey at 5:03 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Plectics
The night before last, I fell asleep on the sofa in my home's art gallery. (How I ended up living in a place which has its own art gallery is a story for another day, as is the reason why...
Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:16 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Plectics
"... 1978 was the year when the U.S. ran out of excuses for bad economic policy and performance." — Time Magazine, "1979 Outlook: Recession" (25 Dec 1978)...
Posted by Blake Stacey at 11:51 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: arXiv
The following I file under "Why didn't I hear about these before I wrote a science-fiction novel?" Hunting the "chameleon particle" with spare parts from Swapfest Glider guns realized in chemical reactions (arXiv:0902.0587, to be published in Phys. Rev. E)...
Posted by Blake Stacey at 3:12 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I have been informed that Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians (2007) is now available in audiobook format from Cherry Hill Publishing. Cherry Hill is now selling an eight-CD recording of the book read by the author, with a foreword by John...
Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:15 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
I haven't yet seen the new The Day the Earth Stood Still movie. Generally speaking, I haven't been terribly speedy about seeing movies as they come out; sometimes, I just wait until they're available on mplayer. The reviews have not...
Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:18 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I'm currently staring at a heap of numbers and trying to make sense out of them. In lieu of substantive discourse from me, therefore, here are a few items I've recently enjoyed reading: Jonathan Shock explores the physics of rainbows...
Posted by Blake Stacey at 12:16 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Can physics tell us about ourselves? To phrase the question more narrowly: can the statistical tools which physicists have developed to understand the collective motion of large agglutinations of particles help us figure out what our brains are doing? If...
Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:06 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Highly Allochthonous 11.05.2009
Eruptions 11.05.2009
Not Exactly Rocket Science 11.05.2009
Corpus Callosum 11.05.2009
Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
![[sex and science]](http://www.sunclipse.org/downloads/sexandscience3.png)
