Science history:
Category: Science history
Isaac Newton: emo teenager ("No man understands me. [...] I cannot but weepe. I know not what to do") who grew up to revolutionize science, pioneer new mathematics and, yes, fight crime. Here's Tom Levenson talking about Newton's career as...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:32 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Bibliophilia
Three book-related items up today: First, a hearty congratulations to Brian Switek, whose book, now titled Written In Stone, is set to be published next fall! If the sample chapters I saw a few months back are any indication, Brian's...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 10:44 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Carnivalia
The thirteenth instalment of The Giant's Shoulders, the blogohedronic celebration of classic science, is available at Dr. SkySkull's place. In an odd bit of synchronicity, the day I posted a brief note on Pynchon, Dr. SkySkull chose for his theme...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:52 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: arXiv
Today on the arXivotubes, S. Fortunato has a review article on detecting community structure within networks: The modern science of networks has brought significant advances to our understanding of complex systems. One of the most relevant features of graphs representing...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 4:55 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
Maybe Brian, gg and I need to expose the problem of "textbook cardboard" in comic-book format....
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 12:32 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Electromagnetism
It makes you behave like the village clergyman in an early English physics textbook. It is interesting to note that Earnshaw himself was concerned with quite a different problem: the nature of the "aether", which we have talked about quite...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 8:52 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Bibliophilia
Yesterday evening, I came home to find a new piece of swag waiting for me: a brown paper parcel, lined with bubble wrap and containing Sean B. Carroll's Remarkable Creatures (2009). I flipped it open immediately after extracting it from...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 10:15 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Pseudoscience
My SciBling PalMD has discovered a form of woo whose name, at least, was new to me: "Emotional Freedom Techniques". Why does "EFT" work? Its promoters will be happy to tell you: EFT is a procedure that borrows from the...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 2:04 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: arXiv
On the arXiv: Cong-Xin Qiu, "AdS/CFT Aspect of the Cosmological QCD Phase Transition" (arXiv:0812.2601). Published in Phys. Rev. D 79, 063505. Recently, deeper understanding of QCD emerges from the study of the AdS/CFT correspondence. New results include the properties of...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:01 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
The story so far: New Scientist magazine publishes an issue with a heartbreakingly sensationalist cover, and biology experts across the Blogohedron get up in arms. (See Sandwalk, Ecographica, Evolutionary Novelties and Genomicron for sample critiques of both cover and content.)...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:11 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks