General
sciencepunk | September 26, 2012I was at the beach recently, staring out at the cargo ships waiting offshore, and beyond them to the distant horizon, and I thought, how far away is the horizon after all? Luckily, Phil Plait has the answer to that on his website, it's a simple question of trigonometry:
Taking the Earth to be 6365km in radius, a man of average height (5' 9" or 175.26cm) standing with his toes in the ocean can stare 4.72km out to sea*. The higher up you are, the further your horizon retreats. But while Phil was thinking big - about how far you might see from an airplane or the space station, I'm curious…
illconsidered | September 18, 2012Now here's a great use of airplane fuel...(no, actually it is not)
(h/t Greg Laden)
illconsidered | September 12, 2012I honestly think that while belief in creationism is the antithesis of scientific thought, it is still possible to be a good scientist and a creationist at the same time. This is for two main reasons. Firstly, creationism is a term that covers a wide spectrum of beliefs, from literal 6000 year old earth bible thumping denial of evolution to a more nuanced kind of mysticism that believes somewhere beneath the deep layers of complex and wonderful natural processes exists an unexplainable and supernatural foundation.
There is no practical difference between investigating how deeply "God's"…
sciencepunk | September 11, 2012I spend a lot of time being frustrated by the constraints of blogging as it is usually done. Even now I’m squirting these words at you from a narrow gully of text some 500 pixel wide, while the rest of your screen goes mostly unused (and once we get below the fold, entirely unused. Were I to keep writing, my words will cascade endlessly in tight formation down the centre of a blank expanse of screen, like the kilometre-high waters of Angel Falls cutting through white clouds).
One of the questions that has become more prescient lately is whether location is relevant anymore. It used to be that…
illconsidered | September 11, 2012There is a blogstorm raging these days for those of you with inadequate workplace supervision. Check here for the latest post from ground zero.
The synopsis is: scientist releases paper showing strong correlation between belief in conspiracy theories, free market ideology, anti-science attitudes and the rejection of climate science; climate skeptic blogger community sees conspiracy and scientific fraud. (To their credit, I have not yet seen the accusation of "socialist".)
I don't have much to say about it, I am as embarrassed for these folks as I am amused by the irony of it all. I should…
sciencepunk | August 2, 2012Located in the northeast of India, the state of Uttar Pradesh is known for the Taj Mahal, the Ganges and the holy city of Varanasi. It's also home to the eastern 'Badlands', an area that boasts high levels of poverty, crime, and acute pressures on land. (In fact, land is in such short supply that people will have living family members legally declared dead in order to speed up the inheritance process.) Peasant farmers work small family plots, and with each successive generation, the plot is divided amongst the children, getting smaller and smaller until people are farming strips of land "…
sciencepunk | July 24, 2012Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NPR both have features on watchmaker Garo Anserlian, who designed a special watch that keeps time with Martian solar days. Snip:
The martian day is longer than Earth's, but this minimal variance can amount to physical and mental fatigue. Every day, team members are reporting to work 39 minutes later than the previous day.
"Everything on this mission is based on local solar time on Mars," said Julie Townsend, Mars Exploration Rover avionics systems engineer. "From home, during the mission practice tests, it was very difficult to constantly translate Earth…
sciencepunk | July 18, 2012I was browsing through some old notes when I found this - I think I wrote it in sheer exasperation after yet another email from a production company demanding I work for nothing because, gee whiz, everyone wants to be in TV, right? I think this will reverberate with anyone who's freelanced for a living. Apologies to Dr Seuss.
I will not work your show for free!
--
I will not work your show for free!
I will not be your radio host
I will not write you a blog post
I will not pen a sharp riposte
I will not keep readers engrossed
I will not get your brand exposed.
I will not write a trial…
sciencepunk | July 17, 2012Some time back, I pitched a few editors the idea of doing something on a new breed of airborne aircraft carriers. Sadly it didn't stick, because no one had invented them yet. Such are the constraints of writing non-fiction. Reality has a way of catching up though, and New Scientist broke the news today about the latest in air tech: floating fortresses that dispense drones and guided missiles on command.
The concept of an airborne aircraft carrier is not new. Almost as soon as we were in the air, we started trying to compound air power by sticking one craft on top of (or under, or alongside)…
sciencepunk | July 15, 2012I live in Haringey, an as-yet-ungentrified part of North London, and there's a small park near me with a very curious chair in it.
The park isn't much - just a strip of lawn passing by a basketball court and a small playground for toddlers. Sprouting like mushrooms here and there are chairs like this one. Lonely little chairs just big enough for one person to sit on.
When I first saw these, I thought they were a little odd, but didn't put much weight on it. Just another poorly thought out piece of urban design, and lord knows Britain has plenty of that to go around. One afternoon I saw a…
sciencepunk | July 11, 2012
Long held to be the window to the soul, research published today in PLoS shows that the eyes are not the tell-tale Achilles heel of liars, despite what as NLP practitioners, Hollywood and innumerable armchair mentalists would have you believe. Snip:
For decades many NLP practitioners have claimed that when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be lying, whilst a glance up to their left is indicative of telling the truth.
Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Dr Caroline Watt (University of Edinburgh, UK) tested this idea by filming volunteers as they…
sciencepunk | July 9, 2012
This three-story-tall mural was painted by international artist Josef Kristofoletti on the side of the ATLAS control room directly above the detector:
This project was inspired by the same questions that physicists are trying to answer; where did we come from, what does it mean to be human, and what is our place in the universe? The artist worked closely with physicists at CERN over the course of a year to create the mural. It depicts the artist's interpretation of what the Higgs boson might look like.
This short, time-lapse video was finished June 2012, using photos that were taken during…
sciencepunk | June 27, 2012My desk was a bit too shiny for my optical mouse to work properly, so I needed to coat the surface in a matte paint. What better than blackboard paint?
sciencepunk | June 26, 2012Those of you who follow me on Twitter will probably remember that around the time Scienceblogs shifted to a new format, I was busy doing a final piece of development on my old website, SciencePunk.com. I felt it had sat in stasis for too long, and I’d outgrown a lot of the views and content on there. I wanted to paint something fresh onto it, but that required a blank canvas. Rather than delete everything (which seemed like quite a blunt act), I thought it would be more fun to visualise the neglect that it was suffering.
So, with the help of Steve Moss, I had a plugin that would gradually…
sciencepunk | June 22, 2012Yet another well-meaning yet soul-crushingly misdirected initiative from the public purse, this time as the European Commission engages in a cack-handed attempt to convince the high-heeled, lipstick stained people they've conflated with women in general that science is a Girl Thing. It seems to assume that it's impossible for women to be interested in chemistry unless it's in the context of cosmetics, or biology except insomuch as fashion. If you can stomach it, here's a the video in all its garish horror - Science: It's a girl thing (now removed in shame by the makers - mirror below). It…
illconsidered | May 21, 2012This image has been going around the intertubes recently, I saw it first on Planet 3.0 and again on APOD. It is one of those interesting illustrations of large quantities that seems surprising or anti-intuitive either because you never thought about it carefully before or just because it is hard to get your head around sizes that are so far outside the realm of everyday experience.
Anyway, I am posting it because my wife insisted (a very unusual turn of events, considering the usual frown upon spending my non-work time on the computer!). When she saw it she became quite alarmed and thought…
illconsidered | May 10, 2012It is by now old news that George Zimmerman has finally been arrested for the unprovoked killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, 17 yr old African American teenager on his way home from the store with a bit of junk food. It took over a month and huge public outcry to get even this small step towards justice but it is the right first step.
But in case you need something new to get outraged about I would like to call your attention to the equally, if not more, outrageous case of Kenneth Chamberlain's murder at the hands of Whiteplains NY police officers.
Police were summoned to the scene for a…
sciencepunk | May 2, 2012(A rant hammered out in bed. Not spellchecked, fact checked, or cross checked.)
So a few weeks ago the world swooned over the latest exciting tech announcement from Google, Project Glass. But I have mixed feelings, which in my time-honored style I am only just now getting down on paper. I watched the video, and I sat there and thought: really? Is that it?
It's perplexing to me that a technology that holds as much potential as Project Glass does should be introduced as nothing more than a glorified smartphone interface welded in front of your face, as if there was some pressing need to furnish…
sb admin | February 1, 2012Dear scientists,
Why do you study, the thing that you study? What is it, and why did you choose to study it over all the other possible things you could have studied?
Best
Frank
sciencepunk | February 1, 2012Dear scientists,
Why do you study, the thing that you study? What is it, and why did you choose to study it over all the other possible things you could have studied?
Best
Frank