General
illconsidered | December 28, 2011I received this in my email today and thought I would pass it on to AFTIC readers as I think Wikipedia is one of the greatest things on the web.
Dear Coby,
Here's how the Wikipedia fundraiser works: Every year we raise just the funds that we need, and then we stop.
Because you and so many other Wikipedia readers donated over the past weeks, we are very close to raising our goal for this year by December 31 -- but we're not quite there yet.
You've already done your part this year. Thank you so much. But you can help us again by forwarding this email to a friend who you know relies on Wikipedia…
illconsidered | December 27, 2011I think I saw this on Planet 3.0, but wherever, the video below, documenting the late Stephen Sneider's remarkable efforts to communicate the urgency and nuance of our climate crises to the public, is very well done. Please watch.
illconsidered | December 9, 2011DemocracyNow! broadcasts this whole week from the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.
illconsidered | December 8, 2011DemocracyNow! broadcasts this whole week from the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.
illconsidered | December 7, 2011DemocracyNow! broadcasts this whole week from the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.
illconsidered | December 6, 2011DemocracyNow! broadcasts this whole week from the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.
illconsidered | December 5, 2011DemocracyNow! broadcasts this whole week from the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.
sb admin | November 20, 2011Last week I had a visit from a friend of mine, who was on something of a farewell tour. After several years of planning, he'd packed in his dependable but much-begrudged corporate job, and was setting sail for Asia, to see more of the world. He's already seen much more of the world than most people. Not because he was well connected or rich, but because he made it his life's mission to tour the forgotten, the hidden and the forbidden places of the world. I mention this because if there ever was a man to take life advice from, it is this one, and he put into words something I've been…
sciencepunk | November 20, 2011Last week I had a visit from a friend of mine, who was on something of a farewell tour. After several years of planning, he'd packed in his dependable but much-begrudged corporate job, and was setting sail for Asia, to see more of the world. He's already seen much more of the world than most people. Not because he was well connected or rich, but because he made it his life's mission to tour the forgotten, the hidden and the forbidden places of the world. I mention this because if there ever was a man to take life advice from, it is this one, and he put into words something I've been…
sb admin | November 9, 2011Today I'll be writing a series of blogposts from the Falling Walls conference in Berlin. Each speaker is invited to discuss the ideas, inventions, and discoveries they believe will break down walls in their field.
Robert E. Horn: How Visual Language Supports Decision Making About Wicked Problems and Social Messes
Let's face it, having "messes" listed as a research specialism on your business card is pretty neat. But Stanford's Robert Horn is exactly that, a man who studies messes, or more accurately "inter-related sets of problems", particularly because business and government strategies…
sciencepunk | November 8, 2011Google is celebrating Edmund Halley's birthday today, so it seemed like a good time to mention something that's been on my mind. It's about life, wonder, and celestial bodies.
Halley's Comet is somewhat unique, being the only short period comet visible to the naked eye. "Short period" here is something of an astronomy-centric phrase, given that it only appears every 75 years. I think a big part of the magic of Halley's Comet lies in the breadth of that period. It's just about the length of a human life, which means if you remember seeing the comet, you're unlikely to live long enough to…
sciencepunk | October 3, 2011So BoingBoing has an item on hanging chain clocks, on sale from Ticktock Showroom at a bargain $100. I wrote about a similar art piece by Andreas Dober a year ago on these very pages, but that had a price tag of $2,338, so I'm glad to see bicycle chains have come down in price.
Here's the thing though: to my eyes, both this clock and the original by Dober are backwards. The clock is designed so that the chain takes the place of the hands as the moveable part, and thus someone decided that it should go clockwise. As a result, the numbers are printed in the opposite order to a usual clock.…
sciencepunk | September 14, 2011Over the years, we've been blessed with innumerable breathtaking images from the pursuit of science - from the unimaginably huge Pillars of Creation to the endlessly tiny Mandelbrot Fractals. But some of these images have taken on an iconic status, instantly recognisable to schoolchildren and Republican presidential candidates alike. The problem is, a lot of these iconic science images are more icon than science. Here's a few you might have seen before.
The Rutherford Model
What you think it means: This is an atom.
What's wrong with it: This model is a century out of date.
Back in 1911,…
sciencepunk | September 14, 2011In 2007, the smash-hit game BioShock told the story of Rapture, a city built on the Atlantic seabed dedicated to the pursuit of the free market. Now academic Alexander Wissner-Gross has revealed how the race for light-speed trading could fuel the development of something remarkably similar.
High frequency trading (HFT) exploits tiny differences in the price of a commodity across two markets. As these discrepancies can last a fraction of a second, trading is carried out by computers that make thousands of transactions in milli- or even microseconds. At these speeds, the time it takes to…
sciencepunk | September 13, 2011Hats off to Ben Goldacre and his diligent team who've put together this crowd-sourced map of nerdy places to visit in the British Isles and beyond.
I once tried to convince some civil servants to support a similar idea (marginally less nerdy, more family-orientated), so I'm thrilled to see this bloom. The database is still being populated, so be sure to add your nerdy day trip destinations. As you might expect, Industrial Revolution nostalgia and eccentric museums feature heavily, two things that Britain does very well. My own contribution: the hamlet of Venn, in Devon, which may or may…
sciencepunk | August 30, 2011A group of 'astronauts' and a mechanical rover have set sail through the stars across North America to an impact crater near Mistastin Lake in the wilderness of Canada, travelling by helicopter rather than rocket ship, in what is known as an "analogue mission":
Beginning today (August 29), a team of scientists and engineers led by Dr. Gordon Osinski from The University of Western Ontario will travel to an impact crater at Kamestastin Lake, Labrador, where they will run analogue human and robotic sample return mission scenarios. An "astronaut" team will conduct a series of investigations in…
sciencepunk | August 3, 2011YouTube user Henry Reich is behind an ongoing series of videos exploring concepts of physics in sixty second bursts. You might think that's too short a time to explain wave particle duality, and some of the videos did leave me hankering for extra information, but hey, that's more than I can say for any physics class I took at school!
(Thanks to Noah Raford for the title)
sciencepunk | August 2, 2011Annalisa Crannel has written an interesting article for Inside Higher Ed on using art to teach mathematics. Of particular interest is how artists and mathematicians approach problems differently - the former willing to stumble toward the answer while the latter hold off until they're sure they have the right one.
We all know and can parody the dreaded two-trains problems. A simpler question is this: If you sketch a picture of the rails of the train track going into the distance, and you know where the first two railroad ties go, where do you put the next one? In our class, we change the…
sciencepunk | July 28, 2011In the early hours of a Wednesday morning two weeks ago, three Greenpeace activists made their way past the perimeter fence at Ginninderra Experiment Station in Canberra, Australia, and destroyed a crop of GM wheat using weed strimmers. A spokeswoman for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the national science agency which runs the station, said the damage was estimated to run A$300,000. In a statement released by Greenpeace Australia Pacific, activist Laura Kelly stated that "We had no choice but to take action to bring an end to this experiment".
Both…
sciencepunk | July 5, 2011
The British Film Institute in London is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic flight with KOSMOS, a season of films dedicated to Soviet sci-fi.
Snip:
Part two of KINO will be presented in conjunction with the 50th anniversary celebrations of Yuri Gagarin's momentous journey into space. KOSMOS will provide an introduction to Russian and Soviet science fiction from the periods leading up to and after Gagarin's expedition as the first human to orbit space. The season will offer rarely seen films and key documentaries in a programme that explores the impact of the Soviet…