Geoscientists
greengabbro | February 19, 2009 Following the Royal Mail's release of some lovely new Darwin stamps, a few of us got to Twittering over lunch yesterday about the lack of geologists on this year's release of American scientist stamps.
(What's that? You have no idea what Twittering is? It's a stupid Web Eleventy-Point-Oh jibber-jabber service, pay no attention. If you are an Eleventy-Point-Oh sort of person, though, perhaps you should be following me.)
Googling around a bit for existing stamps that feature earth scientists, I found the pickings to be surprisingly slim. Alfred Wegener has been on stamps issued by both East…
grrlscientist | January 29, 2009tags: earth science, geoscience, nature, streaming video
What does an geoscientist do and how do you become one? The footage on this video is really remarkable [6:38]
greengabbro | April 16, 2008 The man who discovered the "butterfly effect" died this morning at the age of 90.
Ed Lorenz was a meteorologist; I will spare you most of the details of his career, as they can be found in the MIT obituary. But back in the early 60s, when he was trying to figure out why weather prediction was so difficult, he discovered that even a simple set of equations can produce fundamentally unpredictable results (play with this effect here!). Scientists in virtually every field of study have been banging their heads against this fact in utter frustration for the past 45 years.
Quoting from an email…