xkcd

Welcome to the first post in my new National Geographic ScienceBlogs column “Significant Figures.”  I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you on a wide range of environmental science-related issues, data, and people, and to a productive and constructive interaction. My background? I’m an environmental scientist by training and inclination, with experience in engineering, hydrology, climatology, and interdisciplinary analysis. My research and writing have, for over thirty years, focused on water resources, climate dynamics and change, energy, risk assessment, and the synthesis and…

"...To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us An foolish notion:" Yes, everyone has linked the latest, greatest XKCD: So painful, so true. Fortunately the other thing about physicists, is that we have a great sense of humour. And we need it. Steve Hsu has been doing some provocative ruminating along these lines. This of course leads to classification of physicists, there being two types: Type I is smart. Type II is hard working. Type Ib/c is smart and hard working, and therefore really sub-category of Type II while Type Ia is smart but lazy. Type IIn is hard…

Looks like the show Sport Science (on ESPN) might take the place of Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman as the target of my bad-science attacks. Note: it looks like ESPN has the short episode I will be attacking online, so check it out. Let me start off with the big problem (which The Onion already talked about). Why do you want to make a show about science that has really terrible science (if you can even call it science)? I really don't get that. If you want to just talk about cool sports stuff, do that. Please don't call it science. Ok. Now on to the particular attack. In the last episode,…

Wow. In xkcd 681 comic, there is an impressive illustration of the common term "gravity well". Here is a small part of that large image: I can't resist. I must talk about this awesome illustration. My goal for this post is to help someone understand that comic (although the comic itself does a pretty good job). Energy Energy is the key here. Here, I will talk about two types of energy - kinetic energy and field energy. In this case, kinetic energy is basically just the energy associated with something moving. Field energy is the energy stored in the gravitational field. You could…

I'm sure the fun fact is true as well.

Over the past few months, I have been asked a number of questions about String Theory and the Universe, including from readers Benhead and Mastery Mistery. But now Jamie, whom I'm going to marry later this year, has been asking me about it, and so it's time to write something about the scientific topic of String Theory. (Send in your questions now, because I'll answer them all this week if there's enough interest.) Let's start with this pair of questions: String theory has been around for over 20 years, and so far, there is not one shred of experimental or observational evidence in support of…