Archive for Science
Here’s a roundup of some responses to, and works that could be seen as being in dialogue with, Tom Godwin’s 1954 story “The Cold Equations.” (The original story is also available online.) The first five links below are nonfiction; the rest are fiction. I should note that I don’t really want to host yet another […]
Yesterday’s xkcd led me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about the history of temperature scales. Some particular things that struck me: It hadn’t occurred to me that standardized temperature scales weren’t invented until around 1700, and thus that before that, there were no standardized numerical representations of temperature. Galileo or someone connected to him invented […]
My father was a big fan of Robert Anton Wilson. I read the Illuminatus! trilogy in the summer between 8th and 9th grade (it changed my life). All through high school, I would occasionally pick up one of my father’s Wilson books and read some random bit of it, but aside from Illuminatus!, I never […]
When I described the boardgame Terraforming Mars to someone a couple months back (I forget who, sorry), the first thing they asked was “What about atmospheric pressure?” I hadn’t thought of that question, but it seemed like an excellent question after they raised it. Presumably you would need to significantly increase atmospheric pressure to make […]
I've seen several potentially misleading graphs in articles lately, so here's a reminder of a couple of common y-axis issues:...
A few weeks ago, I decided to take a look at the book of The Martian. I hadn't had much...
I just encountered this nifty way to easily square numbers in your head: To calculate n2 for n between 40...
There's a lovely 7-minute feel-good video that purports to reproduce a scientific study that, the video says, proves that the...
I've seen a couple of people complain about the new Trek movies not being very scientific, which led me to...
Happened across this while looking up something else: But being a dissenter from orthodoxy is not difficult; the hard part...
Some technical and vaguely tech-related items, mostly from a couple months back: IBM discovers the business value of editors. OkCupid...
A set of interesting and thematically linked items, I think via BoingBoing: A scientific hoax/trick/joke: water marbles. The video shows...