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Excellent photos of giant flocks of European starlings, which can comprise more than a million birds. In 1866, a passenger pigeon flock was observed in southern Ontario that was a mile wide, 300 miles long, took 14 hours to pass, and was comprised of some 3.5 billion birds. That would have been a fantastic sight.
Sarah Trigg’s work combines geographic maps with biological forms. “The explorer system [in colonial North America] caused the Native American system to change its normal functioning, much like cancer cells do to normal cells.” More here. (via moon river)
“Shy people may be quiet, but there’s a lot going on in their heads. When they encounter a frightening or unfamiliar situation — meeting someone new, for example — a brain region responsible for negative emotions goes into overdrive.” (via mr)
The hygiene hypothesis of allergies “argues that exposure to more natural environments such as farms early in life helps train the body to respond appropriately to harmless microbes and pollen”. Could also be called the “let your kids eat dirt hypothesis”. Somewhat related story: my dad had allergies when he was a kid but then got stung by a bunch of bees one day and boom, no more allergies.
Italian scientists have created glass made out of carbon dioxide. At high pressure, instead of forming a crystal (dry ice), the CO2 forms a clear, hard, vitreous material. More info. (Little known fact: I did research on glass in college, rubidium and cesium borosilicates mostly. Here’s a few citations on Google Scholar.)
I can’t tell if this is a joke or not, but someone seems to be quite skeptical about the “theory of gravity” on this Christian Forums site. “are you going to tell me that the gravity of the sun is strong enough to keep PLUTo in orbit but not an airplane or a little bird??????”
Some sweet soul has put Powers of Ten online. If you’ve never seen it, I can’t recommend it enough:
Powers of Ten is a short film by Charles and Ray Eames, whose work you may have previously sat in. The film starts on a picnic blanket in Chicago and zooms out 10x every 10 seconds until the entire universe (more or less) is visible. And then they zoom all the way back down into the nucleus of an atom. A timeless classic. (via youngna)
Update: How in the hell did I miss this Powers of Ten Simpsons couch gag? (thx, ray and jeff)
I know I’m going to get mail about my five-star rating for this movie, but it cannot be helped. One summer when I was a kid, a friend and I watched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure — no joke — every single day for a span of 2 months. I still know every line by heart, the timing, inflection, everything. If there were a Broadway production of this movie, I could slide effortlessly into the role of either Bill S. Preston, Esq. or Ted Theodore Logan, no rehearsal needed.
In my high school physics class my senior year, we had to do a report on something we hadn’t learned about in class — which, I discovered when I got to college, was a lot — and I did mine on time travel. I went to our small school library and read articles in Discover and Scientific American magazines about Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, quantum mechanics, causality, and wormholes. To illustrate the bit about wormholes, I brought in my well-worn VHS tape of Bill and Ted’s (a dub of a long-ago video rental) and showed a short clip of the phone booth travelling through space and time via wormhole. I got a B+ on my presentation. The teacher told me it was excellent but marked me down because it was “over the heads” of everyone in the class…which I thought was completely unfair. How on earth is Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure over anyone’s head?
Unsurprisingly, the WSJ doesn’t much care for An Inconvenient Truth. Is there any way of uncoupling political alignment and one’s position on this issue?
A quick study shows that stocks of simply named companies do better than those of more complexly named companies. Even companies with pronounceable ticker symbols did better than those with unpronounceable symbols.
Global warming skeptic Gregg Easterbrook finally caves: “based on the data I’m now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert”. (via scott rosenberg, who says too little, too late, Gregg)
An Inconvenient Truth, a movie about Al Gore’s global warming crusade, opens today in NYC and LA. John Heilemann has a lengthy piece on Gore for New York magazine, the NY Times has a piece about Gore and the movie, the climate science blog RealClimate has a positive review of the film, and here again is my review. Larry Lessig, who knows a thing or two about bringing tha PowerPoint noize, loves the movie, calling the slideshow “the most extraordinary lecture I have ever seen anyone give about anything”.
An Inconvenient Truth will open in the rest of the US in mid-June; check this theater listing for details. For more news, check out the movie’s blog.
Top science book prize goes to David Bodanis’s Electric Universe, a book about electricity. An odd choice…I read the book and it was good but not great.
“If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?” Nuclear weapons? Land mines? Internal combustion engine?
How do scientist attribute climate-change data? In other words, how can they tell from the available data that climate change can be attributed to human causes?
Get yer Richard Feynman on at Google Video, particularly this 50-minute video of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. A bit more Feynman at YouTube.
UK report concludes that there’s no proof of alien life forms. I’m sure this will change when the UNIT files are declassified.
This is the most wonderfully nerdy thing I’ve ever read about politics and blogging. “So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself.” (via cyn-c)
Maybe the universe is a trillion years old and has experienced several big bangs and big collapses over the years. “People have inferred that time began then, but there really wasn’t any reason for that inference. What we are proposing is very radical. It’s saying there was time before the big bang.”
Stardust Holiday is a blog written by a woman who’s spending three months in bed as part of a NASA study. (via cyn-c)
Richard Dawkins has a new book coming out in October called The God Delusion. For some reason, I don’t see this being a big seller in the US.
Wired magazine reports on the revolutionary food and strange equipment (antigriddle!) used by chef Grant Achatz in the kitchen at Alinea. “The technology allows us to get to the essence of food. It allows you to be more true with flavor, not less true.”
Google can be used for finding scientific papers that are more popular (and influential?) than their number of citations would otherwise indicate. “The technique might also emerge as a more useful measure of scientific impact than merely the number of citations alone.”
Update: Mark Dominus takes issue with this list. (thx, greg)
In the 1960s, a young Al Gore had the good fortune to study under Roger Revelle at Harvard University. Revelle was one of the first scientists to claim that the earth may not be able to effectively deal with all of the carbon dioxide generated by the earth’s rapidly increasing human population. The American Institute of Physics called Revelle’s 1957 paper with Hans Suess “the opening shot in the global warming debates”. Gore took Revelle’s lessons to heart, becoming a keen supporter of the environment during his government service.
Since losing the 2000 Presidential election to George W. Bush, Al Gore has focused his efforts on things other than politics; among other things, he’s been crisscrossing the world delivering a presentation on global warming. Gore’s presentation now forms the foundation of a new film, An Inconvenient Truth (view the trailer).
In organizing my thoughts about the film, I found I couldn’t improve upon David Remnick’s review in the New Yorker. In particular:
It is, to be perfectly honest (and there is no way of getting around this), a documentary film about a possibly retired politician giving a slide show about the dangers of melting ice sheets and rising sea levels. It has a few lapses of mise en scene. Sometimes we see Gore gravely talking on his cell phone—or gravely staring out an airplane window, or gravely tapping away on his laptop in a lonely hotel room—for a little longer than is absolutely necessary. And yet, as a means of education, “An Inconvenient Truth” is a brilliantly lucid, often riveting attempt to warn Americans off our hellbent path to global suicide. “An Inconvenient Truth” is not the most entertaining film of the year. But it might be the most important.
Watching the film, I realized — far too late to move to Florida and vote for him in 2000 — that I’m a fan of Al Gore. He’s smart & intellectually curious (the latter doesn’t always follow from the former), understands science enough to explain it to the layperson without needlessly oversimplifying, and despite his reputation as somewhat of a robot, seems to be more of a real person than many politicians. As Remnick says:
One can imagine him as an intelligent and decent President, capable of making serious decisions and explaining them in the language of a confident adult.
The film has some small problems; many of the asides about Gore’s life (particularly the 2000 election stuff) don’t seem to fit cleanly into the main narrative, the connection it makes between global warming and Katrina is stronger than it should be, and the trailer is a little silly; this is a documentary about Al Gore and global warming after all, not The Day After Tomorrow or Armageddon. But the film really shines when it focuses on the presentation and Gore methodically and lucidly making the case for us needing to take action on global warming. An Inconvenient Truth opens in the US on May 24…do yourself a favor and seek it out when it comes to your local theater.
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