As a dark-haired man, I have spent a number of recent New Year’s Eves standing out in the cold just before midnight so I can be the first person into the house. This is my own fault for having married into a family whose Scottish heritage includes the custom of “first-footing,” which dictates that the …
Category: Blog
Paging Orson Scott Card
The Air Force is looking to develop spacewar skills through computer games.
Superlens in sight?
Oregon State University researchers have made an important step toward a functional superlens, one using negative refraction–that is, it bends light the opposite direction to things in nature. Why should you care? In theory, a superlens might be able to attain visual resolution at the level of the nanometer, which is pretty small – a …
A wonder of the world?
Here’s a lot more detail about the proposed New Mexico spaceport. The New Mexico spaceport is to be environmentally friendly in consideration of the local surroundings, featuring an eye looking up into space, Branson said. “As you look down at it from space, seeing this giant eye in the middle of the desert….maybe I’m over …
Happy New Year!
And that’s all I have to say today! (Well, probably.)
The Case of the Disappearing Teaspoons
In the British Medical Journal, reported by Science Blog, results of fascinating and vital research from the Burnet Institute in Australia on the well-known yet baffling phenomenon of tea (and, by extension, coffee) spoons disappearing in the workplace. Some results: During the study, 56 (80%) of the 70 teaspoons disappeared. The half life of the …
A "Huh?" for Wired News
Wired News‘s top science story of 2005 is global warming. Fair enough, but the first sentence of their paragraph describing it brought me up short: “1. It’s getting hot in here: Thanks to the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, global warming can no longer be ignored.” The linking of global warming to Katrina is just …
What brings people to my website?
From Sitemeter, here are the top search terms that bring people to my main website, Edward Willett’s Intergalactic Library (out of the last 4,000 visits, which is probably eight to 10 days’ worth): No. ofvisits………….Search term131…………….hamoukar42……………..riedel glasses37……………..rogue waves35……………..christmas physics34……………..pheremones31……………..riedel wine glasses29……………..christmas chemistry26……………..christmas questions22……………..hygiene hypothesis19……………..edmund scientific17……………..physics of football15……………..animal emotions14……………..riedel glass13……………..skycar13……………..golf technology12……………..skunks12……………..art restoration12……………..animal intelligence That high-ranking placement …
The Great White Way lives!
It was a boffo year for Broadway.
A P.D.Q. Bach "Retrogressive"
The music of P.D.Q. Bach, the last (and least) of J. S. Bach’s sons, is being celebrated in a special “Retrogressive” this week at Manhattan’s Symphony Space. The occasion is the 40th anniversary of the first performance of the, alas, entirely fictional composer’s music by Peter Schickele. Says Playbill Arts: “Shickele who is also known …
The Great Wall of MIT
They’re experimenting at MIT with a rammed-earth wall–a wall built using the same technology as the Great Wall of China. The hope is that it might be a more environmentally friendly way to build certain structures today than concrete. So far, after two months, the wall is holding up well.
The sad state of self-assessment
Thinking about New Year’s resolutions this year? If you think you don’t need to make a resolution because you’re already wonderful—well, science says, you’re probably wrong. Human beings, it seems, are notoriously incompetent at self-assessment. In the December issue of Scientific American Mind, David Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell University, Chip Heath, professor of …
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