Tag: Science Columns

The Viking sunstone

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
November 17, 2011
5 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/11/Viking-Sunstone.mp3[/podcast] The World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, which I attended a couple of weeks ago in my guise as fantasy author Lee Arthur Chane, had as its theme “Sailing the Seas of Imagination.” It’s a shame the topic of this week’s science column didn’t hit the news until after that convention ended, because really, …

Take that, whippersnapper!

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
November 10, 2011
4 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/11/Aging-Scientists.mp3[/podcast] The great Albert Einstein once famously said that “a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so.” Normally, I’d be the last to argue with Einstein: but just this once, I’m glad to say, it appears he was wrong. To be fair, his …

Birds of a feather

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
November 3, 2011
4 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/11/Flocking.mp3[/podcast] It’s a familiar sight this time of year: enormous flocks of snow geese, covering a field, then all taking flight at once, whirling and swirling in unison. It’s almost like they’re all under the control of a single mind, but of course they aren’t. In fact, they’re under the control of a multitude of …

The science of ebooks vs. print books

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
October 24, 2011
5 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/10/Ebooks-vs-Print-Books.mp3[/podcast] Once upon a time, the word “book” meant only one thing: a stack of paper printed with text and bound together along one edge. These days, though, the word “book” has developed two meanings. You can still read a bound-stack-of-paper book, but you can also read a book without ever touching anything that was …

Of mice and man-flu

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
October 17, 2011
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/10/Of-Mice-and-Man-Flu.mp3[/podcast] As any wife will tell you, men are lousy at being sick. They swear they’re on death’s door when it is quite apparent to their long-suffering significant other that in fact they are suffering from nothing more than a cold, nowhere near as bad as the one she had the week before when she …

Alcohol on the brain

By Edward Willett in Columns, Science Columns
October 10, 2011
4 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/10/Alcohol-on-the.mp3[/podcast] Human beings have been using and abusing alcohol for a very long time: roughly 10,000 years, give or take a long weekend. The effects of drinking too much of the stuff have been known for every one of those 10,000 years (although individuals somehow seem to forget them within a remarkably short time frame). …

The 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
September 30, 2011
5 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/09/2011-Ig-Nobel-Prizes.mp3[/podcast] Ah, it’s my favorite time of the year, a time when this column practically writes itself. It’s Ig Nobel Prize time. The Ig Nobel Prizes are presented by the science comedy magazine Annals of Improbable Research, to honour achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” At the ceremony, genuine (and …

Seeing through someone else’s eyes

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
September 23, 2011
6 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/09/Recreating-Brain-Video.mp3[/podcast] Whenever I say anything is impossible, I always think of Arthur C. Clarke’s First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Up until recently, I would have said mind-reading was impossible…but, even …

Gait recognition

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
September 16, 2011
4 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/09/Gait-Recognition.mp3[/podcast] Twelve years ago, I started a science column with this sentence: “Are you fed up with having to carry 2,762 separate plastic cards in your wallet for buying gas, getting Air Miles, withdrawing money, renting videos and collecting frequent-ice-cream-eater points? Then you’ll be glad to hear about biometrics…” More than a decade later, I …

Just-below pricing

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
September 8, 2011
5 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/09/Just-Below-Pricing.mp3[/podcast] I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a MacBook Air (my old Samsung netbook has just about had the life pounded out of it after churning out half a million words or so, including all of my upcoming book Magebane), and I noticed that the 11-inch MacBook Air is listed on Apple’s Canadian …

The Black Death

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
August 30, 2011
5 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/09/The-Black-Death.mp3[/podcast]

Out with the old, in with the new: digital TV

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
August 12, 2011
5 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/08/Analog-and-Digital-TV.mp3[/podcast] Technology changes, new ways of doing things driving out the old. Take digital television. In fact, you’ll have to: by August 31, over-the-air television stations in most major Canadian cities are being required to stop broadcasting in analog and start broadcasting in digital. Merriam-Webster defines analog as “of, relating to, or being a mechanism …