Drowning in the Sea of Information

Seth Lloyd, over at Discover Magazine, writes a fascinating story, You Know Too Much, about the exponential increase of information in general, and science in particular, that we are subjected to in today’s world. Its fascinating to me not just because he uses one of my posts as an illustration of “The development of the [...]

The powers of 10 …

In other posts, I’ve talked about the unimaginable size of the universe. “Feeling Insignificant Yet?” talks about how big some of the other planets and stars are in comparison to us and our home planet, and in “And you thought size mattered …” I noted that as unimaginably huge as the sizes of distant [...]

Past and Future Paradigms

I haven’t raved lately about Modern Mechanix, that ultra-modern purveyor of the yesterday’s tomorrows for us, but day in and day out they put up articles from the past that are both fascinating and challenging, making us think about yesterday, as well as today and tomorrow. One of the key themes there that I find [...]

Primates on display at the Adelaide Zoo

The Adelaide Zoo in Australia has recently come up with a wonderfully innovative PR project, called the Human Zoo, putting 6 people into an old orangutan cage on display to the public. Each group of human volunteers stays in the enclosure for a week, and is subject to the same crowds as any of [...]

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

That quote is usually attributed to Mark Twain, but whatever the provenance, most of us are well aware that statistics can be used to mislead us as much as they can enlighten us. There are some classic ways that stats can be used to mislead us … attempting to correlate data that has no [...]

The roots of fundamentalism

On the Big Picture with Avi Lewis this week, he had the Canadian premiere of Richard Dawkins‘ documentary, The Root of all Evil, discussing the dangers of religion in general. Unlike other authors on the subject, Dawkins doesn’t separate the radical fundamentalists in a religion from the moderates … in fact, he makes the point [...]

NASA TV – Live Shuttle Video update

NASA TV
I posted a link awhile back to a live feed of the space shuttle.  That link was through Yahoo and it no longer appears to work, however the link at the top of this post is direct to NASA.  It should always stay active.  Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean will be space walking on Wednesday, [...]

Is it SMART-1 to crash into the moon?

As planned, at 0542 UT, the spacecraft SMART-1 crashed into the lunar surface.  The planned crash should allow scientists to examine the composition of the lunar surface in the crash location by examining the dust kicked up by the crash.  No one was really sure how visible the crash would be, or whether backyard telescopes [...]

Pluto’s demotion to Dwarf Planet

Last week, I wrote some comments about the IAU discussions to expand the definition of planet to include not only Pluto, but its moon Charon, and other, smaller bodies. The actual vote has occurred, and rather than expanding the definition, they’ve chosen to restrict it further by creating a new term, dwarf planet. [...]

And You Thought Size Mattered …

A few weeks ago I posted an entry, called Feeling insignificant yet?, on the relative size of the planets in our solar system, and the relative sizes of neighbouring stars. The purpose of the post was to show how insignificant the size of Earth is, in comparison to other bodies, and to remind people [...]