Baconian Science — In Our Time, Apr. 2, 2009
Among the most informative shows I can remember. What I found most interesting was that idea best summed up at the end by one of the guests that the Baconian ideology was much more important than the actual Baconian method. The method itself was somewhat challenging in [...]
The Measurement Problem in Physics — In Our Time, Mar. 5, 2009
This was a fascinating and challenging program. I like to collect links here of topics that are mentioned in the show so I can go back later a poke around the things I don’t know much about. The challenge with this program was that [...]
Thursday, February 19, 2009
The Observatory at Jaipur — In Our Time, Feb. 19, 2009
Fun show about an astronomical observatory in India that I’d never heard of. This show demonstrates another of the reasons I enjoy it so much; in depth discussion of topics that are totally unknown to me, but done in such a way that it’s informative [...]
To commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, In Our Time did a 4-part series on his life and work. Taken as a whole, the series is fascinating, as are its constituent parts. Darwin has, to a certain extent, become reduced to the human stand-in for the Science vs. God debate in [...]
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
The Physics of Time — Good show, if a bit challenging intellectually at times. I found the most interesting part at the end when the guests were discussing time as an emergent property that comes from the interactions of individual particles. That is, any individual particle doesn’t have time as a property when analyzed, but [...]
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Heat — This past week’s In Our Time was on heat. It took me several days to listen to the whole thing since I kept getting distracted and wasn’t in the right frame of mind to take it in. This morning offered the chance and it was (as it almost always is) well worth the [...]
Via Brad DeLong, "On Albert Einstein" by Robert Oppenheimer from 1966. "As always, the myth has its charms; but the truth is far more beautiful." And when I think of Eistein, I think of what he said about Gandhi, "Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood." — # 05/31/2007
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
Brad, what this meme needs is a tag! All the great memes have their own tags.
Meme Watch: “East African Plains Ape”
I am no longer the only person on the Internets talking about the East African Plains Ape:
Achenblog: Daily Humor and Observations from Joel Achenbach : ...I am happy knowing that some of my [...]
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Time does a cover story on risk and how we collectively and individually do not manage risk all that well. And yet nowhere in the article does the author acknowledge the media’s role in creating hysteria over low probability events.
Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we’d get pretty good at distinguishing [...]
A new top 100 list! The Atlantic publishes their top 100 most influential Americans. As they said in their email, "Let the debates begin." Plenty to debate here, but I loved this one-sentence description of Woodrow Wilson (#10): "He made the world safe for U.S. interventionism, if not for democracy." — # 11/21/2006
Via Kottke, the Flicker Fusion Factor (note, I know instinctively type Flickr, not Flicker): "The speed, altitude, centrifugal forces, and sensations of flying that we experience in an SUV, a sports car, or, in my case, an economy box, let us feel what it is like to be a bird. This partly explains why we love our cars, preferring this mode of locomotion to any other, even walking and running, for which we are supremely adapted." — # 11/20/2006
I'm sorry, but this is embarrassing to me. Human cloning is an inevitability in almost all its forms. Any type of "ban" will not be followed or enforced. If our country wants to ban it, that's our business, but a global proposal is just silly. In case you hadn't noticed, I'm a big fan of cloning. — # 02/27/2002
Undoubtedly we'll see several news stories about the "future of medicine" or snippets about the "new bionic man". Some group will surely see this as a slight against god. What we can be certain of is that the benefits of the artificial heart will certainly be clouded by the hype wars the various news shows engage in when a national story breaks. — # 07/3/2001
CNN.com – Team to attempt human cloning. Does anyone see the irony in a group of doctors meeting in Rome to announce their effort to clone a human being?
Wednesday, February 28, 2001
Salon.com Books | Assault on evolution
This IDT (Intelligent Design Theory) crap is fantastic. Ask a bunch of questions of evolution that aren’t easily explained, or are unusually complex but have a conventional, albeit erroneous, explanation in pop culture and then draw the conclusion that there must be a supernatural master genius behind it [...]