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Between the Folds
Between The Folds is a striking documentary about the art and science of origami. I’ve watched an advance copy, provided by the producers, and it’s really quite mesmerizing. Roughly half the program is...
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Beauty’s Daughter
I love evolutionary biology, so I love this argument: Beauty is more valuable to girls than it is to boys, so beautiful parents should have more daughters than sons. You want (or at least your genes...
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This is the Way the World Ends
Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice. Paleontologist Peter Ward says the seas could turn to sulfur; physicist Michio Kakutani expects the world (along with the rest of the Universe) to...
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Are We Alone?
This diagram, lifted from a lively paper by the astrobiologist Charles Lineweaver, is the tree of life on earth. The “root” at the center is the last common ancestor of all life. Toward the bottom...
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Our Place in the Universe
What are the odds that humankind will survive long enough to colonize the Universe? Katja Grace argues that the odds are low. Stripped of some nuance, her argument comes down to this: The fact that...
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Diagnosis
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, widely known as the bible of psychiatric medicine, is under revision and the American Psychiatric Association is accepting public comment at a new website....
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Beetlejuiced
I’m not pompous; I’m pedantic. There’s a difference. —The Calligraphic Button Catalogue Just about a year ago, a team of scientists reported that Betelgeuse—the bright red star in Orion’s...
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Yesterday’s Puzzle
I didn’t think anyone would get it. I was completely stumped myself until I got help from my friends. But Neil got it. In his words, “We have onomatopoeaic words for the sounds made by all of the...
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Neutrinos and Appomattox
Scientists at CERN have found apparent evidence that neutrinos can travel faster than light. Suppose that tomorrow historians at Harvard find apparent evidence that the South won the American Civil...
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Relatively Speaking
With a hat tip to our occasional commenter Ron…. Remember those faster-than-light neutrinos? The ones that threatened to overturn relativity, and along with it everything we think we know about how...
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This Particular God, at Least, Appears to Be Dead
The apparently imminent discovery of the Higgs boson by scientists at CERN will have at least one quirky side effect that appears to have gone entirely unremarked until the appearance of this blog post...
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False ID
Bob Murphy, always my favorite theist, posts a defense of Intelligent Design theory, or at least an attack on its attackers, who, he claims, have largely failed to grasp what the ID theorists, such as...
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P.S.
In yesterday’s post, I claimed to have refuted Richard Dawkins’s claim that everything complex must have emerged from something simple by citing the natural numbers, which are provably highly complex...
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Many Many Worlds
Max Tegmark is a professor of physics at MIT, a major force in the development of modern cosmology, a lively expositor, and the force behind what he calls the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis — a...
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Evolution in Action?
From researchers at Harvard, here is stunning time-lapse photography of something that (as far as I can see) might or might not be evolution. A bacteria colony spreads out across a giant Petri dish,...
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Thursday Puzzle/Science Lesson
Every day, a man comes to my door with a United States nickel in his hand. He asks me whether I’d prefer to examine the heads side (which is always painted either black or white) or the tails side...
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A Tale of Two Universes
A short time ago, in a Universe remarkably similar to our own, a team of researchers investigated racial differences in cognitive skills and concluded, with high degrees of certainty and precision,...
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Vaccine Testing: The Smart and Sneaky Way
There are (at least) two ways to test the efficacy of a vaccine. The Stupid Way is to administer the vaccine to, say, 30,000 volunteers and then wait to see how many of them get sick. The Smarter Way...
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