Archive for January 5th, 2008

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Science Etcetera Saturnday, 20080105

Saturday, January 5th, 2008
the heliosphere
The Heliosphere
credits: ESA, Martin Kornmesser, Lars Lindberg Christensen
  • The Sun Earth Plan website illustrates the beautiful scientific ideas we will be deprived of if the UK doesn’t get it’s science funding restored (HT Kav).
  • Two decades of data from over 30 sites in the frozen north indicate that Trees are absorbing less CO2 as world warms, further placing the onus on us to solve the problem.
  • Energy is all around us, not just in oil, as is illustrated in one company Harnessing Energy from Asphalt Heat and another using Sunlight to Make Fuel From CO2.
  • Congratulations! You have a 100 percent chance of carrying at least 1 type of pesticide!!!
  • Alan Boyle has the absolute best write up thus far covering the Presidential Candidates on Science.
  • After contributing diddly squat to the project, but making sure to bask in its good publicity, Intel has Quit One Laptop Per Child Program. Thankfully, the Open Source community keeps churning out the OLPC hacks.
  • The the National Academy of Sciences has published a book, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, which is available online for free (but you have to pay to download it, stupid National Academies Press), and provides guidelines for teaching evolutionary science in school and insists that “Intelligent Design” has no place in science classrooms, “just like facts don’t have a place within an organized religion.” - Superintendent Chalmers from The Simpsons.
  • And this Starbucks cup agrees with the NAS. So Thpppt!!!
  • Las Vegas is set to build the world’s first 30 Story Vertical Farm.
  • Cool Tools has some cool exerpts from Motion Mountain’s Free Online Physics Textbook (HT Clint).

    • Posted in Ionian Enchantment, Science Etcetera, science | No Comments »

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    Adventuring: The Smithsonian Natural History Museum

    Saturday, January 5th, 2008

    I’ve got a huge backlog of photos I need to get up on Flickr, enough to cover several months worth of Saturndays. Here’s two sets from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum:

    Hall of Bones

    Man and the Manlike Apes

    Man and the Manlike Apes

    The Hall of Bones does a great job of illustrating the incredible biological and adaptation diversity of a tool all animals share, an internal skeleton. Without this scaffolding on which to drap our skin over and attach our muscules to, we’d be just a bunch of blobs, oozing from place to place… Well, that could be pretty cool too.

    Visit the flickr set here.

    Hall of Mammals

    Morganucodon oehleri

    Morganucodon oehleri
    Common Ancestor to Us All

    While the Hall of Bones fascinated me and was immensely instructional, the Hall of Mammals was fairly disappointing. Yes, the huge collection of diversity in the Class Mammalia is pretty amazing. Yes, the exhibit is very educational. It’s certainly not without merit.

    However, I saw this exhibit the day following an all-day adventure at the Zoo, seeing real live animals, fully animated with their biological clockworks running with near indecipherable and irreproducible complexity.

    Compare this to a collection of taxidermied animals, frozen in time, and positioned best as possible to appear as they do in real life, but still unconvincing enough to trigger my Uncanny Valley response.

    That’s why we have to keep them alive.

    Visit the flickr set here.

    Posted in Adventuring, Ionian Enchantment, science | No Comments »