Month: April 2009
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Benjamin Franklin’s Electrical Goof
The 1700s were a century of phenomenal progress in the subject of electricity. Luigi Galvani discovered that electricity made dead muscles twitch, inspiring Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Alessandro Volta discovered that electricity was dynamic, flowing through conductive materials like water in a stream, which is why we call it an “electric current.” William Nicholson and Anthony…
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The Digital Naturalist
“Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.” – Chief Seattle This quote from Chief Seattle, leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish Native American tribes, is paraphrased by modern naturalists as, “Take only photographs, leave only footprints” (and sometimes adding, “Kill only time.”). Beetle in Flight Credit: Matthew Fang In the past, Naturalists like Charles Darwin…
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Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam
The Horticultural Gardens in Amsterdam is a suprisingly small garden, however, incredibly rich in biodiversity. Fuchsias And what a fascinating collection of specimens too. There’s the giant rubarb, the southern ash tree grafted onto a northern ash to allow it to survive the colder climate, the semicircle of systematics, the Wollemi pine a living fossil,…
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We are the Metadata
I remember a conversation I had with a retired Coast Guard pilot seven years ago who was testing our Flight Record application still in development: “I just recorded a shipboard landing with a C130 in your application,” he complained. “Is that a bad thing?” I blinked. His eyes bulged, “I’d like to see you land…
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Science Radio Podcasts for Listening in Your Car
I have these in my RSS reader, where I let them mass up until there are hundreds. Then I go through and download all the ones that sound interesting to a folder and burn them to a CD (as MP3s) or store on a thumb drive. These are listed in order of my personal preference:…
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CIS517 IT Project Management: APA Style as a Modern and Accurate Writing Style for the Sciences
A PDF of this Paper is available here. The American Psychological Association’s (APA) Style enhances an author’s accuracy and allows for the incorporation of more modern sources in his or her research. With its focus on research writing, APA citations provide a means of enforcing the ethics of integrity in the sciences by providing a…
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Adventuring in Amsterdam
Rainbow Following us Out of the City There are some incredibly progressive cultural values in the Netherlands, as well as demonstrations of enlightenment values. I previously covered the NEMO Science Center, a children’s science center that had sex displays. There were Obama posters everywhere, wind turbines, as well as bicycles, rows and endless rows of…
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A Very Expensive Programming Mistake
IBM 360/65 mainframe Credit: John Sloan I worked in a wide variety of development environments as an independent contractor in Washington DC, mostly on small teams or individual assignments, but I’ve found there’s an incredible wealth of learning opportunities that come with working in the large-team environment we have at the Coast Guard. In addition…
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The Energy Game
Sun Credit: onlinewoman A hydroelectric dam converts the motion energy of water flowing downhill into electrical energy through mechanical turbines. The water flowing downhill expends the gravitational energy it stored when it was deposited up in the mountains. The water got from the ocean to the mountaintop via thermal energy, which evaporated it into the…
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Merchant’s Millpond State Park
On a recent canoe trip through what has to be the most exotic state park I have yet adventured through, Vicky and I saw turkey vultures, lily pads, beavers, geese, Spanish moss, two bald eagles, painted turtles, bald cypress, and this fine fellow: Alligator in Merchant’s Millpond State Park Credit: Moi The pond is the…
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Gaming Nostalgia
Commodore Logo Researchers are using the oceans of data in Everquest’s logs for psychological, sociological, anthropological, and other studies. Constance Steinkuehler, a game academic at the University of Wisconsin, has found clear evidence that gamers use the scientific method, experimenting and communicating results, to understand the virtual worlds in which they play. Academia is finally…
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How the Brain Grows Into the Body
Baby and Godmother Credit: kton25 Harvard Psychologist Stephen M. Kosslyn presents a fascinating conundrum concerning the development of a human embryo: In order for the brain to process the two images our eyes transmit to it in 3-D stereovision, complete with the ability to estimate distances accurately, it must know the distance between the eyes;…