Month: January 2008
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There’s Only One Human Race
Nobel Laureate, James Watson, recently made the claim that blacks were ‘less intelligent,’ than whites, which just goes to show, being smart in one area doesn’t prevent you from being foolish in other realms. The following message is from the American Anthropological Association: “race” has no scientific justification in human biology. Tiger Woods coined the…
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Cloverfield Creeped Me Out
Saw Clovefield this morning and the film has been haunting me all day. It’s abstractness, catching glimpses of the monster here and there, trying to figure it out, has left me distracted and scouring the Web for more information. A commenter I read at one site said to watch the ocean carefully in the background…
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A Tale of Two Flatland Movies
Flatland the Movie VS Flatland the Film I really enjoyed and appreciated Edwin Abott’s 1884 classic book Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions, which tells the story of Square, a lawyer living in Flatland, a two-dimensional world that has height and width, but not length. It’s in the public domain and free to download at…
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Happy Kid Inventor Day!
Benjamin Franklin age 12 Courtesy NPS Benjamin Franklin was 15 when he started writing notable letters to the Editor of his local paper. Thomas Edison was 15 when he began printing his own newspaper. Louis Braille was 15 when he invented the raised dots that served as a gateway to the blind reading on their…
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Global Cooling Disproves Global Warming Theory
Sorry gang. I have converted. I no longer accept Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory. I simply cannot reply to the deluge of facts presented in David Deming’s Year of global cooling article. The Cognitive Dissonance it’s causing in my brain has given me no choice but to accept that I was wrong. Deming’s a geophysicist, adjunct…
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The OLPC XO-1, Shortcut to the Information Age
So I got my OLPC XO-1 in the mail about a month ago, and I’m still wrestling with my opinion of it. Personally I think it’s the bee’s knees. Everyone who comes into the comic shop fawns over it. I’m the envy of the local geek crowd. I love it when people ask me, “What’s…
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Somma’s Stochastic Revised
My friend BMF photoshopped up the following version of my Somma’s Stochastic Eponym following a comment thread about what symbol best represents science, since the atom caused some confusion: Somma’s Stochastic Revised Bet you wish you had added me to your Facebook friends list now Ira Flatow?!?! Scientists everywhere are going to see this and…
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Adventures in Dating 2.0
The Internet hosts a wide variety of novel match making services. Personals applications, Social Networking sites, Chat Rooms, and the like all provide the socially inept, like myself, dating opportunities previously unavailable before the Information Age. I can’t imagine how socially-awkward Baby-Boomers found true love without the World Wide Web to aid them. I’m guessing…
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My Scientific Eponym: Somma’s Stochastic
I’ve been trying to figure out how to immortalize myself with my very own Scientific Eponym, and… Eureka! Behold! Somma’s Stochastic Somma’s Stochastic states that the number and intensity of logical fallacies employed by a pundit in a debate is inversely proportional to the empirical evidence supporting their position. Stated Simply The less science behind…
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The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum
French Astrolabe, 1600s The Hubble Telescope was impressive. For some reason, I’d never realized how huge this orbiting eye on the Universe actually is, easily three-stories tall. Scale was a common theme for me throughout the museum. The walk-through size of Skylab, the claustrophobia-inducing interior of the cramped Mercury capsule. These pictures won’t fully communicate…
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Mind Webs: 49 hours Worth of Speculative Fiction Radio
Mind Webs CD Cover Here’s an online treasure trove of audio files brought to you by the Internet Archive of the 1970s radio series Mind Webs. The show featured the greatest speculative fiction stories from top-notch authors of the day. You can find a summary of plotlines here. I’ve been listening to the shows for…
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Review: Sunshine
Scene from Sunshine Aside from the original Night of the Living Dead, I full on loathe zombie films. The plots are always the same, a virus (or magic) turns people into perpetual-motion flesh eating things. Big whoop. That was until the independent film 28 Days Later came out and reinvented zombies. Only these weren’t walking-dead,…