REAL Mathematicians Unhindered by Laws of Physics

By: | November 15, 2010

I think this is funny because it explains a problem I’ve had with math all along, which is that  math just makes stuff up:  makes up number, and space between numbers, and relations between numbers, and I’m not even mentioning zero.  Also I know that the horizon problem went something like, the universe shouldn’t have been born as uniform as it was because it was farther across than light — which created the uniformity — could have traveled by then.  Something like that.  So  AG’s mathematicians solve the problem by making light travel faster than light.  For some reason, physicists resent that.  Now that I reflect on it, I suspect that AG and I are the only ones who think this is funny.

Credit: http://abstrusegoose.com/316

Darkness and Light in Ancient Egypt

By: | November 12, 2010

This drop-dead gorgeous picture of the Nile taken from the International Space Station at the end of October prompted some science writers to muse on the enduring importance of the Nile to Egypt. Surrounded by the great darkness of the Eastern and Western deserts, the Nile literally shines like a beacon of light in this image, the source of life in a hostile land.

Evocative as the photo is, however, it fails to capture the truth, or at least the whole truth. While the Greek historian Herodotus once called Egyptian civilization “the gift of the Nile,” the last two decades or so of research in Egypt’s deserts has shown us that this is far too simple a view. In fact, were it not for the Western Desert–a land of suffocating winds and summer temperatures up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit–we might never have had the glories of the New Kingdom, including Tutankhamun’s famous tomb. Continue reading →

Without Learn’d Astronomers; Or, Walt, Shut Up

By: | November 11, 2010

A book I just read said that while the sun once held a gloriously central place in the lives of men, it has now been sidelined and downgraded by science — which I disagree with, you can’t find a more dedicated sun worshipper than a solar scientist.   The  book’s complaint is standard English major stuff, that science with all its measuring and calculating has taken from nature its meaning and mystery, its poetry.  Best example:  Walt Whitman’s famous poem about hearing a “learn’d astronomer” talk about proofs and diagrams until he (Walt) got sick and tired; and “rising and gliding out,” he wrote, “I wander’d off by myself/In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time/Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars” ‑‑ the implication being that he (Walt) and not the astronomer appreciated the stars’ true inner poetry.

I too have heard the learn’d astronomer and my opinion is that Walt would have been better off if he had quit gliding around and learn’d a little science.

Continue reading →

Must Come Down

By: | November 10, 2010

About ten years ago I was killing time in the sprawling Barnes & Noble on Union Square in Manhattan.  I had pushed my chair away from a little table, crossed my legs, and opened a book on my lap.  I don’t remember which book.  I can’t even remember whether it was one I’d grabbed off a shelf or, because I was deep in research at that time, one I’d been carrying around all day just in case I found myself with a few free minutes.  I do remember that I was trying to understand what gravity is.  Or, as I was beginning to appreciate, isn’t.

Because I don’t have a background in science, I pretty much have to start from scratch when I’m researching a topic.  In my investigations into gravity, I’d already discovered that Isaac Newton had been making it up as he went along, and that he had admitted as much in one of his letters to the theologian Richard Bentley.  The notion of a force of attraction existing between two distant objects, he wrote, is “so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.”  Yet fall into it subsequent generations of physicists did.  Nearly two centuries later, the German philosopher-scientist Ernst Mach wrote, “The Newtonian theory of gravitation, on its appearance, disturbed almost all investigators of nature because it was founded on an uncommon unintelligibility.”  Now, he went on, “it has become common unintelligibility.”

Continue reading →

The Fly, Redux

By: | November 9, 2010
I am tsetse, hear me buzz.

Yesterday I shared a room with 3,000 buzzing tsetse flies – the bugs that carry the sleeping sickness parasite.

Tsetse flies live in Africa, but these guys are Yalies. They buzz and breed in racks of mesh cages on the 6th floor of Yale’s School of Public Health. (They also recite some Goethe – it’s the Ivy League, after all). By studying their inner workings, scientists like Serap Askoy hope to figure out how to stop them from spreading the parasite. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: A Great time To Be Alive

By: | November 8, 2010

The last time anyone proclaimed the end of science — at least, this is what I hear — was just before the arrival of  relativity and quantum theory.    Abstruse Goose’s brave new islands, quantum gravity and dark energy, are going to require new physics, and new physics is like seeing outside the optical, hearing outside the audible, and suddenly living in 27 dimensions.  Woofies.

Credit:

http://abstrusegoose.com/308

The Brothel, the Madam and the Doctor

By: | November 5, 2010

In the summer of 1993, just weeks before bulldozers began rolling in for the largest transportation project in Boston’s history–the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel–archaeologists discovered what appeared to be two 19th century privies and a cistern along the old waterfront. Unable to come up with funding to dig them, Boston archaeologist Martin Dudek and his colleagues decided to excavate the sites on their own time, recovering nearly 3000 artifacts, from leather shoes and cosmetic jars to a host of imposing looking syringes.

It now turns out that the privies and cistern belonged to a thriving Victorian-era brothel. In an ongoing research project, Boston University archaeologist Mary Beaudry and her students are now analyzing the artifacts, combing old census records and other documents, and shedding new light on the lives of the women at 27 and 29 Endicott Street. Continue reading →

Sharing Microbes (The Hard Way)

By: | November 4, 2010
Bad bug: Clostridium difficile

The procedure, developed in the late ’50s, is called fecal transplantation. Those of you who watch Grey’s Anatomy will have heard of it. And, yes, it is what you think it is. A physician takes poop from one person, and then he puts it into another. Don’t worry. The recipient doesn’t have to swallow the donor’s feces (an act that might put a positive spin on the phrase ‘eat my sh*t’). Blessedly, it goes in through the rectum instead.

“Why, for God’s sake why!?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you. Poop is teeming with microbes. The typical human gut houses trillions of bacteria — more bacteria than the human body has cells. Together they form the gut’s “microbiome.” These bugs keep you happy and healthy. They aid in digestion, immunity, and much more. Continue reading →