Abstruse Goose seems preoccupied with life paths and choices. This time instead of math, he’s talking about physics, specifically about a theory that the many worlds which according to quantum uncertainty (thus Schrodinger’s cats) can possibly exist, actually do co-exist side by side, maybe in different universes or something. I don’t know. It’s pretty arcane.
ZapperZ is a physics blogger who worries about people believing that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, that ghosts are real and evolution isn’t; and in short, that the public knowledge of and interest in science is thin as a dime. He met a scientist, a woman, who said the only way to explain science to politicians so they’ll fund it was to be “shallow, perky, and superficial.” ZapperZ knows a wake-up call when he hears one, so he’s adopted “shallow, perky, and superficial” as his watchword and has declared a contest for the cutest physicists, men and women both, and began with the women. He wasn’t sure anyone would be nominated. Continue reading
Last May, a man armed with a metal detector stumbled on something almost magical in a farmer’s field in the Eden Valley of northwestern England. Buried under the earth were 74 metal fragments, some large, some small, but all clearly part of a Roman helmet. And not just any Roman helmet.
When the conservators at Christie’s in London had finished restoring it for an October 7th auction, Roman experts gasped. It was an exceedingly rare cavalry-sports helmet, a work of incredible beauty and great historical importance. Only officers of the highest rank or the best horsemanship were permitted to wear such helmets during sporting competitions. “Its face mask is both extremely finely wrought and chillingly striking,” noted Ralph Jackson, a curator at the British Museum, in a formal report. “It is a find of the greatest national (and, indeed, international) significance.”
Have you noticed anything wrong yet about this story? Continue reading
Maybe it’s the advent of the rainy season here on the Northwest Coast, the time of all things mouldy and green. Or maybe it’s just the battle I wage every morning to crawl out of bed when it’s still so bloody dark. But sloths strike me as very simpatico these days.
Ok, if you watch this video–which I heartily recommend–you may feel a little repelled by a creature that can’t be bothered to wave away the large insects roaming its nostrils or dispose of the moths that flutter about its fur. But rise above your antipathy. The latest thinking among biologists is that the sloths are masters of energy conservation. Continue reading
I drove up to an auction in the Pennsylvania hayfields, parked in the field to the left because the lot to the right was reserved for buggies and horses. Maybe five auctions were going on in different parts of the fairground and everywhere were Amish in black and dark jewel-colored clothes, Mennonites in black and light sprigged cottons, all the old Anabaptist sects, the people that locals call “plain folk.” They spoke a dialect of German you couldn’t understand even if you understand German. They had no-shit faces, meaning they don’t hand it out but if you do, then that’s the kind of person you are.
Kids were quietly all over the place, and a surprising number of them were in wheelchairs – plain peoples’ kids are unusually likely to have genetic diseases that interfere with the way their bodies process proteins, which in turn plays havoc with the parts of their brains that control muscles. The auctions were to raise money for the clinic that treats them, The Clinic For Special Children, which is what the plain people call these kids, God’s special children. The clinic supplies these people who have no telephones, no cars, no electric stoves, no electric lights with the only true personalized genetic medicine in the country. Continue reading
Abstruse Goose sure has it in for athletes, doesn’t he. Fine with me. I’m less happy that he doesn’t arrange a life path for people who are born modestly, live modestly, work like dogs (actually not like any dog I’ve ever met, friendly mooches), have modest success and a gratifying life. Boy, is that ever not sexy.
It’s a little-known fact that many more tigers live in private captivity in the U.S. than in the wild. As I wrote in my article, Far From the Forests of the Night, published in the February 2008 issue of Natural History magazine, between 7,000 and 15,000 tigers are held in private roadside zoos, circuses, sanctuaries, farms, and backyards in the U.S. Fewer than 3,500 of the felines live in the wild, mostly in small pockets in India, Sumatra and the Russian Far East.
The situation is so dire, in fact, that delegates to the Tiger Summit, to be hosted in November 2010 by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Russia, are being asked to commit to measures to “prevent the unthinkable: extinction of the world’s last wild tiger populations.”
Hope springs eternal, as my mother likes to say: as a last-ditch measure, an international group of wildlife biologists from Wildlife Conservation Societies around the world are proposing what they call the “six percent solution”: protect tigers living in 42 “source sites” across Asia that still contain breeding populations of tigers.
I grant this is just straight-up astroporn but let’s try to make it legit. It’s a picture taken in 2009 by the Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 3372, the great nebula in the constellation Carina, which is in the sky over the southern hemisphere. “Nebula” is an old astronomical word that has referred to a whole lot of unrelated objects, but in this case it means “cloud.” This cloud is 300 light-years across – the picture is only 50 light-years-worth of it — and in it, some stars are being born and some are dying, and in both cases, they’re kicking up a lot of dark dust and different-colored gases.
One of the dying stars is Eta Carinae; it’s the bright, white, over-exposed blob farthest left, in the middle and under the colon in AstroPorn. Eta Carinae is exploding, over and over again, blowing out stuff from both poles, though the explosions don’t seem to be killing the star off and no one knows quite why. Telescopes like zooming in on Eta Carinae. Continue reading