Archive for December, 2008
Roddenberry
JANUARY 4, 2009Public Memorial Service for the Late “First Lady of Star Trek” Majel Barrett Roddenberry Cast Members and Fans Come Out to Celebrate and Remember Roddenberry’s Life WHO: Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry, son of Gene & Majel Roddenberry and CEO of Roddenberry Productions, will host cast members, family, friends and fans to celebrate the life [...]
How is high-speed high-volume inter-connectivity affecting our brains?
What happens to our brains when we sit at our computers for long periods of time interacting with the cyber world? This question was considered in an article called “Meet Your iBrain,” appearing in the October/November 2008 issue of scientific American Mind. The authors cite a 2005 Kaiser family foundation study that found that “young [...]
Are you smarter than a stuffed animal?
It’s a simple problem in mechanics, and several stuffed animals weigh in.
Thought-provoking photo of Earth from Saturn
This is how Earth looks from Saturn. That’s 930 million miles away (ten times the distance from the Earth to the Sun). Kind of puts things in perspective.
Steven Pinker on the credibility of science
Alternet has interviewed Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the credibility of science. Pinker’s answer bears on many of the discussions we’ve had at this site. In the following excerpt, Pinker distinguishes the scientific method from the “method” of politics, though his logic applies to most things that are not science (e.g., religion): Jeremy Adam Smith: [...]
Steven Strogatz discusses how things in nature tend to sync up all by themselves.
Stephen Strogatz is a mathematician who has studied synchrony in nature. Synchrony is the “spontaneous tendency of separate entities to act as a unit.” Strogatz finds synchrony “everywhere” in nature. He stresses that you don’t need to be smart to synchronize, nor do you need to have a brain or even be alive. I learned [...]
Barosaurus towers over Manhattan
While on a recent trip to New York, I had the chance to visit the Roosevelt Rotunda of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This Barosaurus exhibit is purportedly the world’s tallest freestanding mount of a dinosaur. It is not known whether this animal could have actually reared up like this (to [...]
Bill Maher discusses Religulous with Mike Huckabee.
In this video, Bill Maher discusses Religulous with Mike Huckabee. It’s all quite civil, though both sides work hard to make their points. Watching this video makes me relived that at least some people on the national stage can discuss these serious issues without undue heat (that tone is what I sought when I founded [...]
How Santa Claus kept an evil butcher from turning children into sausage
The Santa Claus we “know” has been tamed down from the earlier versions. Our Santa is not associated with anything unpleasant. Not true of the earlier version of Santa, St. Nicholas Consider this medieval story about St. Nicholas from a play by Henri Gheon called “The Sausage Maker’s Interlude.” A butcher makes a sausage-making-machine, but [...]
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