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…
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…
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…
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…