I saw on the local news that the Brain Gym® program is being adopted (purchased) by some local schools. You may want to read what the Bad Science website has to say. Their main complaint is that it claims to be scientific, but has all the hallmarks of pseudoscience in…
I needed to attend a deposition in Washington D.C. today. I brought one of my daughters (she's 6) on the trip. She patiently drew pictures and read books during the deposition, which lasted two hours this morning. Now that I'm done with work, we're having fun doing tourist things. First, we visited…
The first years of living in a new home are filled with surprises. Our new home in the burbs (I had to go, the family went first!) has a large wooden deck in the backyard. Large wooden decks are fun for outdoor dining, entertaining, repairs, power washing, staining, sealing, AND carpenter bees. The bees are big and sound like low flying helicopters.
Carpenter bees bore into the wood, create tunnels where they make more carpenter bees and then more tunnels and more bees, you get my drift? Carpenter bees are the size of golf balls and very aggressive in posture (although none of us has been stung by one yet). The bees buzz at you about a foot or less away and follow you as you flee until some as yet undetermined distance is traveled away from where they first confronted you.
Needless to say, the kids are afraid of the bees and won’t play in the backyard. I sprayed the bees with water from my high powered nozzle on my hose. Unlike honeybees which die from too much exposure to water, carpenter bees drink the stuff up and zip by the spray to let you know they are still around.
Next, I put out lots more birdseed to draw more birds to my deck area. I hoped birds were natural predators of the bees and would decimate their population. I looked up what might eat a carpenter bee and seeded the deck according to the directions on the back …
Mechanical engineer and kids-show host Bill Nye the Science Guy spoke to about 1,500 Columbus-area students this Monday. I attended his talk, and found that the peppy, brilliant man who preached the fun of science during my childhood had come bearing a hopeful message of the earth’s future.
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has helped to make climate change an enormous hot-button issue, and as the “future owners of the planet”, we college students hear about it a lot. Five separate school organizations have hosted five separate on-campus showings of An Inconvenient Truth in the past three months. The intent to inform and warn has gotten a little out of control.
With the media coverage of climate change in addition to this campus onslaught, most students get it. The close-minded may stick to their guns, but those moveable students understand. Yes, climate change occurs, yes, it will have grave consequences, yes, something desperately needs to change. Now what? The constant reiteration of Gore’s warning leaves all too many jaded and bored with the message.
Bill Nye, in his classically playful-yet-educational way, reframed the issues at the heart of global warming. He dispensed no Gore-like nay saying, he made no threats of the doom to come. Instead, he said this:
“People talk about how we have to ‘Save Planet Earth!’ But the Earth will be fine. The cockroaches will keep living; life on the planet will go on. It’s the humans I worry about.”
So, no forthcoming apocalypse after …
A significant difference between humans and most other animals is that we have the innate ability to abstract ideas. That is, we can manipulate symbols as though they were things. We do this so well that most people are unaware that the symbols aren't actually the things they represent. If…