[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIqk4agzKPE[/youtube] This little Harpers-Index-like compilation with compelling music is a full bag of potato chip tidbits of numerical exposition. The numbers seem accurate. At least those numbers that I have the background to know from other reputable sources. But what do they mean? The video simply concludes that change is…
We're all glad that the British sailors are back home. Anyone following this story knows that these sailors were treated graciously by their Iranian captors. Nonetheless, while in captivity, the British sailors admitted that they had been trespassing in Iranian waters when whey were apprehended. But notice some of the things that…
I wish I were making this up, but it's true. Bush believes he is in an epic war against "pure evil," yet managed to take time this week to raise money for the Republican National Committee, and he then left for a vacation at his family ranch in Crawford, Texas. …
Here's a short, well-written essay on one of the major problems with what now passes for "education": [W]e provide students with a meager curriculum which overemphasizes test taking, which neglects the essential and perennial issues of being a human being and which fails to give students a means of expressing…
Take a look at this beautiful movie image of Saturn taken by NASA:
This nighttime movie of the depths of the north pole of Saturn taken by the visual infrared mapping spectrometer onboard NASA’s Cassini Orbiter reveals a dynamic, active planet lurking underneath the ubiquitous cover of upper-level hazes. The defining feature of Saturn’s north polar regions–the six-sided hexagon feature–is clearly visible in the image.
“Who built that hexagon on top of Saturn?” one might ask. No one built it. It’s a self-organized pattern. And the area of the hexagon is large enough to fit four earths.
This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.
But this striking pattern is merely one of the huge numbers of beautiful self-organized patterns one can find in our universe. In Dynamic Patterns: the Self Organization of Brain and Behavior (1997), J. A. Scott Kelso describes the mysterious-seeming emergence of such dynamic patterns:
…Patterns in general emerge in a self-organized fashion, without any agent-like entity ordering the elements, telling them when and where to go . . . [S]ystems that are pumped