I have a new video essay on Time.com about Galileo and the International Year of Astronomy. It features exoplanet hunter extraordinaire Geoff Marcy and Ben Burress of the Chabot Space and Science Center. Check it out. Let me know what you think. And get your own Galileoscope!…
At the end of the Siftables session, I met Seth Raphael (also here), who was sitting two seats over from me. We also happen to be sharing a stage together tonight at the LateTech event – I’ll be doing science comedy and Seth presents “a new technological magic show.” In the three or four minutes …
“Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.” – Gregory Benford‘s law of controversy (an adage from his 1980 novel Timescape).
My mother used to tell me to “stand up straight.” It was one of her favorite things to say: “Stand up straight!” Many other people, I have discovered, also grew up hearing that phrase. It’s nearly universal. As if mothers were programmed to say it. In fact, I believe mothers have been telling their children …
I noticed a long time ago, whenever my mother would lose weight, my father would gain weight. And when my father lost weight, my mother gained weight. It was like the Conservation of Mass, within our family. Being the young scientist that I was, I developed a theory to explain the facts: You see, you …
In the normal course of my web browsing, I stumbled upon the home page of Stephen E. Schwartz, an atmospheric scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and chief scientist of the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Science Program. The page gets pretty technical for those of us who are not atmospheric scientists, but near the bottom of …