December 16, 2014
The hot topic of the day is, of course, the big shake-up at Scientific American's blog network. The official statement is, of course, very carefully worded, but the end result is that they're shedding a bunch of blogs and instituting a standard set of guidelines for those that remain. A more…
December 15, 2014
Over at Medium, they've published a long excerpt from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, that gives a good flavor of what the book's really like. It's about how the process for solving hidden-object games like the classic Where's Waldo books is comparable to the process used by Henrietta…
December 15, 2014
"...and take care that all the signatures go in the right way round, eh, James? I was able to soothe Mr. Dance last time, but if another copy comes back to be rebound, M. de la Roche will put you out."
"Yessir."
"A little more care, there's a good lad. Run home, now, we'll see you in the morning…
December 14, 2014
Scientific controversies aren't always settled by a single dramatic experiment, but it's a lot of fun when they are. It's even more fun when they can be carried out with, as the author put it, "without any other apparatus than is at hand to every one."
I'm speaking in this case of the famous "…
December 14, 2014
A few items for Sunday morning:
-- First and foremost, in just a few hours from now, I'll be signing books at the Open Door. If you're in Quebec or central Pennsylvania, you better leave now; Boston or NYC, you can have a cup of coffee first. Farther than that, you might try calling them around…
December 13, 2014
Speaking of the timing of astronomical phenomena, as we were yesterday, the timing of celestial bodies was the key to the first demonstration of one of the pillars of modern physics, the fact that light travels at a finite speed. This actually pre-dates yesterday's longitude discoveries, which I…
December 12, 2014
One of the questions from a caller when I was on the "Think" show was about how to keep kids interested in science. As I said, the issue isn't so much creating in interest as working to not squelch the interest that's already there. Taking kids to cool places like zoos and science museums is a…
December 12, 2014
Returning to our mostly-chronological ordering after yesterday's brief excursion, we come to one of the great problems of the 1700's, namely determining the longitude at sea. Latitude is easy to find, based on the height of the Sun at noon-- we told that story last week-- but longitude is much…
December 12, 2014
Two quick notes:
-- In a little more than half an hour Buttercup will marry Humperdinck I'll be talking about Eureka on talk radio in Ireland. This was put together very quickly, thus the short notice.
-- I'll be signing books this Sunday, the 14th, at The Open Door Bookstore in Schenectady. If you…
December 11, 2014
Last week Kate pointed me to this post about heroic stories of science saying "This seems relevant to your interests." And, in fact, a good deal of the post talks about Patricia Fara's Science: A Four Thousand Year History, the Union library's copy of which is sitting on my desk, where I had looked…
December 11, 2014
I've been trying to keep to a roughly chronological ordering of these stories, but this slow-motion snow storm that was waiting to greet us on our return from Florida made the schools open on a two-hour delay today, which eats the time I usually use for blogging and books stuff. So I'm going to…
December 11, 2014
Yesterday, I drove through the slush to Albany to do an appearance on KERA radio's "Think" from a studio there. The audio is at that link.
It was a bit of a strange experience, because I drove to a place to do the interview in a radio studio, but I was the only one in the room, taking questions…
December 10, 2014
The final step of the scientific process is to share your results with others, and that's the step where things are most prone to breaking down. Countless great discoveries have been delayed or temporarily lost because the people who made them were more concerned with protecting "their" secrets…
December 10, 2014
So, you've picked up your copy of the just-released Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist-- you have bought a copy, right?-- and now you're thinking "I'd love to curl up and read this, but what should I listen to while I do that?"
Well, never fear, I'm here to help. Also, I'm really tired, and…
December 9, 2014
Today is the official release date for Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, so of course there are a bunch of exciting things happening:
-- There's a short excerpt at the Science of Us blog from New York Magazine. This is a chunk of the Introduction, about how scientists are smart, but not…
December 9, 2014
I tooke a bodkine gh & put it betwixt my eye & [the] bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye [with the] end of it (soe as to make [the] curvature a, bcdef in my eye) there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles r, s, t, &c. Which…
December 9, 2014
Copies of Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist have been turning up in the wild for a while now, but the officially official release date is today (available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, Powell’s, and anywhere else books are sold). To mark that, here's some stuff I wrote about the…
December 8, 2014
This entry doesn't have a fictionalized story both because I'm on vacation, and because I don't think there's a single dramatic turning point in this particular story. It's probably one of the most impressive human accomplishments of the last umpteen thousand years, though, and definitely deserves…
December 7, 2014
Following on yesterday's story of transformative discoveries starting by accident, we'll jump from the Middle East to the Far East for the probably apocryphal story of the Empress Leizu (also sometimes referred to as Xi Lingshi) who is credited with the discovery of silk around 2600 BCE. One of the…
December 6, 2014
Borne of the flowing water (...)
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,
Borne of the flowing water (...)
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag,
Having founded your town by the sacred lake,
She finished its great walls for you,
Ninkasi, having founded your town by the sacred lake,
She finished its…
December 6, 2014
We flew down to Florida Friday afternoon, on a Southwest flight to Tampa. While waiting to board, SteelyKid of course struck up a conversation with basically everybody in the vicinity, but mostly an older Asian woman who was behind us.
That woman also ended up in the seat directly behind SteelyKid…
December 5, 2014
"More wine?"
"Hmm? Oh, yes, thank you. Sorry, I was--"
"Thinking about mathematics, I wager. Prime numbers was it?"
"No, just distracted. It's this blasted heat."
"It is the longest day of the year."
"Yes, but normally not so hot."
"Especially here. You think this is hot, visit me in Syene…
December 5, 2014
I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic…
December 5, 2014
A couple of quick updates on Eureka publicity, as we get on a plane today to take the kids to Florida for the weekend:
-- APS News has an excerpt from the chapter on collecting hobbies. This is kind of choppy, obviously cut down to meet a word count limit of some sort, but it gets the basic flavor…
December 4, 2014
After a loooong hiatus due to incompatible work schedules, Rhett and I are back with our intermittent hangout series. We talk about space programs, the engineering mindset, and cool stuff you can do with liquid nitrogen.
Amazingly, we didn't actually talk about our current (well, recently-…
December 4, 2014
The southeastern sky had been lightening for some time, stars slowly fading away. Off to the west, a band of clouds was moving in, obscuring stars as it came, but they wouldn't make it in time to block the sunrise. A good thing, as the last two dawns had been cloudy. There would be maybe two more…
December 4, 2014
I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic…
December 3, 2014
The fungal tea tastes vile, and not for the first time he considers dumping it on the last of the morning's fire. It does seem to be helping the pain in his gut, though, as the medicine man said it would, so he gulps the last of it with a grimace. Around him the younger members of the raiding…
December 3, 2014
I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic…
December 2, 2014
A few smallish items regarding Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist:
-- I'll be doing a signing at the Open Door bookstore in Schenectady next Sunday, the 14th, from 12-1:30. The Open door is one of the kids' favorite spots, as it's right outside the Sunday market we go to every week, so this…
