The title is a little joke about a math term, “convergent sequence.” No way on earth can I understand convergent sequences and I doubt if anybody can explain it to me. “Converging consequences” — now that makes a kind of horrible sense, like maybe an east coast snow storm. Anyway. I hope this will be […]
The last Zooniverse project I spent time on was also their first, Galaxy Zoo 1. You looked at pictures of galaxies and decided whether they were shaped like spirals or ellipticals. I could do that, it was fun, and better yet, it was citizen science, 350,000 citizens doing real science with real scientific results, so […]
Virginia wrote one of Nature‘s (very prestigious outfit) ten best features last year. Nature‘s editors said so. The feature, “Science in Court: Head Case,” was about the dicey use of MRI in death sentences for psychopathic murderers. Fascinating science, real-world implications. Go read it. Photo: Gabriel Pollard
UPDATE: I woke up, looked at the clock, then looked out the window at the moon — no eclipse. “They must have gotten it wrong,” I thought. I looked at the clock again, saw I had misread it, and realized with a little shock of joy, they never get this wrong. Other phenomena of nature […]
I swear, you could get a good start at being a practicing geologist, just from looking at maps. These lovely looping patterns are a satellite’s view of some mountains in southeastern Oklahoma. They are the Ouachita, pronounced Wachita and mispronounced Wichita. I’m fond of the Ouachita – they’re sleepers. And given what went on underneath […]
This happens. An astronomer said that he found, as astronomers do, something that looked unusual and that turned out to be an unusual form of a usual thing. But before he figured that out, a reporter happened to ask him what’s new, and the astronomer said he’d found this unusual thing, couldn’t figure it out, […]
Big problems for astronomers: the just-launched zillion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t be focused; a Mars probe got to Mars and then lost contact with the earth; the 300-foot Green Bank radio telescope collapsed one night into lacy rubble. Smaller problems are below. An amateur astronomer, after observing on his back porch one night, locked his […]
This thing is just simmering soup, circulating oceans, the granules on the sun’s surface, and the driver of the continental plates; it’s just convection. That is, heat rises and cold falls, updrafts and downdrafts, up in the middle and down at the sides: a cell of convection. This convective cell is called a supercell and […]
