As soon as I got over the fainting spell from looking at the Planck satellite’s map – and if you haven’t seen it, look now, faint, and then click – showing the Milky Way, I had a burning question. Okay, true, the Planck satellite wasn’t intended to map the Milky Way. It was supposed to […]
I’m aging. I love too many people whose health and wellbeing is too uncertain. I want to write about too many things, each one requiring too much time and too many brains. I take on too many assignments and some of the most important are outside my talents and over my head. I can’t keep […]
All I can say is, yup. That, and the little colored oval just under the BANG! is real data.
A charming website called Who’s the Scientist? shows seventh graders’ images of scientists before and after actually meeting scientists.
Crop circles have moved well past circles. Now they’re jellyfish, dragonflies, and trilobites, drawn using higher math, computers, laser pointers, and GPS’s. A lovely little essay by a physicist in a recent Nature calls them “modern mathematical artworks” and hopes that this summer will produce a “bumper batch.” They seem to have no larger meaning, […]
Pay attention to the quote below the drawing. John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist whose specialities were nuclear physics, gravitation — he created the term, “black hole” — and getting people riled up. He died in 2008 at age 96. I mean, when Victor Hugo writes that science says the last word on nothing, […]
The word, “data” – tables of numbers, incomprehensible graphs — for most of us would make a good sleep aid. For astronomers, though, “data” means a star-sized thing that outshines a galaxy, or a galaxy just being born, or a star that spins in milliseconds. Data for astronomers is a way to survive, a reason […]
Abstruse Goose is a nameless, faceless entity, obviously a mathematician of some sort, who posts extremely funny but occasionally abstruse cartoons at http://abstrusegoose.com. http://abstrusegoose.com/275
