Random Thoughts

If you happen to be in the San Francisco metropolitan area the week of August 16th, 2009 and can't get enough science, I'll be emcee'ing a symposium on communicating science to the public at the 90th Annual Meeting of the AAAS pacific region. The topic is communicating science to the public as we get our legs under us in the 21st century and covers four areas;  Greg Critser, longtime science and medical journalist and author of books like "Generation Rx" and "Fat Land", will discuss how to help journalists create better science articles by helping to manage their expectations and…

No one disturbs his fellow men with a new view unpunished. - Ernest Mach, "A New Sense", quoted in Edmund Bolles, Galileo's Commandment, p. 27

Electrical arcs stabbed through the violet dusk. Heated solutions groaned toward their boiling points. Bubbles rose helically through luminous green liquids. Miniature explosions occurred in distant corners of the facility, sending up showers of glass as nearby workers cowered beneath seaside umbrellas set up for just such protection. Gauge needles oscillated feverishly. Sensitive flames sang at different pitches. Amid a gleaming clutter of burners and spectroscopes, funnels and flasks, centrifugal and Soxhlet extractors, and distillations columns in both the Glynsky and Le Bel-Henninger…

Light is the principal means by which we are able to transmit and receive information from objects around us and throughout the universe.  - Raymond Serway, Physics for Scientists and Engineers

My apologies, Kim...

I was outside the target demographic of this dance (though I can moonwalk like no one's business) but if I were going to pick up a retro dance, this would be a cool one.

Science grows through accretion, but becomes potent through distillation. - James P. Sethna, Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity

From the Rugbyologist's blog:  St. Louis Hero Needed There is a 14 month old child in St. Louis in desperate need of an AB negative blood donor. Hospitals in St. Louis are in desperate need of AB negative blood. If you have this rare blood type, please contact Josh Witten immediately either by email or facebook or twitter (@rugbyologist). Edit: a note from Josh Witten Fortunately, it appears that enough donors have been identified. I would, again, encourage everyone, regardless of blood type to donate as often as possible.

Christine Baranski with BLoggy

The Bookworm And The Encyclopedias A simple math puzzle. A set of 10 encyclopedias is sitting on a bookshelf in left-to-right numerical order. Each single volume contains 1,000 pages.     A bookworm eats its way directly and linearly through them in a straight line. It starts on page 1 of volume 1. It ends on page 1,000  of volume 10. Question:    Not counting any covers, flysheets, etc., how many pages does the bookworm eat ? I intend to post my answer next Monday, or before that if anyone comments with a solution that I agree with. The answer is now posted…