Here’s a hot topic for you: scientists have discovered evidence of precognition–an ability to predict the future (here’s a link to the paper). Although, depending on who you talk to, the hot topic might just be that someone managed to publish on this topic in a well-respected journal. The author, Daryl Bem from Cornell University, [...]
Check this out. The NPR interviewer just gives this guy, Volker Bertelmann, everyday items and Bertelmann uses them to get amazing new sounds out of a piano. You can watch the first part below but the NPR website has a bunch of other videos too.
Every time I have to write a closed book test I wonder where this idea ever came from in the first place. What are we really testing? This feeds into last Friday’s post about what the real goal of education is. If we knew exactly what school was for, we could better design tests that [...]
Nice:
When I studied ecology, I used to think about education in terms of evolutionary pressures. Similar to the way breeders can choose which animals to breed to get a desired result (like the Heike crab, left, which was accidentally selected by Japanese fishermen to look like a warrior), I figured you could think of the [...]
I read an interesting chapter in Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science last night. He covered a question I’m sure many have answered before but in a more intuitive way. The question was: Why do we need science? And the answer wasn’t because the world is complex that we need equations with eleven variables to describe [...]
One of the best science writers Michael Specter, at least in my opinion, has chosen to tackle a huge issue: tuberculosis in India. A disease that is rare in the Western world–well, except for people we don’t care about like the poor and the Inuit–but is still rampant in the world’s second most populous nation. [...]
One of the most interesting things I took away from the talk Ben Goldacre–writer of the weekly column Bad Science in the Guardian–gave in Montreal a couple weeks ago was the fact that naturopaths refused to criticize Matthias Rath, a naturopath, for pushing the idea that AIDS could be cured by vitamins to South Africans. [...]
I know no one cares if I’m busy. And no one should. I just want to say it to tell you that RadarLake has slowed down a bit not because I don’t want to write, but because there are only 24 hours in a day (well, except yesterday which had 25 hours, damn!). I’ve got [...]
I had a post about daylight savings all lined up but then I came across this and got completely distracted. How many bands can you identify by their pictogram? Check out AUX for the answers.
