I’m reading Bertrand Russell’s The ABC of Relativity (well, listening to it, in an audiobook read by Derek Jacoby FTW), and for one, it’s helping me understand relativity a tiny, tiny bit, which is huge. Relatively. But I also just heard Jacoby pronounce this tidbit, which delighted me: If people were to learn to conceive …
Tag Archive: science
Apr 12 2013
A Song for Quetzalcoatlus
It’s been a while since I last debuted a dumb song about a prehistoric reptile for the amusement of my toddler son, so let’s correct that right now. Sung to the tune of “Macarena,” is a quick, stupid ditty for a certain pterosaur with a 40-foot wingspan. He wanna keep things tidy, yeah he wants …
Feb 22 2013
It Apparently Doesn’t Take a Psychic
You really have to watch this video of this mystical guy who really seems to know things he could not possibly know about the people he’s giving readings to. Watch to the end to have your mind blown.
Feb 15 2013
Near-Earth Object, Too Close for Comfort
From the NYT report on the Siberia meteor: “I opened the window from surprise — there was such heat coming in, as if it were summer in the yard, and then I watched as the flash flew by and turned into a dot somewhere over the forest,” wrote Darya Frenn, a blogger. “And in several …
Feb 09 2013
Is Not the Truth the Truth? – Galileo as Falstaff
Go ahead and let this passage from a wonderful piece on Galileo by Adam Gropnik in The New Yorker blow your mind. What would Shakespeare’s Galileo have been, one wonders, had he ever written him? Well, in a sense, he had written him, as Falstaff, the man of appetite and wit who sees through the …
Jan 17 2013
Deep Riffs: Bussard Collector
A song of mine from 2006 that’s ostensibly about a plausible spaceship, but really about caring a whole lot about something bigger than yourself. BONUS: This song, though having a sci-fi bent, does not sound like filk. If you don’t know what filk is, just trust me, you’re welcome. Appears on my album Evidence of …
Jan 12 2013
A Rap for Euparkeria
It can’t be helped. When you have a household with a 3-year-old obsessed with dinosaurs and a daddy with a weird sense of humor and desperate need for validation, silly songs emerge. A late addition to Toby’s Netflix repertoire is Walking with Monsters, a Branagh-narrated spinoff of Walking with Dinosaurs that features pre-dinosaur creatures in …
Jan 08 2013
Internet Comments vs. Knowledge
Apparently, I’m not the only one who doesn’t like Internet comment sections. Neither does science. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: In an experiment . . . about 2,000 people were asked to read a balanced news report about nanotechnology followed by a group of invented comments. All saw the same report but some read a group …
Dec 01 2012
A Song for Eustreptospondylus
You know what dinosaur has a musical sounding name? Eustreptospondylus. Just say it out loud. I mean, if you can. It's pronounced “you strepped a SPON dull us,” which, coincidentally, is also how you say “My hovercraft is full of eels” in Hungarian. My boy Toby, who just turned 3 last week, is obsessed with …
Nov 20 2012
Best Newspaper Correction in the Universe
From the New York Times on the declining birthrate of stars: An earlier version of this article misstated the sound made by a black hole in the galaxy NGC 1275. It is that of a B flat 57 octaves below middle C, not 27.
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