Tuesday February 19th was the 540th birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus. The Christian Science Monitor had a couple of good articles on his life and work. [Read more…]

I remember the first time that I realized that I had a false memory. It concerned an event that I remembered from when I was about six years old. There was a fire a few houses away and my father decided to pack us in the car and drive us away for safety in case it should spread and engulf our home. When I asked my mother and older sister many years later about this incident, they both said that such a sequence never happened. But the images are still quite strong in my mind. [Read more…]

Self-driving cars have clearly reached a level where they are no longer the stuff of science fiction but are now a reality, and we should soon be seeing them on streets everywhere. Once people get over the spooky aspect of it, we can expect to see an explosion in their numbers. Watch this demonstration of such a car driving itself to see how it can be a real boon to some people. [Read more…]

I have been fascinated by the fact that evolution tells us that if we could journey back in time, then all of our ancestors start to merge, with some surprising results. I wrote a series of posts exploring this topic some years ago and pointed out some surprising (to me at least) results. [Read more…]

People who are perceived to be overweight according to the norms set by society have a tough time. We live in a media-saturated world in which thinness is not only treated as a desirable marker of good looks and good health, it is also seen as somehow virtuous and hence people who are above the norms in weight are seen as being somehow morally weak and lacking in will power to control how much they eat. This is despite the fact that it is not at all clear what a person’s optimum weight should be, how much it is affected by distribution and body shape and age, what causes some to be heavier than others, and even whether being overweight is as extremely unhealthy as it is sometimes made out to be. [Read more…]

This paradox is a popular one that seems to have no resolution since the existence of one seems to deny the possibility of the other. After all, if you have an unstoppable force that must mean that there can be no such thing as immovable object and vice versa. [Read more…]

Via Maggie Koerth-Baker, I obtained this video of astronaut Sunita Williams giving us a quite detailed tour of the International Space Station. Although the ISS has been around for a while, it was only while watching it that I realized that I really did not know much about it. The video is pretty interesting, especially for its details of daily life there. [Read more…]

Today January 20th is on average the coldest day in Cleveland and so I look on it as mid-winter. From now on, the days get warmer as we approach spring, and so this is a day which puts a song on my lips and joy in my heart, even though it is actually very cold and windy outside today. [Read more…]