Most of us are familiar with the fact that with solid objects, it is harder to start things moving than it is to keep it moving. A similar phenomenon occurs with fluids, where we use the term viscosity to indicate the frictional effects. With most fluids, keeping it stirred is easier or stays the same when compared to starting to stir it. [Read more…]
Mathematics has always been a beautiful discipline, but its appeal is of an austere kind that takes some effort to fully appreciate. But computers and simulations now enable people to create visualizations of the beauty that they could formerly only create in their minds. The beautiful patterns generated by the Mandelbrot set is one example. [Read more…]
A book given to people taking the GRE exam advises them that “Exercise great caution if you decide to change an answer. Experience indicates that many students who change answers change to the wrong answer.”
This advice represents a widespread belief that our instincts, our intuitive senses, are the most reliable guides to decisions. It is based on the assumption that instincts are based on prior knowledge and experiences and that our brains integrate all these things to enable us to make quick judgments that tend to be sound. This is the idea heavily promoted by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. [Read more…]
It would be a shock if it does but a series of nine experiments done in 2011 by Daryl Bem a professor at Cornell University and published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology seemed to find this remarkable effect in nine different experiments. [Read more…]
I wrote earlier about the puzzling feature of some atheists going out of their way to praise religion, sometimes even denigrating science in the process in order to make their point. Reader Baga sent me a link to this article in Nature that has yet another atheist (this time a scientist) trying to do the same thing. [Read more…]
A long time ago, before I began blogging, I read an article or book by an evolutionary biologist that said that dogs and wolves had evolved to have rules in their packs that gave the smallest members a great amount of latitude and that the bigger members of the pack would not be rough with them. This results in what appears to be the smaller animals ‘bullying’ the larger ones with impunity. [Read more…]
All the cooks out there know that there comes a time when recipes require you to separate the egg yolks from the whites. I remember when I was a little boy seeing people do that by breaking the shell roughly in two and pouring the egg into one of the halves. The yolk would get caught while the white would overflow the shell and pour into the bowl beneath. You would then pour the remainder into the now empty other half of the egg shell, with more white dripping down. By doing this several times, you get get a pretty good separation, though it required some skill to not shatter the shell while breaking it and not break the yolk on the jagged edges. [Read more…]
One of the features of evolution is that once we have passed the age when we can have and raise children to a point where they can survive on their own and go on to have children, we have played our part in the process and have become redundant, evolutionarily speaking. Although our own bodies start to decay, this has no biological effect on our children. [Read more…]