I have noticed that when I make calls on Skype, I sometimes hear a small echo of my voice. This has a remarkably discombobulating effect, making it almost impossible to continue speaking.
I learned that a Japanese company has used this effect to create a speech jamming gun that you can use to silence speakers whom you find annoying. [Read more…]
The commonly accepted theory for the original human settlers in the US is that 15,000 years ago they crossed over from Asia to America near the Bering Sea that had a land bridge then or at most required a short boat ride.
Hence I was intrigued by this news article (via Machines Like Us) that there is some evidence that the first humans here may consist of a people known as Solutreans who came from Europe 20,000 years ago by [Read more…]
When we think of social science studies that use surveys to look at features of the general population, we tend to assume that they go out and find a randomized sample of people, either by mail or phone or in person, and that each such study finds its own sample, so that any person [Read more…]
Scholarly articles tend to follow pretty much a four-step formula.
In order to make the case that their research is important, [Read more…]
2012 being a leap year, today is the extra day. Some of us are aware of the rule that says that we add a leap day for years that are divisible by 4 but not if it is divisible by 100 unless that year is also divisible by 400.
The reason for these complicated leap day rules is [Read more…]
Most scientists know how to fight for acceptance of their ideas within the community of scientists. The rules of the game are fairly well understood. But when it comes to politically charged issues, they tend to be at a loss because they work as individuals and hence do not know how to respond to massive organized attacks, of the kind that they have been under from climate change deniers. The attacks have ranged from explicit and [Read more…]
If there is one thing that people can agree on as a universal good in education, it is that we should seek to increase the critical thinking abilities in people. Actually, that is not quite true. During the days when the debate over intelligent design was raging in Ohio in 2003, one letter to the editor by an ID advocate dismissed [Read more…]
With the exploratory glamor being hogged by the space program, it is good to remind ourselves of the vast unexplored regions of the Earth.
Here is a nice graphic that shows what happens as we go down deep into the ocean. Of course, we don’t really know for sure since going deep is a formidable challenge. The deep ocean is largely an unexplored frontier. [Read more…]
Radiation has a very bad reputation. There is something about it that scares the daylights out of people. This is understandable since the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced graphic images of the devastation that radiation could cause. The Cold War generated additional fears of radiation silently killing off large numbers of people. Even today, one sees the fears generated by the phrase ‘dirty bombs’ that kill by nuclear radiation. [Read more…]
I am one of those people who can fall asleep almost anywhere at almost any time, even on planes. But in addition to such naps, I also value getting a good continuous night’s rest, which is usually conceived of as about eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.
So I was surprised by this report of a study that said [Read more…]