General
illconsidered | September 15, 2008I don't know if you all do too, but I find the whole LHC thing pretty interesting.
So here's a short video (6ish minute) that gives a very simple and visual overview of how the whole thing operates:
Not at the physics grad student level or anything, but interesting for the rest of us!
Interesting factoid: at their speed of 99.9999991% of the speed of light, the accelerated protons will have a mass 7000 times that of their mass at rest.
illconsidered | September 9, 2008Over on my latest entry in the "How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic" guide, a commenter has taken issue with this passage:
Discerning a trend from noisy data is one of the most basic processes in scientifc research, so even though this argument has a naive appeal to the majority of us with no statistical training, you can be sure that any scientifically trained individual trying to make a case for cooling out of this graph is not being intellectually honest. Please consider any source of this argument as very unreliable, either by being very uninformed about basic scientific processes, or very…
illconsidered | September 4, 2008How cool is this?
I found that via yesterday's APOD.
It is video taken by Deep Impact looking back from 50 million km (31 million miles) away in space.
illconsidered | September 2, 2008Okay, when I first heard this about McCain's VP pick, Sarah Palin:
I figured it was just an unscripted blunder by a marginal participant. But now I see this:
After I stopped laughing, I realized it is actually going to be one of their wingnut talking points. Sarah Palin knows about foreign policy because she lives close to Russia! Could you be any more ridiculous?
Now excuse me, I am going to go put a few particle physics texts under my pillow so I can solve the mystery of Dark Matter in the morning....
[h/t to Dispatches from the Culture War]
illconsidered | August 21, 2008Yesterday's APOD has a very cool multiple exposure picture of the moon passing through the earth's shadow, partially that is. It really gives a impressive sense of earth's shadow, even more than the usual total eclipse photos.
illconsidered | August 20, 2008So Bill Maher is interviewing a sitting US Senator about evolution. This Senator is not so sure about evolution ("the scientific communty is a little divided on that") and Maher is a little sceptical that intelligent people could actually believe in a talking snake:
You're a Senator. You are one of the very few people are really running this country. It worries me that people are running my country, who think, who believe in a talking snake.
And the Senator's defense?
"You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the senate"
No kidding you don't!
illconsidered | August 8, 2008Again, just because!
Love that music, too. I heard that on SBS in Tasmania in 2001 and struggled hard to find out what it was but never did. Now I know, "Sweet Lullaby" by Deep Forest (this video has a different version). Waiting for the CD now.
illconsidered | August 7, 2008What would adapting to climate change be like? A picture is worth a thousand words:
But a second picture is worth a few thousand more!
I saw the kids protecting their families from the rising tide at the beach and thought it was an amusing analogy. The running-away photo was just an unforeseen bonus!
I, and the throngs of others, were at that overcrowded beach to see some fireworks. Well actually to take pictures of the fireworks. After four evenings of this, all part of Vancouver's "Celebration of Light" fireworks competition, I think I have learned the basics of photographing them.…
illconsidered | August 1, 2008Posted just because I love this (besides, it's Friday, let's go dancing!)
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
illconsidered | August 1, 2008I don't know if you all have heard of Chris Jordan before. He does some interesting very large scale art work featuring garbage or consumable goods to illustrate the vast quantities of some of these things that we all consume.
One of his latest pieces is a rather powerful political statement about the Bush administration's abuses of power and human rights, called "We the People"
It is an image of a piece of the US constitution made out of pictures of abused and illegally detained people, abused and detained by the US. The image "depicts 83,000 Abu Ghraib prisoner photographs, equal to the…
loom | July 1, 2008Okay--after some technical difficulties I won't bore you by recounting, I have an announcement. For the third time in this blog's life, I'm packing it up and moving it to a new home.
I would like offer my deepest thanks to Scienceblogs for hosting the Loom for two years. I got to know a great community of bloggers whom I will continue to follow closely as they flood my RSS stream. Virginia Hughes, Katherine Sharpe, Tim Murtaugh, and the rest of the folks behind the scenes at Scienceblogs have been wonderful to work with, always ready to get me out of whatever programming mess I fall into…
loom | June 30, 2008Really, it's not like I've discovered a new element or anything. See you tomorrow.
loom | June 29, 2008...at 5 today. [That's 5 pm EST--sorry for the confusion.]
[Hint...I've turned off the comments till then.]
loom | June 28, 2008I'm back on bloggingheads.tv, talking this week with Paul Ehrlich about everything from climate change to Polynesian canoe oars to the origins of human culture to why cars are best for teenagers to make out in. Check it out.
loom | June 3, 2008Just a technical note--for some reason my site carlzimmer.com has been put on some bad list by Google, so that you are warned that if you go to the site your computer will melt into a pool of liquid germanium. But it's safe.
loom | May 31, 2008In case you couldn't make it to my World Science Festival panel this afternoon, check out my conversation with co-panelist/journalist/book author Peter Pringle on bloggingheads.
loom | May 10, 2008Following up on the last post, here's George Johnson with Stephen Colbert. Where else on TV could someone recreate one of Faraday's experiments? The new Mr. Wizard?