In his post, Slapping Interstellarmachine around, Zerowing21 demolishes quite clearly and thoroughly the fallacy of the idea that everything must be taken on faith that cannot be observed directly. He also does a decent job of demonstrating that all ideas and beliefs are not equally valid. These are tactics the creationist and ID crowd use all the time in their specious ‘arguments’ for their ideas. All ideas are not all equally valid. Some ideas are highly unlikely and shouldn’t get as much weight as those with good evidential support. Some ideas are just stupid. Anyway, he says it much better than I do.
Category Archives: science
Science is so very cool…
Check out this video:
It shows a water droplet falling onto a carbon nanotubule surface that is perfectly hydrophobic (water resistant), so much so that the surface tension of the droplet is enough to keep it in a tight ball and allow it to bounce! I especially like the sequence showing two droplets colliding and merging…
Another Symphony of Science production
I love these songs, done with the Autotune software and emphasizing science and reason using the voices of some of the brightest lights in science. This one, ‘The Poetry of Reality’, is my second favorite, after the original one done with Carl Sagan called ‘Glorious Dawn’.
You can find many more videos at the Symphony of Science website.
Carl Sagan Sings
A really fantastic tribute to Carl Sagan, done as a song, using clips from his Cosmos television series. I love the technology used to make him ‘sing’. It’s quite effective when used in this way, and has produced a haunting melody and given his already wonderful way of speaking an interesting twist. You can download the mp3 version by visiting the webpage listed at the end of the video.
Happy Monkey Music
I’ve always thought, as I suspect many of you have, that animals in general (and our pets in particular) will respond to human music, even like it. It turns out that this idea may be wrong. A recent study has revealed that monkeys don’t like human music, but will listen and respond to music based on the vocalizations they make. This article from Wired explains the details. I listened to both samples of music and found the fearful monkey music very irritating. The happy monkey music wasn’t much better!
Amazing! NASA’s Kepler Mission
NASA has successfully launched the Kepler satellite to look for Earth-like planets around other stars. The Planetologist explains it much better than I can. Again, amazing!
Discovery Institute Smackdown
This is how you respond to creationist attempts to legitimize their ‘science’. Pwnd. Dr. Gotelli is my hero.
I’m Hopeful
Great video from President Obama on his commitment to science education and support. He’s saying the right words. It’s the best way to start undoing the anti-science damage that has occurred over the last 8 years.
The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds
Seed presents a very cool video compressing the 4.6 billion years of Earth’s existence down to one minute. See if you can catch the final extremely brief blip at the end representing the moment humans show up.
Darwin’s Birthday
Excellent opinion piece at the New York Times on the significance of Darwin’s grand contribution to science and understanding the history of the human species. Today would be Darwin’s 200th birthday.
Singing Meat 