Swans on Tea

Eating al desco
I was recently eating lunch ‘al desco’. While I was eating-working, a student walked in my office to ask me a question, saw I was eating lunch at my desk, and said “Oh, I’m so sorry for interrupting your lunch. I’ll come back later.”
I was stunned. This has never happened to me before.
I’ve [...]

How to Teach a Child to Argue
And let’s face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric [...]

Periodic table gets a new element
More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of the element, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery.
The team, led by Sigurd Hofmann at the Centre for Heavy Ion Research, must propose a name for their find, before it can be formally added [...]

The Science of a Really Bad Day
Interview with Peter J. Bentley, PhD, the author of The Science of Why Sh*t Happens

Unqualified Offerings: A lot of ignorance needn’t stop you from offering contradictory theories
I have no particular opinion on why there is a gender gap in certain fields of science. I have a lot of skepticism for various theories offered, but I have no theory of my own. And it isn’t just because [...]

Green Eggs and Toast
Changing standard storytelling as an exercise in challenging kids. Plus, it’s fun. I’ve done these and similar things with my nieces. The fill-in-the-last-word is something I learned from someone with a background in child development, and the replace-a-word I do just because I love kids’ sense of the absurd [...]

Wrong Tomorrow
When someone makes a prediction, people post it to the site along with a brief description and a URL. We monitor it and change its status to true or false when appropriate.
They want significant, empirically testable predictions made by public figures, that have no more than a five-year horizon. Topics (thus far) are [...]

Tiger Woods’ game after surgery may be pure physics
Woods’ swing has been the envy of golfers around the world ever since he burst onto the professional scene in 1996.
His action is pure efficiency, combining hip, shoulder and wrist motion to exert the greatest possible force on the ball.
Pure efficiency? Does that make him the [...]

Low-Tech Fixes for High-Tech Problems
“In postwar Japan, the economy wasn’t doing so great, so you couldn’t get everyday-use items like household cleaners,” says Lisa Katayama, author of “Urawaza,” a book named after the Japanese term for clever lifestyle tips and tricks. “So people looked for ways to do with what they had.”
Popular urawaza include picking [...]

Meet Entropy Jones. Four hours of a baby play, condensed into about two minutes of time-lapse video.
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Non Sequitur: The Invention of Ideology
Answers don’t come before the data are in. Couldn’t agree more.

Doing the Math to Find the Good Jobs
The study, to be released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress.
[…]
According to the study, mathematicians fared best in part because they typically [...]