Swans on Tea

Halloween math class.
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The map that changed the world
The Waldseemuller map was – and still is – an astonishing sight to behold. Drawn 15 years after Columbus first sailed across the Atlantic, and measuring a remarkable 8ft wide by 4½ft high, it introduced Europeans to a fundamentally new understanding of the make-up of the earth.
The map represented a [...]

Cell Size and Scale
Use the slider to zoom from coffee bean scale all the way down to a Carbon atom, passing by various biology-related structures.

One thing I noted last summer when the STS-124 shuttle astronauts visited was that the kids asked some great questions. And that’s the theme of a new Boing-Boing column:
Submit your toddler’s science questions!
The child does not have to be your own. Questions do not have to be cute or “Kids Say the Darndest Things-ish” [...]

Built on Facts: Book-throwing and physics.
More like book-spinning. Why a book will or won’t wobble like crazy when you toss it.

Chad was recently at the Perimeter Institute’s Quantum to Cosmos Festival, on a panel discussion called Communicating Science in the 21st Century. (Direct link to the video is here). It’s a pretty good discussion, I think, but a few things are left open — discussions have their way of drifting off in a [...]

Brian Cox on The Colbert report
You’re saying sensible things. This has gone horribly wrong!

Storage Ring Dust-Up
High-energy physicists have finally pinpointed their dust problem. Inside multi-million dollar storage rings, high-speed trains of electrons are often derailed by micron-sized specks of dust. Now a team has shown that dust grains arise from sparks inside a Japanese storage ring, as they report in an upcoming paper in Physical Review Special Topics–Accelerators [...]

Paul Graham: What Startups are Really Like
The cofounder is your thesis advisor. There are many points with a pretty decent correlation to life in grad school, at least for physics, and my datum.
I’ve been surprised again and again by just how much more important persistence is than raw intelligence.
Not that physics grad school [...]

Or so it would seem
Blog: how to write badly well
For instance, in Skip blithely between tenses
I sit at my desk with my head in my hands and sighed. It is only three days until the deadline, I think, and I’m going to have had to finished everything before then. If only I have finish [...]

sciencegeekgirl: Science activities for Halloween!

David Saltzberg, the science consultant for the TV show The Big Bang Theory, has a blog explaining the science: The Big Blog Theory
Its blogroll needs some character development, methinks.