Probably not helpful if you have a fear of lists, or phobophobia (fear of phobias)
I do have to wonder how widespread some of these are. Arachibutyrophobia? Is that widespread outside of dogs?
Monthly Archives: May 2010
The Science is Fake, but the Genius is Real
Why is coffee addictive?
The coffee bean has a distinctive smell that makes you forget how painful it is to be awake
Wicked Optical Behavior
Singular Optics: Light chasing its own tail
Interference, screw dislocations and optical vortices, oh my!
Theory, Theory, Who's Got the Theory
Built on Facts: The Theory of Theory
Matt’s commentary on the idea of “just a theory” at the Language of Bad Physics Blog (to which I linked recently) along with a quick example.
I put “theory” in scare quotes not because amateurs can’t make contributions to physics – they can and do – but because there’s a heck of a lot of cranks out there with theories that aren’t actually theories. In physics, if you want to come up with a theory at minimum it has to:
1. Generate numbers.
2. Match those numbers consistently with observation.
If there’s one widespread trait among cranks, crackpots and other related species, it’s not understanding or accepting the concept of falsifiability, and why if one is wrong, one must be verifiably wrong. I suspect that they simply don’t accept the possibility that they could be wrong.
There Are Oedipal Snakes on this Oedipal Plane!
The Deadliest Snakes on Land, Sea and Air
Until recently, the only time we’d heard of airborne snakes was in the Samuel L Jackson cult classic, Snakes on a Plane, but snakes don’t need human help to fly. They can do it all by themselves. Actually, Flying Tree Snakes are technically able to glide rather than fly, but even so these South and Southeast Asian jungle denizens can make some serious headway as they sail through the air – traveling distances as far as 328 feet before landing. After first slithering up towards the top of the canopy, the snake hurls itself into the ether, twisting and propelling itself away from its launch pad before landing on another tree or the forest floor.
(How do they get 328 feet? It’s 100 meters. That’s some MoFo false precision from the MoFo unit conversion!)
Bulwer-Lyttonites in Training
Analogies and Metaphors Found in High School Essays
Old list, but still worthy of comparison to the Bulwer-Lytton contest
A Peek in the Closet
Instruments for Natural Philosophy
In February 1975, Deborah Jean Warner, a Curator of Physical Science at the National Museum of American History, called me to ask if Kenyon had any historical physics teaching apparatus. I looked around my office, and reeled off the names of four or five good pieces of apparatus that I was using in my lectures. The next month I was at the Smithsonian, exploring the collection and photographing some of it in black and white and in color. Since then, I have visited and photographed nearly seventy collections of early physics apparatus. This web site displays pictures of about 1850 pieces of apparatus, along with text and references.
Megafauna
My friend, Jørgen, doesn’t believe I can collect one million giraffes by 2011. I’m gonna prove him wrong, but I need your help. You can create your giraffes in any way you like, but not on a computer and no store bought objects. You must create your giraffes yourself!
Can I make more than one giraffe?
Yes! I don’t care who makes the giraffes, I just need one million of them. The project is “One Million Giraffes”, not “One Million Giraffes From One Million People”.
If this were an email, I’d put it down as an urban legend. But it’s a website, so it must be an urban awesome.
The count is 798,873 as of when I copied that number from the website.
Woo From the Great White North
Paul Hellyer defends aliens after Stephen Hawking’s warning
Former federal defence minister Paul Hellyer, 86, believes not only that aliens have visited Earth but also that they have contributed greatly to human technological advances.
So he can’t quite understand why the world renowned astrophysicist views them with such trepidation
[…]
“Microchips, for example, fiber-optics, they are just two of the many things that allegedly — and probably for real — came from crashed vehicles,” Hellyer said.
If I had been involved in the development of the microchip or fiber-optics, I’d be rather insulted by the notion that it’s so far beyond our capabilities that it must have come from aliens. It’s been observed (can’t remember he source offhand) that from the descriptions given by the “eyewitnesses,” aliens are always just a little more advanced than were are. They didn’t give us fusion, or a propulsion system that would actually allow interstellar travel or anything like that. A hundred years ago, they didn’t give us lasers. They “gave” us technology that fits right in with the cutting edge of science and technology of the time.
I Know That You Know That I Know
“Are spies really of any value?” investigated (mostly) in the context of Operation Mincemeat, a deception to make Germany think an invasion in the Mediterranean would come through Greece, instead of Sicily.
A body that washes up onshore is either the real thing or a plant. The story told by the ambassador’s valet is either true or too good to be true. Mincemeat seems extraordinary proof of the cleverness of the British Secret Intelligence Service, until you remember that just a few years later the Secret Intelligence Service was staggered by the discovery that one of its most senior officials, Kim Philby, had been a Soviet spy for years. The deceivers ended up as the deceived.
But, if you cannot know what is true and what is not, how on earth do you run a spy agency? In the nineteen-sixties, Angleton turned the C.I.A. upside down in search of K.G.B. moles that he was sure were there. As a result of his mole hunt, the agency was paralyzed at the height of the Cold War. American intelligence officers who were entirely innocent were subjected to unfair accusations and scrutiny. By the end, Angleton himself came under suspicion of being a Soviet mole, on the ground that the damage he inflicted on the C.I.A. in the pursuit of his imagined Soviet moles was the sort of damage that a real mole would have sought to inflict on the C.I.A. in the pursuit of Soviet interests.