This article in New Scientist blew my mind. Basically, physicists were trying to find gravitational waves, but kept getting all this noise in their data. And by “noise” they might actually mean they’ve figured out that we’re “living a giant cosmic hologram.”
I took a philosophy class about identity and perception once that made me reconsider my ideas about reality. I wonder what all those philosophers we read would have to say about this?
Japanese farmers grow the most beautiful apples. The process is incredibly labor intensive, however, and may die out in the next generation or so.
Anti-Ballistic Missile Complex
Peg Mullen, the Cindy Sheehan of the Vietnam war, died last week.
Why aren’t more women philosophers? It’s the same reason most women steer clear of computer science: the large proportion of arrogant, sexist pricks currently in the profession.
Abigail Reynolds - The Music Room
Hope you like bugs – one of their major predators is on the way out. And amphibians aren’t the only ones in trouble: 20% of mammals, 12% of birds, 5% of reptiles, and 4% of fish are in danger of extinction.
Just one more woman on a committee or in a group can make an incredible difference. I’ve been in math classes where I’m the only woman and math classes where I’m one of just a few women. FSP really captures the difference in the dynamic in her post.
On COROT-7b, it rains rocks into lava lakes.
ExxonMobil is still funding climate change denial PR. Since we’re going to hit peak oil in the next 20 years and there’s no way we can change things fast enough to prepare for that, they’ve set themselves up for some incredible profits. Unfortunately, their profits won’t help us much.
Think ecosystems don’t provide absolutely essential “services” for humanity? Check out what cutting down part of a forest has done to an entire country.
When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are.
An excerpt from Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses
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