Back in May 2014, WC wrote on this blog: An American football field is 6,400 square yards. That’s 8,294,400 square inches. But a Creationist who subscribes to Bishop Ussher‘s calculation of the age of the earth would focus exclusively on about 11 square inches in one corner of the football field – about 3.3 inches on a side…
WC is, of course, a birder. And keeps a list of the birds he has seen, which makes WC a “lister,” WC supposes. Not hard core. When a rare Asian bird would turn up in Gambell, Alaska, out in the Bering Sea, WC didn’t drop everything and rush out to see it, to add it…
As recently as the end of World War II, science and scientists were a gentleman’s club, and women need not apply. WC mentions this because terrific astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell received a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics this week. Just 51 years after her discovery of pulsars; just 40 years after her colleague, Anthony…
Researchers in China have meticulously documented a reason for diminished cognition – stupidity – in old men: bad air. Seriously. Air pollution, including the PM 2.5 fine particulates, has been shown to impair cognition, especially in the elderly. We find that long-term exposure to air pollution impedes cognitive performance in verbal and math tests. We…
While much of climate science is pretty firmly established, whatever Donald Trump may think, climatologists are still puzzling out some of the details. And some of those details are turning out to be very important. Feedback is one such critical detail. Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of…
The smoke of burning juniper wood was said to aid clairvoyance, and was burned for purification and to stimulate contact with the Otherworld at the autumn Samhain fire festival at the beginning of the Celtic year. Maybe dubious contact with the “Otherworld” is the source of the “evidence” behind the campaign to remove Western Junipers…
Galileo Galilei famously faced the Inquisition for steadfastly asserting the Earth revolved around the Sun, rather than the Sun around the Earth. But before that, he is credited with the equally famous experiment at Pisa, where he dropped two heavy metal balls, of different sizes, from Pisa’s Leaning Tower. Aristotle had written the heavier metal…
