On one of those Monday afternoons where law is strangulation and nagging questions about the nature of the universe become an urgent priority, a gnat was flying around my desk and I realized I didn’t know if insects got tired or if their life span was too short for any kind of exhaustion short of [...]
Newscientist.com news service reported the findings of Richard Price, a physicist at the university of Texas at Brownsville, to the horror of all weight conscious people: “Your waistline may be spreading, but you can’t blame it on the expansion of the universe.”
“Since atoms are made up mostly of empty space, with electrons ‘orbiting’ the nucleus [...]
“There are scores of contexts – for instance the clothes you wear are one aspect of your everyday context but they do not take into account where you live, your age, your sex, et. cetera. Media and technology that respond to you, that is ‘context-aware’ – the new hip term in the tech world [...]
Hurricane Katrina has unleashed a fury of misinformation over the link between global warming and hurricanes. Many reporters, politicians, and academics have wrongly asserted that the frequency of hurricanes has increased due to global warming. Their oft-cited “proof” is the high number of hurricanes that ravaged the Florida coast last year. The reality is no [...]
Below is a report I just recieved from my friend, Junjiang Gao. I thought it needed to be passed on to the curious.
“There was a news report about a religious activity held in a Taiwanese city. The picture went along with the article showed a stage with a couple of female pole dancers. The [...]
A black essayist writes in this week’s Time magazine about falling out of love with hip-hop and in love with White Music. His journey is a thought-provoking commentary on the influence of race and other social pressures over what reaches our ears. There is universality in his tale of moving from Public Enemy to Bjork–fears [...]
As I grabbed an article on the emerging role of mathematics in the biological sciences a few weeks back from the Public Library of Science (PLoS), I was thinking about how wonderful it was to be able to access the article (and their entire archive) for free. For the previous four years, I had taken [...]
Salon posted an immensely informative article on the stem cell debate today. Writing in a question and answer format, Farhad Manjoo manages to cover the entire spectrum of issues surrounding stem cells in his piece: what an embryo is, the relationship of embryos to in vitro fertilization, an explanation of cell line quality, the argument [...]
One of the few outposts of actual debate on the Internet is the aptly named ‘dialogues’ section of Slate. This section, appearing periodically in the online magazine, captures the essence of debate: flushing out arguments and discussing their merits and faults. It is a pleasure to read because the back and forth arguments give insight [...]