Posts Tagged ‘Science’

A Radical Distrust in Certainty

Saturday, July 22nd, 2023

I’m a bit too snowed-under these past few days to post much. So here is something from the archives, a quote from Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems, a book about quantum gravity, which I thought was a great summary of science:

Though rooted in previous knowledge, science is an adventure based on continuous change. The story I have told reaches back over millennia, tracing a narrative of science that has treasured good ideas, but hasn’t hesitated to throw ideas away when something was found that worked better. The nature of scientific thinking is critical, rebellious, and dissatisfied with a priori conceptions, reverence, and sacred or untouchable truth. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical distrust in certainty.

The Impossible Map by Evelyn Lambart

Wednesday, July 5th, 2023

For the second day in a row I’m posting an old favourite by NFB legend Evelyn Lambart. This time it’s The Impossible Map, one of my favourite explanations of how map projections work using fruit and vegetables. Simple but effective.

Moon Museum

Thursday, June 29th, 2023

An art project was commissioned as part of the Apollo 12 program, which included pieces of art by notable contemporary artists, including a penis drawn by Andy Warhol. The tiny ceramic wafer was said to have be covertly attached to one of the lander’s legs and flown to the moon, though there is no (easy) way to determine if it made the trip, or if it is still in place.

The penis was famously covered by a thumb when the piece was covered in the New York Times. None of the drawings are particularly ground-breaking or even interesting, but they did have a tiny 13mm × 19mm of total space to work with.

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Book: How to Take Over the World

Thursday, June 29th, 2023

This is a fun entry into a genre I sometimes think about as dumbsmart. It’s a collection of dumb ideas analyzed in a smart way. The book takes the idea of taking over the world (very, very loosely) and seriously analyzes what it would take to actually pull some of it off.

To be clear, all of the activities author Ryan North looks at are really more “vaguely supervillain-esque” than a series of instructions for how to actually take over the world. Chapters include Starting Your Own Country, How to Become Immortal, and How to Live Forever. The chapter Drilling to the Centre of the Planet to Hold the Earth’s Core Hostage is the closest he gets to actually taking over the world, but the task turns out to be essentially impossible, so he settles for digging a slightly shorter path between stock exchanges to make money by trading stocks a fraction of a fraction of a second faster that surface-based connections can.

To echo on some recent themes of Elsewhat, there is even a sequence about creating a floating geodesic sphere hot air ballon base inspired directly from ideas by Buckminster Fuller.

Canadian Friends can get it here →

Orcas Sinking Boats?

Monday, May 29th, 2023

Photo Credit

Scientists think a traumatized orca initiated the assault on boats after a “critical moment of agony” and that the behavior is spreading among the population through social learning.

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Via One Foot Tsunami

El Niño is Coming, and It's Going to Get Hot

Monday, May 29th, 2023

That one-two punch from El Niño and climate change is expected to “push global temperatures into uncharted territory,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a press release today. “This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment. We need to be prepared.”

Read More at The Verge →

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