-Cheeze-Its™ brand snack crackers decay in a non-exponential fashion, with a half-life of roughly 18 months from time of initial unsealing.

-When smashing one’s head forcefully into an open cabinet door to the extent that stars and birds become visible, said stars and birds revolve around the victim’s head in acounter-clockwise orbit, rather than a clockwise pattern as commonly depicted in both classic and contemporary cartoons¹.

I tooke a bodkine gh & put it betwixt my eye & [the] bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye [with the] end of it (soe as to make [the] curvature a, bcdef in my eye) there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles r, s, t, &c. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub my eye [with the] point of [the] bodkine, but if I held my eye & [the] bodkin still, though I continued to presse my eye [with] it yet [the] circles would grow faint & often disappeare untill I removed [them] by moving my eye or [the] bodkin.

If [the] experiment were done in a light roome so [that] though my eyes were shut some light would get through their lidds There appeared a greate broade blewish darke circle outmost (as ts), & [within] that another light spot srs whose colour was much like [that] in [the] rest of [the] eye as at k. Within [which] spot appeared still another blew spot r espetially if I pressed my eye hard & [with] a small pointed bodkin. & outmost at vt appeared a verge of light.

[illustration and text From Isaac Newton's handwritten notebook essay ‘Of Colours’, c. 1666]

I cannot even apply eyedrops without flinching, and Isaac Newton willingly stuck a bodkin¹ into his eye socket and rubbed it around, just to see what would happen.

We all celebrate Newton as a genius, but if you dig a little deeper you’ll find that he was also the height of 17th century whatthefuckery.

All I could think of when I saw this photo is that it’s what Homer Simpson’s workstation would look like in real life.

(via David Kaneda)

Blown glass bottle, Roman, circa 1st century CE

For that awesome artifact-digger-upper @bsheepies.

Rebuilding the actual physical infrastructure is all well and good, he argues, before going on to declare that so far there is very little public talk about the massive spending on non-defense research and development that would be required to make such a “green” economic revival possible.

His points all make complete sense; yes, money alone will not help the technical problems and yes, we need to reestablish science as a pillar of our educational system.

Yet with many research universities facing massive devaluations of their endowments and higher education becoming less affordable (if not impossible) for even many upper-middle-class families, I wonder if there will be enough properly educated domestic brainpower to even conduct the amount of R&D Revkin calls for.

At the risk of being called a socialist¹, I don’t see any reason why part of an economic recovery plan can’t include federal grants for college students who pursue science degrees related to the green technologies being tapped as the key to an economic turnaround. That’s not to say that other fields aren’t as important, but if we’re collectively agreeing that we’re fundamentally behind in R&D in the green science we’re depending on to pull us out of recession, shouldn’t we be enabling the intellectual infrastructure by actually getting students into research programs?

So what is this all about? Memes explain a lot about who we are and what make us unique. They enlighten us to the direction the internet is moving and how we communicate with one another directly and indirectly. Memes, oftentimes, transcend the internet and enter our personal lives and add to the already existent memes we subconsciously spread every day in gestures, art, and even language. Our brains are quickly adapting and we will think we are consciously choosing these things, but it’s fundamentally our inherent programming to replicate that is making us do it.

- Josh Hopkins, guest blogger

However, recent work by psychologist Amir Raz has suggesting [sic] that both hypnosis and placebo may both work through the manipulation of attention, essentially influencing the focus of processing within the brain to alter how it regulates the body and mind.

Part of the discussion is whether hypnotic suggestibility is part of the placebo phenomenon itself or merely an indicator; i.e. are suggestion and placebo the same thing at work.

I’ve always believed in the efficacy of placebo, even when I’m knowingly trying to remedy myself with something that I know doesn’t have any basis in physiology.  I think part of this is a learned comfort response – when you’re young and sick, and your mom gives you soup and hugs, you “feel better” even though she hasn’t cured your cold.  We carry this response with us into adulthood, trying to use our own personal remedies and comfort routines to cure aches and pains and such, in a sort of medicinal cargo cult way.

When I’m sick in wintertime, I’ll take cold medicine and whatnot.  But I also drink lemoncello, because it reminds me of Sorrento and Capri and warm sun on my skin.  And though I know that alcohol and lemon rinds do absolutely nothing to relieve sinuses plugged with unspeakable goo, I’m happy to take the placebo effect that it gives me.

(via Seed)

The 12-Tet Rover is … 12 tetrahedrons made of 26 struts … that will roam all over Mars’ complex terrain. Unlike the current wheeled rovers, it will be autonomous, so it will not require instruction from a whole team of scientists to complete a simple task. It will recognize obstacles and figure out how to get around them. It has a huge advantage over wheeled rovers because it does not require flat ground to operate properly. Rather than use wheels, it extends its struts and tumbles forward.

(via Pruned)

And yet both clips were superbly photographed, both accurately explained some quite complex information, and both clearly provided good entertainment to their viewers. So why are they so different? . . . To The Ranger’s British eyes, this American clip seems almost patronising and childish in its presentation. And yet the content is little different; the difference is purely stylistic.

This is a phenomenon I’ve noticed time and time again.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy content on Discovery Channel and NG and others, but as The Ranger notes, their productions always seem to value drama and flash over forthright delivery of content.  I often find myself literally yelling at the teevee to STOP DUMBING IT DOWN.  For a 1-hour program, that’s 44 minutes of screen time for maybe 18 minutes of actual Scientific Content, with the rest of it being flashy CGI, poorly staged re-enactments, and dramatic voiceover filler¹.

Given a choice between investing an hour of my time in a BBC program² or an American equivalent, I’d take the BBC offering pretty much every time³.

In my opinion, however, he has three fatal flaws and my intellectual integrity prevents me from using him as a model for how to get science fiction to the wider public. His themes are consistently anti-science, he makes large and consistent errors in getting the science right, and he consistently insists he’s not just a writer but that his M.D. and his research gives him expertise on the science he gets wrong. Oh, and he’s a dick, too, writing one critic into a book of his as a child rapist.

Timely article for me, as I’ve been struggling with the issue of how to make my first foray into a genre work accessible to my “usual” audience and also legitimate with typical SF readers as well.