Ever since my long-ago youth, I wondered how I could determine if what I described as, say, blue was the same thing that someone else described with the same word. Was it possible that despite our common-sense approach that said that we all were using the same terminology, we really weren’t communicating at all? This specific conundrum came up in …
What Used to Be May Not Be
It’s clear that things aren’t always what they seem. I’ve written on this subject before; see this link. But Particularly in scientific endeavors, all it takes is one experiment or reproducible observation to put things into the proverbial cocked hat. Take this item, for example, in which is reported an experiment that seems to show that the speed of light …
Daily Battles
I often come across words of wisdom, or guidelines to help get one through one’s life, or even just a day. Most are commonplace and obvious, but that doesn’t always disqualify them or their value. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and all that. So, it was with some ennui that I accessed this blog post, only to …
Forest for the Trees
I love numbers—for various reasons. Most germane to this post is that I think that finding numerical patterns makes me feel like I have some control over things, although—to be sure!—such an approach is illusory at best, and misleading, at worst. Nonetheless, finding real or apparent numerical relationships in the Universe is interesting and comforting. So, finding this link that …
The Unexpected
Our planet had a bit of a scare last week: In two apparently unrelated incidents, pieces of the Solar System made incursions into our neck of the cosmic woods. The one that we knew about in advance, asteroid 2012 DA14, whizzed by at speeds in excess of 17,000 mph, well within the orbit of the synchronous satellites we all depend …
More Things Not Dreamt Of
Despite oft-repeated claims by the self-described cognoscenti, something new in science is being discovered all the time. As Hamlet opined, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” [Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5, 159–167] Today’s tidbit comes from the realm of physics and animal behavior, specifically this item that describes how bees …
When Junk Isn’t
I cannot document this, but ‘Way Back When, in the days when I was a graduate student studying the interactions between nucleic acids and proteins, I was firmly convinced that the then so-called “junk” DNA—which was comprised of all noncoding sequences in the genome—couldn’t just be junk. As much energy and resources were expended on maintaining its sequence as for …
Is So! Is Not!
Too often, I find myself in situation where I argue something that I know to be the case, only to find out afterward—in the face of incontrovertible evidence— that the opposite was true. How did I ever end up thinking one way, and finding out that what I had reported—and, worse, acted upon—was contrary to fact? A recent item may …
What’s In Is Out
Okay, this isn’t science or technology related (except by a looooong stretch), but it does have relevance for our ongoing conversation (well, monologue, as I don’t allow comments). My reading is eclectic, to say the least, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I came across this item, describing how fashion in men’s shoes has changed over time. I was fascinated …
Guidance Systems
Biology continues at the forefront today, with a recent report that dung beetles use the Milky Way to navigate. Really! The experiment done to determine this connection was rather elegant; I’ll leave it to the reader to find out about that by visiting the link, above. For the purposes of this post, never mind that I never would connect an …