In the garden of your mind

This remix of Mr. Rogers is simultaneously strange, gentle and more than a bit psychedelic.

 It's also wonderful.



(Via io9)

This was the first time I'd heard of the 'Symphony of Science' series by John D. Boswell. They're all good. I especially like 'The Greatest Show on Earth', not least since it makes Richard Dawkins sound like a member of the Pet Shop Boys.

Applied science: Make my day edition

According to a report in the Guardian, new research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (the original article is freely available) considers the relative speeds of proactive and reactive movement.

In the context of a quickdraw gun duel.

The conclusion:

"You move faster if you draw second, but you're still going to die," Dr Welchman said. "You'll die satisfied that you were quicker, but that's not much use to you."

So, along with that other scientifically sound gun-related admonition ('Always aim for the head when confronted by zombie hordes') we can add something else: 'always draw first'.

We have also learned something else: it seems that Niels Bohr was handy with a pistol.

Niels Bohr, who worked on the structure of the atom at the beginning of the 20th century, tested his theory by staging his own mock duels with toy guns at his institute in Copenhagen. His gunslinging partner, the Russian-born George Gamow, drew first and lost every time.

"[Bohr] can't have won because he was quicker in reacting," Welchman said. "It must be that he was a really good shot as well as a really good physicist."

I wonder how rare that particular combination is.

Incidentally, the PRS website is full of fascinating stuff: the currently most-read article is apparently Brennan, Clark and Prum, 'Explosive eversion and functional morphology of the duck penis supports sexual conflict in waterfowl genitalia'; full text is also available for free.

The methodology in a nutshell:

We used high-speed video of phallus eversion and histology to describe for the first time the functional morphology of the avian penis.

This does not sound like quite as much fun as staging mock duels with toy guns in the lab: but it sounds pretty damned interesting.

Science is so cool.

‘You know, Bob, Darwin really knew a lot of biology.’

As we have for the past couple of years, we join some of our friends in marking the 200th birthday of one of the more remarkable individuals our species has brought forth, Charles Darwin. (And, this year, we'd suggest you also raise a glass to the equally aged Abraham Lincoln, who was not only a remarkable primate himself but who has long been especially regarded -- by one of us -- as a fellow Illinoisan.)

I have little to add to the general festivities, other than, perhaps, to again post this image of Darwin, which I like since it shows him a bit younger and less austere than most portraits.


He's sans beard, you'll note, but the extraordinary sideburns hint at the (ahem) tangled bank to come.

There will be countless articles on Darwin today, but I thought one at the New York Times by Nicholas Wade was worthwhile.

It concludes:

Historians who are aware of the long eclipse endured by Darwin’s ideas perhaps have a clearer idea of his extraordinary contribution than do biologists, many of whom assume Darwin’s theory has always been seen to offer, as now, a grand explanatory framework for all biology. Dr. Richards, the University of Chicago historian, recalls that a biologist colleague “had occasion to read the ‘Origin’ for the first time — most biologists have never read the ‘Origin’ — because of a class he was teaching. We met on the street and he remarked, ‘You know, Bob, Darwin really knew a lot of biology.’ ”

Darwin knew a lot of biology: more than any of his contemporaries, more than a surprising number of his successors. From prolonged thought and study, he was able to intuit how evolution worked without having access to all the subsequent scientific knowledge that others required to be convinced of natural selection. He had the objectivity to put aside criteria with powerful emotional resonance, like the conviction that evolution should be purposeful. As a result, he saw deep into the strange workings of the evolutionary mechanism, an insight not really exceeded until a century after his great work of synthesis.

And, once again, here's the closing sentence from the Origin of Species, which I always like to imagine being read in the voice of James Earl Jones.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

TGF posting (so forgive the lack of seriousness)

On the CERN project and the madness surrounding it, see here and Ario (Speedwagon).

For the Large Hadron Collider Rap, see here.

Information on a cute particle accelerator near us can be found here.