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Scientists find fiddler crabs will exchange favours for sex

— News.com.au

Really, scientists?! Who’s gonna have sex with a fiddler crab? They’re crustaceans!

Don’t let the “science” and “pentatonic scale” stuff scare you off watching this. Think of it as “A Remarkable Demonstration of Music as a Universal Language.”

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”, from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009.

Two women are talking in the lunch room. One is wearing a black pullover sweater.

The other woman says, “I like your sweater.”

“Thanks. It’s long, so it covers my ass.”

“That’s what I like about it. Not that it covers your ass, but that it would cover my ass.”

I’m speechless . . .

The sweater isn’t covering her ass, her pants are covering her ass, and the sweater is covering the pants!

It’s a total misread of the geometry of the situation!

The last place I worked, I kept my James D. Watson bobblehead on a cubicle divider, next to a Spongebob bobblehead that belonged to a colleague.

Everyone who saw these two guys recognized Spongebob, but not one person ever recognized James D. Watson.

I mean, they knew it was someone named James D. Watson because his name is right there on the base, but despite the fact that he’s holding a double helix structure, nobody recognized him as James D. Watson, Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule.

(Ironically, one of the main reasons I got into software development was the opportunity to work with smart, educated people.)

I brought Watson with me to the place I work now, but unfortunately I accidentally knocked him off a credenza one morning and his head broke off. I tried a couple of times to glue it back on but it didn’t take. So I had to throw him away.

The real James D. Watson is actually still alive at age 80.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

— Walt Whitman

My son has an assignment to read this poem and answer some questions about what Whitman was trying to say.

The academic answer is that he was exploring the tension between romanticism and science in the late 19th century, and acknowledging sadly, based on “much applause in the lecture-room,” that the romantic worldview was dying out.

But just between you and me, he was also saying that overanalyzing things like stars and poems makes them boring . . .

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for a real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue.

— Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

It’s an old joke but does it ever really happen?

My son’s science homework for last night was to build some Lewis dots using Froot Loops. This morning, the dog ran out and managed to take a couple of bites of a Lewis dot before we were able to fend him off . . .

DemandDebate.com has new t-shirts for sale:

From xkcd.com:

My boy is researching a paper on Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“How’s the research going?” I ask.

“I discovered an error and had to start over,” he says.

“You discovered an error in your paper or you discovered an error in Darwin’s theory?”

“Well, Internet Explorer discovered an error and had to close.”

“Because if you discovered an error in Darwin’s theory, there’s probably a Nobel Prize in it for you. Be sure to mention me in your acceptance speech.”

“Shut up.”

“[Imitating his voice] ‘I’d like to thank my dad, who always encouraged me to do my best.’”

“Shut up.”

Some famous scientist — I wish I could remember who — said that new theories supplant old theories not on merit, but only when everyone who believed in the old theory has died.

Hence — don’t expect people to embrace your new idea. People hate new ideas. The good news is — eventually a new idea becomes an old idea.

Once people start to say, “Oh, that idea’s been around for a while,” or die, whichever comes first, they become more receptive to it.

Xkcd will sell you a T-shirt with this slogan on it.

My son loves it. He thinks his 8th grade science teacher should get one.

“That’s a great idea,” I say, “if he wants to get fired.”

“He could just cross out BIZNATCHES and write KIDS instead,” he suggests.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, Save the Children has published its seventh annual State of the World’s Mothers report on newborn mortality.

As usual, the U.S. takes a beating:

Continue reading HW Explains the U.S. Newborn Mortality Rate

E = mc², the world’s most famous equation, is 100 years old. According to this BBC article:

Einstein showed in a handful of lines that as you accelerate an object, it not only gets faster, it also gets heavier.

That in turn makes further pushing less fruitful so that eventually nothing can be accelerated beyond the speed of light.

Continue reading Happy Birthday, E = mc²

. . . the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a ‘controversy’ to teach.

Continue reading How the Intelligent Design Hoax was Perpetrated

An open letter to the Kansas School Board on an alternative theory of Intelligent Design, i.e., that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.

We don’t have the money, so we have to think.

— Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford was an illustrious scientist — the 1908 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, and the father of nuclear physics.

His humble upbringing as the fourth in a family of 12 children in rural New Zealand influenced his approach to science, as summarized in the above quote.

A recruiter called me today about a job managing an $80 million IT project.

How in the world can you spend $80 million on an IT project?! I could put your company logo on Mars for $80 million.

Most of the big, expensive IT projects that I’m familiar with, there really was no reason for them to take so long or cost so much. A lot of time and money could have been saved with some upfront thinking.

I get a lot of this now — recruiters asking me if I have experience managing multi-year, multi-million dollar projects, as if there’s some competitive advantage to be had from spending huge sums of money over long periods of time.

A modern variation on Rutherford’s famous saying might be: “We’ve got 80 million dollars! Why should we have to think?!”

Thus spoke The Programmer.