Filed under: anarchism, culture, literature, people I'd like to meet, philosophy, russia, science, trivia
May 11, 2008 • 6:26 pm 0
The Periodic Table
The great Jacob Bronowski on Mendeleev.
Filed under: science
• 6:23 pm 0
The History of the Periodic Table – Part 1 of 2
Brent Christy is very funny at the start of this video just reading my chemistry book cover to cover like I do every weekend.
Filed under: science
• 6:45 pm 0
Today I was through in Glasgow for a Killy reunion. It was fun to meet all these people that I hadn’t been at school with, although it transpired that I’d tried to teach some of their offspring. One lady there was a member of another of Edinburgh’s Buddhist sanghas and she’d just been visiting the Portobello Priory (which is where I attend) last Friday. Another nice thing this same lady told me was that she’d given a eulogy at the Scottish Parliament for a recently deceased, long-standing member of the Edinburgh Buddhist scene. So this was an ex-Killy kid addressing the Scottish Parliament—which was one of John A’s great dreams (a Scottish Parliament that is).
I’ve not been through in Glasgow for a while and about the only place I always must visit when I do go through is Borders bookstore (to be American). However I defy anyone to go into that shop and not buy something (it’s much nicer than their Edinburgh shop), and today for me was no exception.
Leafing through one of my purchases on the train home I came across the following:
On a plaque attached to the NASA deep space probe we [human beings] are described in symbols for the benefit of any aliens who might meet the spacecraft as “bilaterly symmetrical, sexually differentiated bipeds, located on one of the outer spiral arms of the Milky Way, capable of recognising the prime numbers and moved by one extraordinary quality that lasts longer than all our other urges—curiosity.”
Yes that’s you (and me:)
I think that this is the plaque referred to:
Filed under: books, education, misc, science, scotland, today, trivia
January 12, 2008 • 7:11 pm 0
Myriad Manipulations of an Optical Illusion
Myriad Manipulations of an Optical Illusion—Doc Bushell:
If you’re like many regulars to ScienceBlogs you probably found the cool Purple Nurple optical illusion over at Omni Brain. I don’t really understand why a static object appears as though it’s pulsing, but I do enjoy the effect. Did you ever wonder how much an optical illusion can be distorted and still maintain the illusion? Mighty Optical Illusions has a bunch of items similar in effect to Purple Nurple. I grabbed the one below (it reminds me of a bunch of almonds). It has a very cool wavy effect.
(much more fun below the fold)
Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
(Via Dr. Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge.)
These are static images?!
Filed under: psychology, science
