Geeks' Corner » Geekscoveries

Metrocontextual science map

Phil Plait — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:00:48 +0000

Crispian Jago makes completely transparent attempts to get linked from blogs. The thing is, he keeps doing spectacular stuff! This time it’s a metro-subway-style map showing scientists of the past 400 or so years. It’s wonderfully detailed! Here it is shrunk enough to fit on my meager 610-pixel wide blog: Each color track route represent a field of science – brown is chemistry, red is theoretical physical and quantum mechanics, and so on – and the time is concentric, with the 16th Century in the middle, and current time on the outside. Just like a subway map where there are transfer points, some people span more than one discipline, and you can see that as two circles connecting different tracks. Stephen Hawking, for example, is astronomy and physics. Here’s a zoom: Cool, huh? Galileo was clearly a man of many hats. Lots of other scientists straddle multiple fields, but interestingly, the number of them dwindles with time. I’m no science historian – I’m not sure science existed before Twitter – but I imagine there are many reasons for this, not the least of which was that when science as a method was new, it was easier to make grand discoveries that spanned many different disciplines. It’s just plain old harder to do that these days. To make a name for yourself you have to be pretty good in a narrow field, and very few people have that sort of polymath capability when modern science is so deep and rich. Note that for the 20th Century, Crispian started including a lot of popularizers of science as well. There may be a few names you recognize… I expect this map will go viral once places like Geekologie and Boing Boing find it. Which they will. Get in on the coolness on the ground floor now. Or, of course, one flight lower.

Found by The Dude

The father of Gaia has little faith in humans

The Dude — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:26:35 +0000

James Lovelock says that “[h]umans are too stupid to prevent climate change.”

As for what I think… I fear that he’s right. Humans are far too narrow minded and short sighted to deal with a global problem.
We haven’t evolved for this. Maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on our selves, but it sucks to be the organisms that put a whole planet in the toilet.

via The Guardian

//The Dude

Rigged for Art

The Dude — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:00:12 +0000

V. S. Ramachandran explains the wonders of perception and art.

In essence it takes all of the things that creative people have instinctively known since we started painting on cave walls and carving fetishes and applied science to it. We can indeed explain art!

Via IHC

//The Dude

The answer is 42

The Dude — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:05:47 +0000

Readers of the Hitchhiker’s Guide are familiar with the concept of Earth being a giant super computer (sorry ’bout the spoiler).

But now the topper of all toppers have theorized that the whole universe is a quantum computer.

In Decoding Reality, Vedral argues that we should regard the entire universe as a gigantic quantum computer. Wacky as that may sound, it is backed up by hard science. The laws of physics show that it is not only possible for electrons to store and flip bits: it is mandatory. For more than a decade, quantum-information scientists have been working to determine just how the universe processes information at the most microscopic scale.

Via New Scientist

//The Dude

A theory of the net mind

The Dude — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:29:15 +0000

I posit that anything that can be used to represent pixels on a screen will automatically generate a Nintendo related image.

Example:

Via The Tanooki

//The Dude