"We live in a world of incredible material diversity"

By -
Or so the guy on the Nova special told me.

Compared to what, I wonder. The other worlds this fellow has lived in?

UPDATE: Oh my God. I watched about two minutes of the show, which is called Hunting the Elements. I hadn't thought about chemistry in a while, I thought it might be interesting to delve into it for a bit. But apparently Nova thought that having some whiny, sniveling idiot named David Pogue make stupid jokes throughout the show would make science more interesting. He was completely unbearable, however interesting the subject matter was.

UPDATE II: By the way, I am sure David Pogue is not really an idiot. The point is, rather, that he thinks we will like science better if he acts like a complete idiot while someone else explains science.

Comments

  1. Anonymous2:36 AM

    ",,. we like science better if he acts like a complete idiot"

    You don't get out much, do you?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob Murphy8:33 AM

    What if you had to choose between Pogue explaining chemistry, or Jeff Goldblum explaining biology? (That's a reference, people. I've been reading this blog for years.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous12:09 AM

      I'm pretty sure that it was chaos theory (the Goldbloom thing).

      Delete
  3. Wabulon11:27 PM

    How many ions are composed in full dissolution of Fe, nitrosyl, and cyanido? Which ones taste good?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more