Okay, so In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs were working on a radio telescope. It looked like this.
it didn’t have a plaque with their names on it when they were working on it.
So. they got a kind of noisy signal. (incidentally, the same noisy signal you get when you plug a tv antenna in… that static screen) They thought, at first, that the noise was caused by pigeon and pigeon poop. So they cleaned it out. but it was still there.
Long story short, they’d discovered cosmic microwave background radiation. the residue of the big bang!
Welcome back to the grind, PaleoPosse! Did you have a good Thanksgiving vacation? I sure hope so, because today I’m going to flex your brain muscle and attempt to teach you some REAL science: PHYSICS. Not that mushy, gushy “biology” and “paleontology” pseudo-science that Ryan and Patrick peddle.
Microbes ain't got SHIT on me
AND if you stick through it all the way to the end, there’s a prize in store for somebody!!!
But enough of that, today I’m going to teach you about the Work-Energy Theorem. Otherwise known as, “Everything they tried to teach you in high school physics.”
I take the Winter Solstice gift season very seriously. Maybe more seriously than you’ve ever heard me be if you only know me from the show. The season itself is inconsequential, I am focused with laser precision on finding the right gift for the right person. It has to exist in the small space between what a person really would love to have but would never actually buy for themselves. I’ve noticed that not everyone shares my proclivity, or even my desire, to find that perfect gift, but since it’s safe to assume everyone you know likes Science… sort of (what do you mean you haven’t told them yet?!) here’s a brief list of Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday PaleoPresents. Load a new tab, put on your blackface like a Christmas Dutchman and get shopping.
Your friends that kind of like science, are scientists, or want to be scientists:
1) If you were following the Paleopals last year you probably remember me plugging Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character). This is one of the best books out there for someone who is interested in science or thinks they might be a professional scientist. It covers all of the good stuff about being a scientist and none of the bad (except maybe that you get made fun of a lot). Feynman is able to capture what he calls the “pleasure of finding things out” in his short essays about things that are science and things that are sort of science.
SO. you are friends with a dudenerd, and you gotta give him a christmas present. what does he want? to be ben, of course! Or maybe you’re married to a nerd and you just want him to be like me. I don’t know, maybe you’re training my doppelganger to replace me. … … …
suppose that for some reason, you want to turn person X into a ben, or at least a first order approximation… HERES SOME STUFF YOU WILL NEED TO FACILITATE THE CHANGE.
It’s that time of the week again. The Paleopals stand united against boredom as a part of the Great American Link Out. Go click on something interesting.
Oh god why won’t this meme die?! Every time anyone refers to the infamous lyrics, we end up paying attention to the worst people in the world.
but it dawns on me that the problem here might be that most people don’t know how magnets work. So when we keep making fun of Scrabbly Jay and Mooman 4 Weed (no, i’m not going to look up their names), we’re actually wondering aloud about them. For instance, it topped one of the Lists of things people want famous physicist Sean Carroll to explain. Recently I’ve even come across a video of Physics King Richard Feynman stumbling over the question.
Dick’s point, in brief, is that asking how magnets work is too difficult a question to answer. It demands a concise description of a completely unfamiliar system in terms of super familiar things. It’s like asking, “how does japan work”. what?
Anyway, i’m throwing my F*cking hat into the F*cking ring, in hopes that we can all forget about Scrabbly J and mooman 4 Weed.
cursing is for louts and people who have just hit themselves on things.
PaleoPosse…Pal-Po’s…P-Posse… I have a secret to share with you…
I am an adult, and I still play with Lego’s.
I bought this for my little sister, then built the whole thing myself...
I think if you did a survey of current engineers and/or architects, you’d find that 80%-90% were “above-average” Lego users when they were children. My own engineering friends and classmates certainly were.
That is why I am VERY excited to see Lego becoming awesome again. =D
I imagine that many readers of this blog and listeners of Science… sort of wished the US played better with others when it came to foreign affairs. This can probably only happen when this country starts to have more respect for other countries and care about the things they care about; I’m not talking about socialized medicine or vegemite, so relax. I happen to think that if more Americans cared just a little about soccer than we would have a better understanding of world politics.
