Monday Science Links

This week's Science!

• Chad at Uncertain Principles tries to explain relativity to Emmy. His dog.: "No, no-- you'd have plenty of time. Time slows down when you go faster." I look in the rear-view mirror. She's standing on the seat, wagging her tail and looking pleased with herself.


• Chris Mooney writes at Science Progress about the staggering cyclone Nargis catastrophe: Most Americans haven’t paid any serious attention to hurricanes since 2005, the year that brought us Category 5 mega-monsters Katrina, Rita, and Wilma—storms that kept one-upping each other in intensity and together caused unprecedented damage to the United States. But for nations bordering the Arabian Sea or Bay of Bengal—technically referred to as the North Indian cyclone basin—such storms have been scarily active over the past year, and the toll in death and damage has been still more stunning.


• Chris (a different one) at Mixing Memory blogs on how even babies prefer people who speak "their" language: What's most striking about those results, perhaps, is that 5 month old infants don't speak at all, but they're still able to distinguish between "their" native language and other languages, and show a clear preference for people who speak it. Unlike in the case of the five year olds, then, this can't be due to a desire to be around people whom they can understand..


• Kim at All My Faults Are Stress-Related tells us where she does science. Or show us, rather: Seed magazine wants pictures of where people do science. The post is entitled "What's your workbench?" - which says something about the stereotypical view of science. Clearly, they need pictures from geoscientists.


• Bee at Backreaction posts on the Illusion of Knowledge: The Illusion of Knowledge refers to the following quotation by Daniel J. Boorstin: "The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge."

Enjoy!