Just a bit of a round-up of what feels like half a dozen cool things that have caught my attention today:
First – the Science Blogs Book Club! They’re chatting about Microcosm and plan to feature more in the future, with their fellow science bloggers chipping in with opinions. Great idea!
Secondly, if you noticed my earlier blog entry about the World Science Festival in New York City, then you really should be checking out the accounts of Nobel Intent, the Ars Technica’s Science-Centric Journal. They’ve been doing a running series on the features of the festival, including:
Lawrence Krauss takes on the universe
World Science Fest: science gets you cool jobs
“… a number of the programs at the World Science Festival were targeted at younger audiences. Yesterday’s program was no exception, as people doing interesting science-related jobs gave a approachable descriptions of how science got them work that pretty much everyone would recognize as cool.”
One such presenter was Laurie Santos of Yale who works with lemurs, capuchins, and macaques – and in order to figure out how they think, she does magic tricks! There’s a Bloggingheads.TV interview with her here.
In addition to this, NY Times Op-Ed Contributor Brian Greene (apparently he spoke several times at the festival, introducing lectures and conversations among scientists and other cultural denizens) has written a great essay:
The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.
Speaking of experiences, this was sent to me by R: What Dictionaries and Optical Illusions Say About Our Brains, from Science America:
“Cognitive scientist Mark Changizi does not bother with how the brain accomplishes a task, but rather why it performs the function in the first place… The prolific Changizi recently published two papers: one that sets out to explain how our lexical systems evolved and another that suggests how the brain’s visual system is adapted to anticipate the future a fraction of a second before we actually see it. (See related slideshow here.”
And remember how I started looking at the link between science and juggling a while back? How about the science of fun? A great little overview on what Martin Gardner is up to now and the event named after him – Gathering For Gardner – or G4G, which brings together experts from the world of maths, magic and puzzles:
Gardner became interested in maths through “mathematical” magic tricks – and magicians, not mathematicians, formed his main social circle as a young adult. He liked magic, he said, because it gave rise to a sense of wonder about the world. “You see a woman levitated and that reminds you that it is just as miraculous that she falls to the ground by gravity… you don’t realise that gravity is just as mysterious as a woman levitating.” Does maths give Gardner that same wonder? “Absolutely, yes.”
There’s a few accounts from this years conference too – an Australian!
Inside Rodgers’ house, where hundreds of items from his puzzle collection were on display, Colin Wright, an Australian who lives in the Wirral, was holding court. With his schoolboyish, ginger hair and glasses, he looks just how you might expect a mathematician to look – in fact, he is a juggler, too. “It seemed like the obvious thing to do after I learned to ride a unicycle,” he said.
He has helped develop a mathematical notation for juggling, which has electrified the international juggling community. It turns out that, with a language, jugglers have been able to discover tricks that had eluded them for thousands of years. “Once you have a language to talk about a problem, it aids your thought process,” Wright said as he took out some bean balls to demonstrate a recently invented three-ball juggle. “Maths is not sums, calculations and formulae. It is pulling things apart to understand how things work.”
Oh, if you’re wondering about the gender ratio…
At university level and above, maths is a very male affair, although at GCSE girls now outperform boys. At the G4G, fewer than 20% of the participants were women. Some of them presented talks in which they applied high level maths to crochet, knitting, needlework and quilting. It turns out that “mathematics and the fibre arts” can actually convey deep mathematical ideas in a novel way – such as what a hyperbolic space might look like, which is something that has baffled mathematicians for centuries. Carolyn Yackel, one of the genre’s pioneers, gave a talk on how to knit a pair of hyperbolic trousers. (You knit an octagon in hyperbolic space and then join the sides together.)
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