Lawrence Krauss

... will be giving public lectures on Monday and Tuesday. Monday's talk is "Science, Non-Science, and Nonsense: From Aliens to Creationism." Tuesday's talk is "An Atom From Dunedin."

I look forward very much to both. Lawrence Krauss is very good.

See http://www.otago.ac.nz/news/events/index.html?category=Sciences for more details. (This link will only work while it is current).

The Greeks were quite good, actually

It's easy to be surprised by how advanced the ancients were. For example, around 300BC, Aristarchus proposed that the sun, rather than the Earth, was at the centre of the known universe. It took about 1800 years for the idea to be raised again, by Copernicus.

This is quite impressive, too.

X-rays and advanced photography have uncovered the true complexity of the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, a device so astonishing that its discovery is like finding a functional Buick in medieval Europe.

Using nothing but an ingenious system of gears, the mechanism could be used to predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, and even accounted for leap years. It could also predict the positions of the sun and moon against the zodiac, and has a gear train that turns a black and white stone to show the moon's phase on a given date. It is possible that it could also show the astronomical positions of the planets known to the ancients: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

It is sad that so many achievements of the ancients were lost for so long; imagine the artifacts and writings that no longer exist at all. Imagine how much we are missing; imagine where humanity would be if they had never been lost to start with.

(thanks to Reddit)

Sharing a few things

Now, allow me to take the opportunity to share a few links. Firstly, a few blogs I follow:

Pharyngula is the exceptionally popular blog of Minnesota biology professor P.Z.Myers. P.Z. is famed as an outspoken and vicious critic of all kinds of quackery, especially (as he is a biologist) creationism. He offers no olive leaf to the moderate religious folk, either, and is utterly scathing to the non-religious types who think we should tread carefully where religion is concerned. He deserves his popularity; he is fantastic, and I thoroughly recommend his blog.

Starts With a Bang is the blog of Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist. Ethan mostly posts about what's happening in physics and astronomy. I've learned a fair amount from him, he is good at explaining things.

Finally, Bad Astronomy is the blog of Phil Plait, "astronomer, lecturer, and author." Phil is infectiously enthusiastic about astronomy. He is also a noted sceptic, his biggest opponent being anti-vaccination types.


That's blogs; now I just want to link to a couple of YouTube videos that I liked. Firstly, Tim Minchin. I only discovered him a few weeks ago, and it would be fair to say I fell in love. He is a comedic musician. Probably his best song is his Christmas song, "White Wine in the Sun" which starts funny and then becomes quite sentimental -and the lyrics reverberate with me, because I have a sister on the other side of the world right now.




Secondly, this is a wonderful video. It's called "Instruction Manual For Life," and I'll let it do the talking.




Thirdly, if you haven't seen/heard Symphony of Science, you're missing out. A guy called John Boswell has created some autotuned songs from certain science documentaries such as Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Most of them have Sagan, other scientists such as Hawking, Tyson, Feynman, and Dawkins make appearances. His page is here. I'll link to the first video on YouTube, "A Glorious Dawn," featuring Sagan and with an appearance from Hawking.





That's all for now.