The brainstorming video site Big Think is taking this August to present their "Dangerous Ideas." Their contributors are making videos, released on a daily basis, that present a dangerous idea ... and then they also present the counter-argument against it. What's great about this plan is that Big Think isn't necessarily advocating these ideas, they're just trying to stimulate some radical thinking.
Of course, the only reason to really consider a "dangerous idea" is in a severe situation, which I suppose explains why both of the physics-related dangerous ideas thus far end with the phrase "Or Face Extinction."
I, for one, can't wait to see Michio Kaku's dangerous idea. (Kaku has a regular blog, Dr. Kaku's Unvierse, over at the Big Think site.) My guess is that it will involve a stable wormhole into another dimension.
When I first heard about Science Papa, I thought it would be a perfect game. A science game for the Wii where you conduct a series of experiments? This is right up my alley. And, for a few hours, it was. I figured out how to use the interfact, and how to use the pictures to figure out the next step in the experimental process. Everything was proceeding fine, and I had no real complaints about how the science was portrayed in the game.
Then I realized that the only reason I understood the science behind the experiments was because I already knew it. The game hadn't taught me any science at all. In fact, the science was amounting to a series of step-by-step activities that were growing more and more tedious as time went on. There was no context for what was happening, and certainly no insight provided being gleaned.
As such, this is the first item I've had the opportunity to review on this website that I really didn't like that much and can't recommend, on any level, that you buy. I just don't really see how anyone would particularly enjoy it. Still, since I did spend several hours playing the game, I guess I might as well pass on my video game review of Science Papa.
I was attending the gaming convention Gen Con this weekend, and saw this bumper sticker in a downtown Indianapolis parking garage. For obvious reasons, I had to share.
I once saw the northern lights. On the way back from a business trip to Oregon, I was sitting on the north-hand side of our airplane as it flew late at night. The captain came over the speaker to announce that if we looked out our window, we could see them ... and, sure enough, there they were.
Well, what I saw was nothing compared to the recent display, as depicted by this video of the auroras, taken in Denmark. The increased activity was the result of solar activity, shown below, which spewed forth high-energy plasma. The stream of energized and charged particles traveled through space until the ionized gas collided visibly with the upper layers of our atmosphere.
On August 1st, almost the entire Earth-facing side of the sun erupted in a tumult of activity. There was a C3-class solar flare, a solar tsunami, multiple filaments of magnetism lifting off the stellar surface, large-scale shaking of the solar corona, radio bursts, a coronal mass ejection and more. This extreme ultraviolet snapshot from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows the sun's northern hemisphere in mid-eruption. Different colors in the image represent different gas temperatures ranging from ~1 to 2 million degrees K. Credit: NASA/SDO
What you may not realize, though, is that while these visual displays are magnifient, we are constantly bombarded by cosmic rays. The universe is just full of stuff, and much of it is passing through our bodies relatively harmlessly each and every moment of our lives.
If you don't believe me, you can find out for yourself, by building your very own cosmic ray detector, which will make some of these particle interactions visible.
If you do build a cosmic ray detector, e-mail me a picture. If we get enough, maybe we can start an image gallery of them!
