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Posts made in October, 2013

Live Blogging The Science Of Ghostbusters

I won't bore you with an introduction but I'll just say "Ghostbusters" is one of the funniest movies of all time. So I decided to live blog it, but just the science parts. Let me know how I did.Opening: Great movies open with something happening. A rare few, like "Superman", can start with credits. Librarians getting the bejeezus scared out of them are always funny. In 2 minutes, we already...

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The Beautiful Mathematics Of Sugar In Your Coffee

What do the motion of spinning of a top, computer architecture, and the sugar in your coffee all have in common?They highlight the beauty of mathematics.Yann Pineill and Nicolas Lefaucheux created a video where they put equations on the left, the technical diagram in the middle, and then real-life footage of the phenomenon is on the right.Result: Math makes some incredibly complicated stuff look...

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Butter Is Why You Shouldn’t Get Your Health Advice From The New York Times

If you read mainstream media in 2013, you will learn that wheat and sugar are trying to kill you.It's better not to take them too seriously. While science tends to be rather rigorous in its claims - peer review is an inherently prudent idea that conservative Russell Kirk was likely proud of - health advice is instead based on flitting from one fad to the next, and leading the charge today are the...

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Science Meets Halloween: Make Scary Fog and Slippery Slime At Home

Halloween is just around the corner, but if you live in California, like me, they aren't doing anything fun. They can't even call it Halloween.So though when you were a kid you might have learned things that excited you about science, like how to make 'slime' using cornstarch and water or, for a little more cost, fog using dry ice and water, that isn't going to happen in 2013.

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STEM: In Academia There Is A Glut, But There Is A Shortage In The Corporate World

One argument for putting a halt to government spending billions of dollars doing Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) 'outreach' is that, like all government programs, they become self-serving and never, ever stop. read...

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