Practically everybody knows about Pavlov’s dogs. But do many people know about their master, Pavlov himself? The other day I started to wonder—apropos of just about nothing—why dogs? And was Pavlov mean to his dogs, or were they treated well? … Continue reading →
They’re certainly more amazing than I knew, anyway, and I already knew they were pretty amazing merely by looking at them. It’s the neck, of course—that impossibly long, impossibly stretched-out, Dr. Suess-like neck. I recently saw surprising footage of giraffes … Continue reading →
…there’s this.
Continue reading →Yesterday we had a discussion on this thread about whether polls are gamed in order to help a certain candidate or party. It’s a question that’s interesting enough to devote a whole other post to it. Then answer is: it … Continue reading →
…the universe is full of black holes. Probably. Maybe. Supermassive black holes with masses of more than 10bn suns have previously been found at the heart of large galaxies located in dense clusters in the universe. But this is the … Continue reading →
Crows are very smart birds, although they’ve long been thought to be harbingers of bad news: A crow’s brain is the size of a human thumb, huge relative to its body, putting their intelligence on par with primates and allowing … Continue reading →
Here.
Continue reading →Garbage in, garbage out?
Continue reading →You decide. I’d settle for intelligent. On the other hand, there’s this.
Continue reading →…is not the territory: Presently, the best climate models fall many orders of magnitude short of the power and intricacy needed to effectively predict the long-term climate patterns that emerge from the interactions of all these planetary systems. And that’s … Continue reading →
This bracelet fragment is surpassingly strange, although it may not be clear why on first viewing: Here’s a reconstruction of what it probably looked like when worn: Here’s the explanation: It is intricately made with polished green stone and is … Continue reading →
It’s not really new; the virus and the disease it causes, Zika fever, was identified back in the 1950s in Africa. But it has been spreading for a while, and recently made the leap to the Western Hemisphere and is … Continue reading →