A big Thank You to the Harvard Physics Department for again letting us use the SciBox for rehearsals of a new Ig Nobel mini-opera. This photo was taken by David Kessler: The opera will premiere this Thursday night, Sept 17, as part of the Twenty-Fifth 1st Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Sanders Theatre. The entire […]
Tag: life
“It’s [wildcard] Jim, but not as we know it” — The Firm’s lyrics in academic paper titles
Which pop act has inspired the most titles for scholarly academic papers? The Beatles? The Velvet Underground? A Flock of Seagulls? A likely candidate is the 80’s UK band The Firm. Although it’s fair to say that they were never quite as famous as the pop ensembles mentioned above, nonetheless more than a dozen academic authors […]
A Game of Life: Microorganism Billiards
The angle of incidence is strongly related to the angle of “reflection” in this new real-AND-SIMULTANEOUSLY-artificial game of the mathematical gods: “Microorganism Billiards,” Colin Wahl, Joseph Lukasik, Saverio E. Spagnolie, Jean-Luc Thiffeault, arXiv 1502.01478, February 5, 2015. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of Wisconsin, report: “Recent […]
Life – the mystery continues
Over the millennia, many have asked themselves (and others) ‘Life – What exactly is it?’ But (definitive) answers came there none. As is confirmed in a 2012 paper by Edouard Machery, who is Associate Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, US. ‘Why I Stopped Worrying about the Definition of […]