Fuck yes.
“If men could get pregnant, abortion clinics would be like Starbucks. There would be two on every block and four in every airport. And the morning after pill would come in different flavors like sea salt and cool ranch.”—Saturday Night Live
(via secular-science)
Thanks #XboxOne #E3 press conference for revealing to us exactly zero games featuring a female protagonist for the next generation.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq)Above is a tweet I made this afternoon in reaction to the fact that none of the games…
Holy.. Shit..
I think I officially just became a rage-boner-waving feminist. I also just hated myself for being associated with the male race — again.
This is disgusting..
8 Awesome Things We Learned About Bill Nye From His Reddit AMA
Amid chants of “Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!, the Science Guy himself logged on to Reddit yesterday afternoon to answer questions about science, his childhood, his favorite experiments, and a human mission to Mars. Despite a weird Gillette plug in his opening post, Bill Nye’s latest AMA turned out to be just as fun as the one he hosted last year.
Here are our eight favorite questions and answers:
1. Bill Nye’s life was changed by bees.
User MuddIsland asks, “Mr. Nye is there any interesting event from your childhood, teens, or even adult life that you would be willing to share? If so what is it and how did it affect your life?”
Nye responds:
I watched bumble bees (Hymentoptera bombidae) for hours. How could such a relatively big animal fly with such relatively small wings? The answer was discovered in my lifetime. Their abdomens are springs, and their halteres provide vortices with allow the wings to swing up with hardly any aerodynamic drag. If I may, how cool is that?2. Bill Nye sometimes gets science facts wrong.
After Nye’s poetic description of bumble bee anatomy, user jhartsho very hesitantly offers a correction:
I can’t believe I’m about to do this….but hymenopterans don’t have halteres. Those are specialized balancing structures limited to Diptera (flies). Hence di (two) ptera (wing). Hymenoptera still have all four wings, no balancing structures. Their muscles vibrate instead of contract to allow for extremely fast wing movement. They also use these vibrations in cold weather to heat their bodies. Sorry, Mr. Nye. As an entomologist I just had to. I’m gonna go punch myself in the face now.3. Bill Nye has a favorite science experiment.
User crow6671 asks, “Thank you for doing this iAmA. You rock!! Here’s my question, what is one of your favorite experiments to do?”
Nye’s got it covered:
I really do love to see a water balloon get pushed into a glass bottle by atmospheric pressure (as though by a giant’s thumb). Check out Sophia.org4. Bill Nye can’t pick a favorite scientific theorem.
User TheSillyLion asks, “What is your favorite scientific theorem or equation? (Example: theory of relativity, Hubble parameter, E=mc2)”
Nye puts it in perspective:
Can’t say I have a favorite. They are all so important to our understanding of nature and our place in space. With that said, Michael Faraday changed the world. We have electricity and these fancy computer machines as a result. BTW, Darwin discovered so much about how we came to be, and he didn’t even know about DNA. Astonishing. It’s the process of science that has changed the world. Science rules!5. Bill Nye won’t discount the idea of life on Mars.
User Jamiefox92 asks, “Do you think that we could have a manned mission to Mars in our lifetime with all the factors such as time from Earth to Mars and with the amount of solar radiation that the men would face during the trip?”
Nye dreams of Martians:
Were we to discover evidence of something alive on Mars, either fossil or even living now (!!?!!!), it would change this world forever. And… we’d mount a human mission to Mars. Check out #exploreplanets. Visit planetary.org to see how you can help make this discovery much more likely, to wit, by influencing space policy at NASA, the world’s largest space agency.6. Bill Nye can explain dark matter in one sentence.
User DrXaverius asks, “Can you explain dark matter in layman’s terms?”
Yes, Nye can:
It’s apparently the source of gravity that is at once holding galaxies together and pulling them apart at an accelerating rate. Hmm…7. Bill Nye never gets bored.
User cloudclad asks, “What field of science bores you the most?”
Nye is polite but firm:
Strongly encourage you never to use the word “bore” or “boring.” It says a lot about a person. It’s hard for me to imagine being “bored,” ever. The world is so exciting and fascinating, yes?8. Bill Nye isn’t in it for the money.
User MuscleMansMom asks, “Hi Mr. Nye! What made you chose doing stuff like kid shows as opposed to working solely in a lab?”
Nye believes in the scientist in everyone:
I worked at an engineering firm (which has since been absorbed) for people obsessed with making a profit every quarter (every 3 months). You cannot advance much with that outlook. So, I decided to affect the future as much as could; I shifted my focus to elementary science education. The objective 20 years ago, and the objective now, is to, dare I say it, change the world. The outcome is still to come I believe as people like you become engineers and captains of industry. I’m hoping you all will make the world great.
(Source: alwayshallbeyours, via likeaphysicist)
Switching Loops and Cisco IP Phones
Switching Loops and IP Phones | How an IP phone may take down your network.
You thought switching loops were a thing of the past, eh? Well, turns out you, as well as I, thought wrong. It turns out that Cisco IP phones don’t forward BPDUs out of there PC ports. So, if someone plugs in an IP phone from a data port and back to…
Neil deGrasse Tyson, MA ’83, is the public face of science. But he says his success has nothing to do with UT.
“Hey, aren’t you the scientist?”
The voice calls out on a bustling Manhattan sidewalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson—celebrity astrophysicist and director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium—whirls around, looking for its source. He sees a disheveled homeless man with a piercing stare.
“Yes, I guess I am,” says Tyson, MA ’83. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ve seen you on TV,” the man replies. “I just want to know—how exactly would a black hole kill a person?”
So Tyson launches into a quick account of spaghettification, or the way extreme gravitational forces near a black hole would stretch a human body from head to toe—like a skinny pasta noodle—until its very atoms would be wrenched apart. “A black hole is a one-way trip,” he is fond of saying. “You ain’t coming out.”
Perhaps no other scientist in the world is so famous that even someone lacking basic shelter stops him on the street to ask a technical question. But Neil deGrasse Tyson, 53, is like no other scientist. More than anyone else living today, he is the public face of his entire field.
You may not know his name, but you’ve seen him on CNN, ABC, The Colbert Report, The Tonight Show, Jeopardy!, or even Stargate Atlantis. TIME named him one of the 100 most influential Americans; People gave him the inimitable title of “Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive.” And when his new show debuts on FOX next year, Tyson will be exposed to his widest audience yet.
“People stop me on the street all the time,” Tyson says. “Taxi drivers, janitors, businessmen. It doesn’t matter who you are—it’s human nature to ask deep questions about the universe. To look up and wonder what’s out there. And I’m happy to talk about it.”
Connecting with such a prominent alumnus could be huge for The University of Texas. This is even truer because Tyson is African-American, and UT has long had a troubled relationship with the black community. But Tyson is not exactly UT’s biggest fan. That’s because he and the University had a bad break-up—one that prompts tricky questions about how academia defines success. As we’ll see, his time at UT is the one thing Tyson doesn’t like to talk about.
read more about Neil’s journey and struggles
This is a good read.
(via sagansense)
my entire math life
This is basically the problem with the entire modern educational system.
Time to do unpopular opinion? Time to do unpopular opinion.
Balancing a checkbook is applied addition and subtraction, stuff of the third grade. Okay, yeah, it is a failure of the modern educational system if he hasn’t learned it by now.
Imaginary numbers interact with real numbers (1, 2, π, 1.5, etc) for complex numbers, and are useful if you want to get into engineering or science — you know, high paying jobs.
Remember Tomb Raider? How they make her turn? Quaternions, which use THREE sets of imaginary numbers.
Like how your cell phone gets reception? That requires resonance, the understanding of which can be aided by complex numbers.
And don’t even get me started in the more exotic physics like fluid dynamics or quantum mechanics. That is, the forefront of how planes fly and how computer chips work.
There’s this term, innumeracy, that is to math what illiteracy is to english. One thing that bugs me is when ignorance is paraded about, when one acts as if math is an optional knowledge. Doubly so when it’s the very thing holding them back.
The failure is not in teaching these things, but the lack of teaching about why we should care about these things.
Thank you maths side of tumblr
The failure is not in teaching these things, but the lack of teaching about why we should care about these things.
Come to think of it, that’s applicable to how a lot of subjects are taught.
But I’m afraid maths gets the worst of it, really. I mean, how often have you heard people complaining about history? Social sciences? Even chemistry, which is more specialised than maths? No, maths gets the worst of it by far, and everyone demonises it because no one ever tells them that maths is a language, and a quite difficult one at that, because it’s the language of the Universe (of god, if you will).
Not only that, but it’s also the only language that’s truly universal (we’re certain aliens will arrive at the same maths we have) and that can truly explain everything that’s in principle conceivable. Human language can describe the stuff we see, and some extrapolations we imagine; maths can describe everything that is, was, will be, has never been, and could ever be.
Everything is maths.
(Source: dermit, via skepticalavenger)
