Science is cool


Off-Topic Discussions

1 to 50 of 84 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>

3 people marked this as a favorite.

The Milky Way viewed from the Southern Hemisphere.


~whistles~ wow. THAT is cool!


Time lapse video from Spain.

Science is exceedingly cool.


ISS tour


2 people marked this as a favorite.

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Virtual Tour


DungeonmasterCal wrote:

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Virtual Tour

Sweet.


A hive of scum and villainy


4 people marked this as a favorite.
Freehold DM wrote:
A hive of scum and villainy

Oh, hey look! It's my old daycare! *wink*


Space Instrument Adds Big Piece to Solar Corona Puzzle

Sovereign Court

The 8th Dwarf wrote:
The Milky Way viewed from the Southern Hemisphere.

That is a really cool picture.

It seems a strange way that the thread has spun off though; that image isn't really much to do with science: 'art is cool' or 'nature is cool' would make more sense as the image is a product of the glorious beauty of nature as interpreted through the artistic skill of a photographer.
Admittedly, the photographer used some precisely engineered equipment and probably took advantage of an understanding of certain scientific principles...

Same thing with the cool video Irontruth posted.

All so complex and inter-related.

Now that article about the corona was some awesome science, explained with a bunch of really evocative similes.


GeraintElberion wrote:
The 8th Dwarf wrote:
The Milky Way viewed from the Southern Hemisphere.

That is a really cool picture.

It seems a strange way that the thread has spun off though; that image isn't really much to do with science: 'art is cool' or 'nature is cool' would make more sense as the image is a product of the glorious beauty of nature as interpreted through the artistic skill of a photographer.
Admittedly, the photographer used some precisely engineered equipment and probably took advantage of an understanding of certain scientific principles...

Same thing with the cool video Irontruth posted.

All so complex and inter-related.

Now that article about the corona was some awesome science, explained with a bunch of really evocative similes.

I believe your viewpoint on the issue is part of why scientific literacy has declined in the US. The presentation of science to the masses is an important part of science that is too often neglected. Yet this is how you get people interested in science, obtain broader acceptance of science and increase the cultural desire to further scientific endeavors.

Yes, we went to the moon, but televising it had a huge impact on inspiring many people who became scientists later on.


Stanford Researchers Break Million-core Supercomputer Barrier

Sovereign Court

Irontruth wrote:
GeraintElberion wrote:
The 8th Dwarf wrote:
The Milky Way viewed from the Southern Hemisphere.

That is a really cool picture.

It seems a strange way that the thread has spun off though; that image isn't really much to do with science: 'art is cool' or 'nature is cool' would make more sense as the image is a product of the glorious beauty of nature as interpreted through the artistic skill of a photographer.
Admittedly, the photographer used some precisely engineered equipment and probably took advantage of an understanding of certain scientific principles...

Same thing with the cool video Irontruth posted.

All so complex and inter-related.

Now that article about the corona was some awesome science, explained with a bunch of really evocative similes.

I believe your viewpoint on the issue is part of why scientific literacy has declined in the US. The presentation of science to the masses is an important part of science that is too often neglected. Yet this is how you get people interested in science, obtain broader acceptance of science and increase the cultural desire to further scientific endeavors.

Yes, we went to the moon, but televising it had a huge impact on inspiring many people who became scientists later on.

Well, I'm not American and the OP is Australian but...

It seems like scientific illiteracy can only get worse if non-science is described as science.

Televising the moon missions was showing people actual science, I thought.

Does science really have trouble getting accepted? Are there people saying: "Yeah, but you've only proved that with science: what kind of proof is that?"

I didn't know that scientific literacy was declining over the pond. I'm surprised.

The Exchange

dotting the heck out of this thread
:)


Fake Healer wrote:

dotting the heck out of this thread

:)

It's damn good to see your mug again, fakey.


I am sorry but everything is down to physics. It's all science space and the stars Astrophysics, light, film, physics and chemistry, geology and engineering for the ground and lighthouse, biology for the tree.

When Darwin was looking a some birds, lizards, and tortoises and islands he could of said nature is beautiful or holly s*%! Natural Science is f%*~ing amazing complex and beautiful.


Freehold DM wrote:
Fake Healer wrote:

dotting the heck out of this thread

:)
It's damn good to see your mug again, fakey.

+1

The Exchange

Actually I thought of a cool science experiment...to mix NaCl (salt for you chickens) with C12H24 (Petroleum) and use a laser to excite the hydrogen from the long chain carbon and Chlorine...so that the Hydrogen can be extracted leaving behind a C12Na24 long chain metal.

I thought we are so wasting our Petrol by just burning it in an engine when we can use it when ever we want for Hydrogen Storage and just separate the Hydrogen out of mass-liquid storage. Just got to do something with the liberated chlorine. Hydrogen is a bugger but it doesn't require too much laser energy to excite it if you use an assist atom to kick off the hydrogen. The prospect of winding up with HCl is a nasty.

If this were Water we could use Iron and excite the hydrogen just enough for the iron to steal the oxygen as iron Oxide...like the iron oxide formation on Mars.

I suppose we could leave out the NaCl and just excite off the Hydrogen and try and manufacture Graphene (which leaves a single carbon bond free on each carbon which we can use for storage of a hydrogen at any time) Thus making a fuel cell.


GeraintElberion wrote:


I didn't know that scientific literacy was declining over the pond. I'm surprised.

Over the past 30 years, the US has declined in the number of people who think evolution is real.


It's a very, very sad state of affairs. Education standards have slipped and are continuing to slip. As far back as the mid 80s when I was in college, there were two football players I shared a class with who were unable to read a word.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Irontruth wrote:
GeraintElberion wrote:


I didn't know that scientific literacy was declining over the pond. I'm surprised.
Over the past 30 years, the US has declined in the number of people who think evolution is real.

How much of that is general decline in scientific literacy and how much of it is a specific well funded campaign to push belief in creationism and discredit evolution?


I think that's part of it. We do have a general culture of anti-intellectualism.

It's in our politics and entertainment. Elements of hip hop culture have anti-intellectualism currents as well, thought not all.

Some of it just has to do with what we decide to value as a culture. We put famous politicians on our money. Europeans put famous artists and scientists.

The Exchange

Irontruth wrote:
GeraintElberion wrote:


I didn't know that scientific literacy was declining over the pond. I'm surprised.
Over the past 30 years, the US has declined in the number of people who think evolution is real.

But it ain't...at superposition all life is the same life - so we are a single superpositional organism subject to change in possibility not evolution over time and generations.

Liberty's Edge

Irontruth wrote:

I think that's part of it. We do have a general culture of anti-intellectualism.

It's in our politics and entertainment. Elements of hip hop culture have anti-intellectualism currents as well, thought not all.

Some of it just has to do with what we decide to value as a culture. We put famous politicians on our money. Europeans put famous artists and scientists.

Franklin.


Krensky wrote:
Irontruth wrote:

I think that's part of it. We do have a general culture of anti-intellectualism.

It's in our politics and entertainment. Elements of hip hop culture have anti-intellectualism currents as well, thought not all.

Some of it just has to do with what we decide to value as a culture. We put famous politicians on our money. Europeans put famous artists and scientists.

Franklin.

Yes, he did contribute to science and art, but he's also an extremely noteworthy politician. What is popularly credited as his major contribution to science is most likely a fabrication he made up near the end of his life (the kite in the storm story). The fact that he'd lie about science to improve his own image just proves he's more of a politician than anything else.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Hmm. According to a book I was reading on the Great French Revolution, Ben was already a celebrity in France before the American Revolution because of electricity...

Wikipedia entry:

Spoiler:
Electricity

His discoveries resulted from his investigations of electricity. Franklin proposed that "vitreous" and "resinous" electricity were not different types of "electrical fluid" (as electricity was called then), but the same electrical fluid under different pressures. He was the first to label them as positive and negative respectively,[40] and he was the first to discover the principle of conservation of charge.[41]

In 1750 he published a proposal for an experiment to prove that lightning is electricity by flying a kite in a storm that appeared capable of becoming a lightning storm. On May 10, 1752 Thomas-François Dalibard of France conducted Franklin's experiment using a 40-foot (12 m)-tall iron rod instead of a kite, and he extracted electrical sparks from a cloud. On June 15 Franklin may possibly have conducted his famous kite experiment in Philadelphia, successfully extracting sparks from a cloud. Franklin's experiment was not written up with credit[42] until Joseph Priestley's 1767 History and Present Status of Electricity; the evidence shows that Franklin was insulated (not in a conducting path, where he would have been in danger of electrocution). Others, such as Prof. Georg Wilhelm Richmann were indeed electrocuted during the months following Franklin's experiment.

In his writings, Franklin indicates that he was aware of the dangers and offered alternative ways to demonstrate that lightning was electrical, as shown by his use of the concept of electrical ground. If Franklin did perform this experiment, he may not have done it in the way that is often described, flying the kite and waiting to be struck by lightning, as it could have been dangerous.[43] Instead he used the kite to collect some electric charge from a storm cloud, which implied that lightning was electrical.[citation needed]

On October 19 in a letter to England explaining directions for repeating the experiment, Franklin wrote:

When rain has wet the kite twine so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it streams out plentifully from the key at the approach of your knuckle, and with this key a phial, or Leiden jar, may be charged: and from electric fire thus obtained spirits may be kindled, and all other electric experiments [may be] performed which are usually done by the help of a rubber glass globe or tube; and therefore the sameness of the electrical matter with that of lightening completely demonstrated.[44]

Franklin's electrical experiments led to his invention of the lightning rod. He noted that conductors with a sharp rather than a smooth point were capable of discharging silently, and at a far greater distance. He surmised that this knowledge could be of use in protecting buildings from lightning by attaching "upright Rods of Iron, made sharp as a Needle and gilt to prevent Rusting, and from the Foot of those Rods a Wire down the outside of the Building into the Ground;...Would not these pointed Rods probably draw the Electrical Fire silently out of a Cloud before it came nigh enough to strike, and thereby secure us from that most sudden and terrible Mischief!" Following a series of experiments on Franklin's own house, lightning rods were installed on the Academy of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania) and the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall) in 1752.[45]

In recognition of his work with electricity, Franklin received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1753 and in 1756 he became one of the few 18th century Americans to be elected as a Fellow of the Society. The cgs unit of electric charge has been named after him: one franklin (Fr) is equal to one statcoulomb.

Liberty's Edge

2 people marked this as a favorite.

Bifocals, the Franklin stove, the lightning rod, demographics, climatology, discovery of the Gulf Stream, the flexible urinary catheter, the Pro-Con list, the idea of "paying it forward", anti-counterfeiting techniques for paper money, supporting the wave theory of light, meteorology, oceanography, naval architecture, the reaching arm, political cartoons, the glass armonica, various and sundry mundane inventions...

Yeah, the man contributed nothing to science and technology.


Reread the first sentence of my post.

Liberty's Edge

Which doesn't excuse the rest of it.


Except your post had nothing to do with proving the kite in a storm story as being true, so you didn't actually respond to the second part of my post.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Can we just focus on the coolness of science and leave the politics to another thread.

The The Hubble Gallery


The more accurately you measure a shoreline, the longer it becomes.

An explanation of fractals and their presence in African heritage.

The Exchange

I know physics requires the addition of Forces F1 + F2 = F(1+2)...but what is the division of forces? F1/F2=?


Irontruth wrote:
Except your post had nothing to do with proving the kite in a storm story as being true, so you didn't actually respond to the second part of my post.

I don't know if it has anything to do with politics, Comrade Dwarf, but, I'm still curious, Citizen Truth:

He was already famous for thinking about electricity, which was a pretty big deal, in the 1750s. Are you sure that he lied about it, or that folk myth didn't grow up around it, like, say, GW and the cherry tree?

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Whatever your position though is... don't try to recreate Franklin's experiment with the kite. Such a thing can very easily get you killed.


Comrade Anklebiter wrote:
Irontruth wrote:
Except your post had nothing to do with proving the kite in a storm story as being true, so you didn't actually respond to the second part of my post.

I don't know if it has anything to do with politics, Comrade Dwarf, but, I'm still curious, Citizen Truth:

He was already famous for thinking about electricity, which was a pretty big deal, in the 1750s. Are you sure that he lied about it, or that folk myth didn't grow up around it, like, say, GW and the cherry tree?

Don't get me wrong, he did indeed make a huge contribution to our ideas about electricity.

You are correct, it is a lot like GW and the cherry tree. There are some publications and facts surrounding the issue, but there's also a lot we don't know. My assertion of his politician nature is also somewhat tongue in cheek. Even if he was a great scientist, he was also never the less an influential politician. He really is an exception that proves the rule. He's the only scientist on our money, but he's still a politician, reinforcing the concept that we value power over intelligence.


My favourite Space/Astronomy/Astrophysics podcast: Astronomy Cast .


The Pauli Exclusion Principle - Everything is Connected to Everything .


Musical interlude

Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Symphony of Science) .

Symphony of Science - "Children of Africa" (The Story of Us) . (this one has Dr Alice Roberts whom I have the biggest crush on).

More Dr Alice Roberts Our Bottoms Are Designed For Running - Origins of Us - Series 1 - Episode 1.


Shattering Ewoks on Titan - QI - Series 9 - Episode 7 - BBC Two .

Ross Noble, Prof.Brian Cox, Sue Perkins, Alan Davies and Stephen Fry talk about Shattering Ewoks on Titan.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

ASKAP telescope time-lapse .

This time-lapse shows off CSIRO's new telescope, the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), standing tall in Western Australia. ASKAP has been designed to be able to survey the whole sky extremely quickly. This in turn will make possible astronomy projects that could never have been done before.


The 8th Dwarf wrote:

Can we just focus on the coolness of science and leave the politics to another thread.

The The Hubble Gallery

+1

Stunning images!


Scientists notch a win in war against antibiotic-resistant bacteria

The Exchange

2 people marked this as a favorite.

String Theory for School Textbooks


1 person marked this as a favorite.

US to bomb Guam...with dead mice


yellowdingo wrote:
String Theory for School Textbooks

Hee hee!

You're f+~+ing awesome, Comrade Dingo.


One of my favorite images.

It's Saturn with the Sun behind it. Also, on the left side, just above the rings is a bright dot. That's Earth.


cool


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Here are the stars we are most likely to visit after leaving the solar system.

1 to 50 of 84 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>
Community / Forums / Gamer Life / Off-Topic Discussions / Science is cool All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.