Steve Ersinghaus

I don’t know why, but I’ve found Importance of Achromatic Contrast in Short-Range Fruit Foraging of Primates strangely fascinating. Here’s a snip:
Despite these findings, behavioral observation of wild primate populations has given a limited support for trichromat advantage. In a study of wild mixed-species troops of saddleback (Saguinus fuscicollis) and mustached (S. mystax) tamarins, [...]

Hendree Milward, one of our wondeful math faculty has posted the escalator problem:
Escalator Problem
Adrian is at the top of descending escalator, and his son Brad is at the bottom.
Adrian starts walking down the escalator, and counts 40 steps when he reaches the bottom. Brad starts running up the escalator, at three times the speed his [...]

First beam tomorrow. This will be fun. I mean the science.

From Ron Cowen and Science News
Cosmologists are agog about the possibility that an orbiting observatory may have discovered particles of dark matter — the proposed, invisible material that researchers believe makes up most of the mass of the universe.
At two meetings in August, researchers analyzing data from the Russian-European observatory PAMELA, short for Payload for [...]

Jacques Distler has numbers on political parties and fiscal reality.

Lots of writing on the subject of William F. Buckley Jr. As you’d expect.
My first encounter came with Firing Line with Buckley and then Kinsley as moderator later.
Then we went to Crossfire and then to Asshead and Shitmouth. Talk show evolution.

Chris Mooney on connections:
If science today isn’t learning much from the humanities, neither is it learning enough from those with expertise in politics or in communication. And it shows. Consider the experience of American science in the 2000s. Despite producing more Ph.D.s than ever—with 29,854 in 2006 representing an all-time high according to the National [...]

Jesse Abbot kicks off the first of a three part series of talks in the history and philosophy of math and science with Peter Skiff of Bard College. Meet us just off from the Cyber Cafe at 1PM tomorrow at the college.
This should be a wonderful kick-off to an interesting series of events that [...]

I find this article at Real Climate very interesting, a nice peekhole into potential disaster:
One also has to wonder whether the international treaties and organizations needed to agree on and execute a geoengineering scheme are significantly easier to realize than the agreements needed to decarbonize the energy future, which would offer safer and more durable [...]

Here’s to Al Gore and the Peace prize.
Cheers.

For me, the dancer is spinning clockwise.
Via Mark Bernstein, who has side by sides, which sometimes provides a peripheral shift, meaning that you may be able to adjust the spin direction of the figure. In the side by side, if I glance back and forth and hold, the figure will go counterclockwise. Come back and [...]

Chris Mooney asks some good questions
As a prerequisite, the next president must grasp how science flows into a democracy at all levels. Whoever wins the election—man or woman, Democrat or Republican—will face profound science-based challenges and questions. Will space become militarized, or remain a neutral zone of unfettered international access? Will we successfully protect our [...]

An interesting link to a pdf article by Olle Häggström via The Panda’s Thumb. Scroll down to Uniform distribution is a model assumption with link-back to more context. Note that you have to read the whole paper and the context to grab the gist.

This is wonderful stuff. Susan Gibb on the dangers of do-it-yourself:
The grapes are in full galloping fermentation and while I’ve been elbow deep in it popping the grapes to get that done quickly, it keeps threatening to overflow its container and I’m afraid that it just might tonight. At midnight. Seep over [...]

From Sharpebrains’ interview with Daniel Gopher via A Blog Around the Clock
What research over the last 15-20 years has shown is that cognition, or what we call thinking and performance, is really a set of skills that we can train systematically. And that computer-based cognitive trainers or “cognitive simulations” are the most effective and efficient [...]