When I was in college, I took this differential equations (DE) class that I really enjoyed. I remember that a very fun exercise we used to do was to calculate the rate of decay of radioactive materials. In a nutshell, radioactive materials are extremely unstable, their nuclei are constantly changing, and …
Listening to the Diane Rehm radio show today, BBC’s Katty Kay was hosting a conversation about genetics and criminal behavior. (Both the recording and transcripts are available online.) The basic premise of this kind of research is that one can make predictions about the potential for future criminal behavior based on …
Certainly, John Cleese is one of my favorite comedians. In this podcast on his series “The Scientists,” Cleese ridicules the claims of modern genetic scientists who try to explain every single instance of human behavior “mechanically”—that is, in terms of genes’ behavior. In a similar tone, Philosopher Tyler Burge recently …
Martin Gardner, polymath and science writer, who wrote Scientific American‘s column Mathematical Games for a quarter of a century, died on May 22, 2010, at 95 in his home in Norman, Oklahoma. Fellow polymath Douglas Hofstadter once wrote that Gardner was one of his life’s “major shaping forces”. Gardner used …
Recently, I had the opportunity to watch this old video of a hearing where late astronomer Carl Sagan spoke about the importance of funding basic scientific research. I have been a huge fan of Sagan all my life since the first time I saw his popular TV series Cosmos in …