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The Oatmeal has an utterly superb cartoon devoted to Nikola Tesla: The greatest geek who ever lived. Normally at this point I would clip a bit of the cartoon to give you a taste of what I mean but this one really does need to be seen in it’s entirety. So go read it now.
One bit I do want to draw some attention to, though, is a remark near the bottom of the cartoon mentioning that July 10th is Nikola Tesla Day. This is the date of his birth and a date worth celebrating.
So geek out on July 10th and make something awesome.
Or, just keep an eye on Wikipedia.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster: Impact of magnetic fields on ram pressure stripping in disk galaxies
Not being an astrophysicist, I am relying on The Register’s summary, according to which the researchers suggest that certain combinations of gravity and magnetic fields can cause galaxies to leak long strands of gas.
That’s just the kind of thing one would expect of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), a deity revealed in 2005 which uses a “noodly appendage” to perform its works.
So finally, a deity for which some scientific proof exists.
Open Culture (via) has three films and a TV programme made by Christopher Sykes about the physicist Richard Feynman. There is a lot of video here and I haven’t had a chance to watch much of it yet, but I certainly intend on doing so as soon as I am able.
The first one, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is embedded below. You can find the other three on the Open Culture site.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Seth Godin has a striking little graph based on these stats and this image. Randall Munroe of XKCD fame did something similar.
With all of the hype and scares currently flying around the media about the Fukushima nuclear power plant, it is worth bearing in mind that humans are very bad at risk assessment.
Always look at the data before leaping to conclusions.
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