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On the move again - the Alps
Flat landers like ourselves always try to head for either beaches or mountains, things that just don't exist in Lincolnland. So today's travels were great, mostly. Starting from Munich, our route...
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Leonard Troland and the story of the photon's name
posted by @ulaulaman via @peppeliberti #photon #physics #LeonardTroland Gilbert Newton Lewis was a physical chemist who used the name "photon" in order to describe the light(1, 2). Probably unknown to...
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Just the Tip of the Iceberg - Part 3 The Signature of All Things
***Spoiler Alert*** This post may contain plot details and quotes from The Signature of All Things. The first five pages of Part 3 focus on mosses with an intensity that covers a wide breadth of...
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Coffee & wine bars - too cultured for the USA?
Zurich is littered with coffee and wine bars. Most of them are pretty small, quite intimate, with little tables and a couple of lithe young women in tight black jeans and white blouses waiting tables....
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Paracomatula: Feather Star, or Feather Star Wannabe?
Fossilised accumulation of Paracomatula helvetica, from here.Earlier postson this site have discussed examples of the feather stars, the most successful representatives in the modern environment of the...
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A very Swiss day
Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the accompanying image could possibly exist in Lincolnland. Yes, there's a big lake, a great lake in fact, but it isn't this cute, nor is the city next to it in any...
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The More Your Friends Change, the More Your Social Network Stays the Same
For the most part, people move in and out of our lives at a trickle: a new coworker becomes a friend; a neighbor moves away. But there's at least one cataclysmic monsoon in a young person's social...
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A Great Year for GamesWithWords.org
Unique visitors at GamesWithWords.org were up 76% in 2013 over the previous year. That's after several years of fairly steady traffic.Meanwhile, two journal papers and a conference paper involving data...
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How's your weather? Or, don't move that snow drift; it may be my car.
Well, today was another day of terrible weather here in Switzerland. It was sunny, about 10 C, and we toured a botanical garden to see what spring flowers might be open (bear paw hellebores, hardy...
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January 2014 Desktop Calendar
We went out on a hike this weekend to Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve, about an hour outside of Davis into the coastal mountains to the west. Unfortunately the rainy season here in the central valley has...
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The first atomic clock
The first atomic frequency standard, based on the ammonia molecule (1949).Inventor Harold Lyons is on the right; Edward Condon, at the age the director of NBS, is on the left.The story of the atomic...
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Back to blogging
I haven't posted anything in ages, partly because I haven't done an experiment in ages. I'm not planning any experiments right now, but I do need to do a lot of thinking and writing about research...
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More Citizens, More Science
For the last couple years, most articles about Citizen Science -- in which amateurs contribute to scientific projects -- have been hagiography. These articles were nearly exclusively Ra! Ra!, all about...
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That was the year that ws 2013
Well folks, another year wrapped up. That's the sixth New Year that this blog has seen in - so thanks to everyone who still keeps coming back to read it! Here's a wrap up of this year.One of the...
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TMI Friday: Frippery Furrows Fanny
Jewellery, body piercing and other such frippery are usually harmless. A ring here, a piercing there. Humans have been using these accoutrements for millenia without problems. at least, problems...
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Pepper sex? You must be kidding.
TPP just got this image by email, and if this is the way 2014 is going to go, it'll be a long year. Flip the bell peppers over to check their gender. The ones with four bumps are female and those with...
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This is water (and snowflakes)
posted by @ulaulaman via @zuppadivetro about #water #snowflakes When water freezes, the molecules take a definite position in their relations one to another. Snow flakes are made up of molecules in...
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An important paper about the interactions between influenza and H. influenzae...
Wong SM, Bernui M, Shen H, & Akerley BJ (2013). Genome-wide fitness profiling reveals adaptations required by Haemophilus in coinfection with influenza A virus in the murine lung. Proceedings of...
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E-assist city bicycle
TPP continues to be impressed by the continual innovation being shown by bicycle builders to make bicycling in urban situations accessible to more people. Here's the aptly named Faraday (look him up...
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The Heartland Institute - helping teachers get climate change "right"!
A nice booklet was mailed to TPP; it's titled Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science. As a member of a number of conservation and scientific groups with major outreach functions, the booklet...
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