Clik here to view.
Biodiversity in the maize and soybean desert
TPP has long joked about living in the maize and soybean desert of the upper midwest. Sadly this does a grave injustice to deserts because even the harshest desert has more biodiversity than our...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Shamanistic origin of Santa Claus?
Far out, man! In this nifty little article about Amanita muscari, the fly agaric, a spectacular mushroom, they suggest a story that TPP had never heard before. Now any botanist who knows their...
View ArticleClik here to view.
One ring to bind them all: things you might not know about benzene
Space filling model. c. Michelle FranclNext year is the 150th anniversary of Kekulé's paper proposing the cyclic nature of the benzene 'nucleus.' and the 190th anniversary of Michael Faraday's paper...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In the matter of Walter Lewin, MIT goes medieval
By now most people must have heard the unpleasant news that Walter Lewin, the beloved and world-renowned physics teacher at MIT whose legendary video lectures drew comparison with the Feynman Lectures...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hard to know what to say about the torture report so leave it to Tom Tomorrow
The release of the summary of the torture report more or less tells us something most people already knew, so it's hard to know how to respond or comment. Only a real Pollyanna would think the USA...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Open house etiquette
It was a busy weekend socially and the internet connection was flaky, even more than usual so no blogs. Since the Martha Stewart fairy dusted our home with decorations, some one volunteered to host a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Holiday recipe for you - Liquore di zabaglione
This recipe showed up in last Sunday's ChiTown Trib just in time to be used for part of an Italian dinner for friends and family. In August TPP made zabaglione, an liquor flavored egg custard &...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Banishing the darkness on the winter solstice
Did you notice that the days are getting longer? Yes, the world will not be consumed by darkness as the days continued to shorten. But rather than have fires, or feasts, or religious events to banish...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Long, long ago, far, far away
This is a pretty amazing photograph of NGC 1398, the barred galaxy. There is something strangely compelling about images like this of things so huge and so far away. Their camera must have a mighty...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The hobbit, the dragon, and the green knight
by @ulaulaman about #TheHobbit #JRRTolkien #Smaug #mathematics Gandalf and Bilbo by David WenzelThe Peter Jackson's Hobbit movie trilogy is arrived to a conclusion, so it could be a good point to write...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Over packaging
Holiday gift giving provides lots of data points for observing packaging. Is there anything with more wasteful packaging than men's shirts? Let's see if the packaging can be listed: an adhesive size...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Arthur and the eclipse
by @ulaulaman about #ArthurEddington #AlbertEinstein #GeneralRelativity On the 17th November 1922, Albert Einstein, accompanied by his wife, arrived in Kobe (see the report of the visit published on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Holiday flowering
It's been a good holiday season for flowering. As a consequence of spending summers and early fall outside, almost all of our tropical houseplants regularly flower. This was a particularly good year...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Monday morning brain boggling - optical illusions
Here's a video of a pretty powerful optical illusion of a checkerboard. Non-random placement of the white dots creates the illusion of a bulge. When the dots are removed, the illusion disappears....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Great Blog Galaxy - Almost big enough to be seen!
This galaxy of blogs is the result of asking over 600 science bloggers what science blogs they read and then construct it as a network of bloggers reading blogs. The more people who read your blog,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A tribute to the Year of Crystallography - Haüy´s Models
"It would be good if the readers, who wish to follow the details of these demonstrations, make themselves or have made, in cardboard or any other materials, solids that represent the principal...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Does a 3-day fast reset your immune system?
I’ve been hearing new reports lately that sound an awful lot like pseudoscience: that fasting for an extended time, two days or longer, can reset your immune system and provide other health benefits. I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Lithoglyphidae: Let's Get Fresh
Live individuals of Lithoglyphus naticoides, copyright Jan Steger.In previous posts on this site (see here and here), I've introduced you to members of the Hydrobiidae, a diverse family of mostly...
View ArticleClik here to view.
2014 retrospective - Blog #323
The past 12 months have been pretty good for TPP personally. Things have gone very well although not without some aggravating episodes, e.g., getting you retirement money out of Lincolnland's clutches....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The deadly irony of gunpowder
In the mid-ninth century, Chinese chemists, hard at work on an immortality potion, instead invented gunpowder. They soon found that this highly inflammable powder was far from an elixir of life -- they...
View Article