Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Science

  • TED Talk: What frogs in hot water can teach us about thinking again

    This one is a nutshell for Adam Grant’s newest book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. I loved the book. I encourage everyone to read it. I’ve long strived for confident humility. I love that he names this talk after the myth of the frog in a slowly boiling pot. Frogs […]

  • Opposite of face blindness?

    Face blindness means that I would not recognize individuals I know. Clothing, voice, or other cues would be the only way to know person A from B. I keep thinking new people I see look like a close relative of an acquaintance. I am not confusing them with the person. Just wondering if they are […]

  • The Bystander Effect

    I am seeing more and more where people are complaining about the filming of an attack and not intervening in it. People are claiming they would do something. But… I suspect many of the people who film these events without intervening think beforehand they would do something too. Why they do not intervene is pretty […]

  • Trump’s best shot at reelection is false-consensus effect

    Thinking back to Obama’s campaign for reelection, I recall much talk about how incompetent, evil, and terrible a president he was from his opposition. Not Romney directly but the his likely voters on social media. To the point of Romney feeling moral obligation to defend Obama as not that bad of a person to his […]

  • Juggling Social Roles in Social Media

    Sociology has a concept of us holding multiple social roles. At home, I am both a husband and a father. With relatives, I am a son, nephew, or cousin. At work, I am a supervisee, mentor, subject matter expert, or organization historian. Things get a bit more undefined out in the wider world, but I […]

  • Micro Quorums

    Listening to the Radiolab Bit Flip episode. If you haven’t listened, then you really should first.

  • TED Talk: The story of ‘Oumuamua, the first visitor from another star system | Karen J. Meech

    In October 2017, astrobiologist Karen J. Meech got the call every astronomer waits for: NASA had spotted the very first visitor from another star system. The interstellar comet — a half-mile-long object eventually named `Oumuamua, from the Hawaiian for “scout” or “messenger” — raised intriguing questions: Was it a chunk of rocky debris from a […]

  • TED Talk: How to take a picture of a black hole | Katie Bouman

    A talk on how the process would work presented a couple years ago. Interesting how closely the actual image matches the reconstruction before they did it. At the heart of the Milky Way, there’s a supermassive black hole that feeds off a spinning disk of hot gas, sucking up anything that ventures too close — […]

  • What I’ve learned over the past year

    A friend asked me this last night and my unprepared answer was all over the place, but I think in retrospect there was a theme. I was aware that being a parent changes the brain in the abstract. I was unprepared for the experience for how hard it hits. Think the stepson being only a […]

  • Dream: Airbender gone wrong

    This was one of those being chased dreams. Everyone has superpowers. Mine? If I move too fast in a single direction a glowing, writhing ball of explosives developed in front of me. My superpower was pulling the hydrocarbons out of the air to make an aerosol TNT. But only in front of me. If I timed […]