Daily Archives: May 29, 2009

Categorically Not! – Awesome

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cat_not_optical_puzzleThe next Categorically Not! is this coming Sunday May 29th. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole – of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events. (Image above right is from the excellent Categorically Not! – Really? event back in April 2006, described in an earlier post here. It was all about illusion, with examples from the world of optical illusions, and from literature.)

The theme this month is Awesome. Here’s the description from K C Cole:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

LHC News

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lhc_and_mont_blancJester at Resonaances reports on a talk by Jörg Wenninger about the progress at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

There’s information about the repairs, more thoughts about the accident last year, and somewhat frightening news about issues of quality control on some of the manufacturing of crucial parts that may haunt the entire project for some time to come. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Go! Now! Get a Galileoscope!

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I just learned from Phil’s blog that the Galileoscopes I mentioned to you some months back (remember? International Year of Astronomy? Not just Darwin year?) are ready for shipping. There were issues with production at first, but now they are ready. The key issue right now seems to be that they are in danger of having to stop production of these lovely things if they don’t get lots of orders by May 31st. Ack!

So please please consider sending in a order for one or a few. Imagine what a delightfully unusual gift it would make for someone. Either someone you know, or someone you don’t know like a neighbour, your local school, church (yes!) or community center, or… even that special someone who you’d like to get to know – what an icebreaker, eh? Here’s a picture from the site of what a happy owner’ll have after assembling it:

galileoscope_kit_box

It is easy to put together, gives a new window onto the world above your head, and […] Click to continue reading this post →