6 posts tagged “scientific american”

Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine writes an open letter to Messrs Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens in the Skeptic column of Scientific American. He argues that we should avoid defining ourselves as anti-religion, instead outlining what we support (presumably rationality and having the strength of character to see the world as it truly is). Quoting von Mises, Darwin, Sagan, and Luther King Jr he argues that what stands above science and religion is the freedom to think, believe, and behave what and as we wish, so long as exercising that freedom does not impinge upon the freedom of others.

Hear, hear.

Here is an article from Scientific American which struck a chord with me for two reasons. Firstly, it explains the rapid increase in the vocabulary of toddlers, a breathtaking phase my son is currently blossoming through. Secondly, it does so without any fancy hypothetical linguistic white elephants, but merely with a common statistical entity: the bell curve.

There are two excellent new mathematical articles on the Scientific American website.

The first rather bravely and lucidly takes the reader through Cantor's proof that there are more numbers between 0 and 1 than there are positive whole numbers. Like the author, I remember being blown away by this result when I first saw it. The proof is so short and elegant, understandable even by those who normally quail at mathematics, and yet opens up vistas of astonishing scope. Think about it: there are different sizes of infinity. There are not only more numbers between 0 and 1 than there are positive whole numbers, but there are more numbers between any two numbers you care to pick than there are positive whole numbers, even if your chosen two numbers differ first at the billionth decimal place. In fact, there are an infinite number of sizes of infinity - how big is the set of "infinities", though?

The second article details work done by scientists at my alma mater, University College London, to describe the Mobius strip (descriptions: technical, non-technical), that mind-bending object which has only one side and one edge. You can make one by taking a strip of paper, giving it a half-twist, and gluing the ends together. For the first time, we can now determine the exact shape of a physical realisation of this object given certain facts about the material from which it is to be made. The proof uses minimisation techniques - minimising energy or another quantity seems to be an ubiquitous law of the universe of mysterious and powerful beauty. I will shortly be writing an article about this for the magazine Plus. I'll be sure to post a link when it appears.

We all want it, don't we? Read The Science of Lasting Happiness at Scientific American.

An interesting article in Scientific American (linking in nicely to an earlier post)reveals that there is more to success in mathematics than a high IQ. It seems that the ability to hold information in your working memory, while simultaneously being able to control your impulse to automatically follow a well-trodden path leads to success. The authors of the quoted study suggest that training a child's "executive function" and "impulse control" should be a core part of the math curriculum. Suggested training includes listening to and then repeating in reverse order a sequence of numbers.

From a post in a Scientific American "seminar blog":

Isaac Newton attributed his genius to his "patient attention," and Yale economist Robert J. Shiller, seconding that thought 300 years later (in 2000), declared that "the ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence." If attention accounts for much of what we accomplish, it accounts too for our consciousness, since it largely controls what dominates our thoughts and awareness.

So that's where I've been going wrong, mind like a monkey swinging from tree to tree.