Unsperiments

I think of experiment as a reasoned procedure to learn something by trying out a series of variations. (Wikipedia notes the importance of "repeatable procedure and logical analysis," for example.) I enjoy baking beskuit (South African rusks; think Boere-biscotti) because it's an endless experiment: with every batch, I try something new.

Molding humans

Two stories from the Research Highlights section of a recent Nature podcast got me thinking about the wide range in human behaviors, e.g. extraversion and introversion, risk appetite and aversion, optimism and pessimism.

Traditional ethics and standards of scholarship

The astrophysicist Simon White concluded his introduction (pdf) to the 2016 Ringberg workshop on galaxy formation by asking how one developed consensus about what is well established. (Thanks to Petri Mähönen for bringing it to my attention.)

White’s answer: “Re-emphasise traditional ethics and standards of scholarship.”

Boggle: measuring how sunshine alters the moon's orbit

The July 11, 2009 issue of New Scientist ran a series of stories of why the moon still matters to astronomy, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. One of them, by Stuart Clark, described how reflectors left on the lunar surface are helping test Einstein's theory gravity. Laser pulses bounced off these reflectors allow researchers to measure the distance between the earth and the moon to a precision of a few millimetres.

At such accuracy one has to factor in the effect of solar radiation pressure "which pushes the moon's entire orbit from its calculated path by about 4 millimetres."