Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Let’s finish the job.

Republicans don’t trust women.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

In my day, never was longer.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / We Are (Mostly) Star Dust

We Are (Mostly) Star Dust

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Have some brain-food-fun this a.m., courtesy of a friend of mine, Ben Lillie, recovering physicist and the man behind the lovely Story Collider effort.  Here he gives a TEDx talk on element number 3, lithium, an audio essay ranging from Evanescence (the band, not the property) to the universe and back to human nature.  Enjoy:

Don’t know about you, but every now and then I need a complete break from the not-funny comedy that is current US politics.  This worked a treat for me.  You?
Any great science popular media among your favorites?  That’s what the comment thread is for.

Reader Interactions

30Comments

  7. 7.

    PurpleGirl

    @jeffreyw: Agree. That first series held completely my interest. I was science geek in high school and early college but I haven’t kept up with science for years.

  13. 13.

    Big ole hound

    Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the only scientist who is easily understood by old guys like me. He and Steven Colbert did some great tongue in cheek stuff.

  14. 14.

    Tommy

    Interesting TED TALK. I did not know that the element Lithium was actually something in the drug Lithium. I figured the drug company just named it Lithium because well Lithium is a cool sounding word.

    I also liked he said “we are all stardust.” I think at many levels, at the most core elements of our bodies that is factually accurate. And kind of cool to think about and/or ponder!

  16. 16.

    Cervantes

    Any great science popular media among your favorites?

    Could start listing them now and still be listing them in the spring, so, for now, just these: the book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps by Kees Boeke, and then, from the book, the Powers of Ten films made by the Eames brothers.

  17. 17.

    Pogonip

    @Villago Delenda Est: Wow. Dust motes. Have you ever really looked at dust motes? Wow. Just wow.

    In that era we lived out in the country, and across the road was a “hippie” girl in a trailer. Mr. Hippie was in Vietnam, and Mrs. Hippie took advantage of his absence to supplement her income via gentleman callers. She wasn’t a hippie, she was a whore–Er, a sex worker, as we call them nowadays–but back then, one did not explain such things to little girls. So my parents just called her a hippie. Either way, it was something naughty, so I always got a decadent kick out of being allowed to cross the road and visit her. See, the ’60’s really were fun!

  18. 18.

    Pogonip

    @Villago Delenda Est: P.S. hilarity ensued the day I overheard her inviting my dad to “visit” her.

    –“See, I told you she was nice, even if she is a hippie! Now we can all go visit her.”
    –“Me and your mom ain’t got time to visit her.”
    –“Why not? You visit Grandma.”
    –“Hey, ain’t it about time to mix up the baby cereal and feed the puppies?”

  21. 21.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    The beverage Seven Up originally contained lithium, and was called 7 Up, Lithiated Lemon Soda. I think that while the name was shortened to 7 Up before the 1940s, the salt itself stayed in the formula until sometime in the 50s. There are some significant side effects to lithium that need to be monitored – though it is a very effective mood stabilizer – so that formula change was important for public health.

  26. 26.

    Cervantes

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    These TED talks hold little attraction for me. I don’t think one can learn science by hearing someone talk about it.

    Without commenting on TED talks in particular: if by “science” you mean the activity, then that would be one thing; but surely a person can be inspired or educated or even challenged by hearing someone else talk about their activity (or work, or science) — no?

  27. 27.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    You can’t learn science, but you can learn about science. If you watch an interview with Martin Scorsese, you’re not going to learn filmmaking, but you’re going to learn about filmmaking.

    I’m never going to get onto a ship to hunt for giant squid, but I want to hear the story when they get back. I don’t need to understand the biological science behind it to be interested in learning about a newly discovered animal.

  28. 28.

    mclaren

    Absolutely fascinating article on the ways the human eye beats the theoretical minimum angular resolution for vision:

    http://accidentalscientist.com/2014/12/why-movies-look-weird-at-48fps-and-games-are-better-at-60fps-and-the-uncanny-valley.html

    Exactly the same trick happens with our ears, which also beat the theoretical uncertainty principle limit for discriminating sound
    frequencies:
    http://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html

    There’s been lots of hype recently about so-called deep neural networks. Turns out that they’re wildly overhyped. Deep Neural Networks look at static TVs and declare them to be school busses.
    More revelation of the idiot folly of Artificial Intelligence.
    newscientist.com/article/dn26691-optical-illusions-fool-computers-into-seeing-things.html

  29. 29.

    mclaren

    The journal Nature featured a powerful article a few weeks back slamming string theory:

    http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-defend-the-integrity-of-physics-1.16535

    “Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics — Attempts to exempt speculative theories of the Universe from experimental verification undermine science, argue George Ellis and Joe Silk.”

    Mathematician Terence Tao has a great video lecture of his work crowdsourcing new mathematics:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elWIDVI6b18

    Theoretical physicist Joe Polchinski has a great lecture here called “Spacetime vs. the Quantum.” Either one or the other must go, he says.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNQUdPhE-s0

  30. 30.

    mclaren

    @Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):

    You can’t learn science, but you can learn about science.

    Exactly.

    Out here in the real world, everything has gotten specialized. Extremely specialized. Intensely specialized.

    This means that the likelihood that you’ll be able to actually learn, say, string theory, even if you have a PhD in another scientific field, is approximately zero.

    So faced with the choice of learning nothing about various fields, and getting at least a hint of what’s going, you can sit there and remain ignorant…or you can watch lectures by various high-powered scientists like Terence Tao even though those lectures avoid all the real substance of the subspecialty.

    Personally, I find remaining ignorant odious. But your mileage may vary.

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