Donning the Public Media Lab Coat

Last week I met up with Trent, my former colleague and now senior editor at On Being (née Speaking of Faith). It was good to catch up, and in the process I learned that they’d hired a new associate producer — none other than my former MPR bus buddy Susan Leem (at one point we shared two bus lines). Looks like she’s wasted no time getting going:

Who isn’t testing a theory, a joke, or a product on the reactions of the people they meet, read about, or hear on the radio? Finding public radio in my small town in the deep South was like finding a secret hidden laboratory. And I still feel like I’m slipping on that imaginary white lab coat when I tune in.

A great first post, read the rest on the Being blog.

"Because sudoku has simple rules, we felt that maybe bacteria could solve it for us, as long as we designed a circuit for them to follow"

Ryo Taniuchi, leader of a team of scientists in Tokyo who taught bacteria how to solve sodoku puzzles.

"To listen to enough Radiolab is to see that scientists haven’t simply replaced the theologians, the metaphysicians and the social critics as posers and answerers of the biggest questions. They’ve also become, in a time of gene-splicing and hadron-colliding and psychopharmacology, our true avatars of creative expression, the last radical artists left."

“My gosh, who hasn’t experienced The ‘Radiolab’ Effect? It totally happened to me.” (Shanai)

Ditto!

"In another reading experiment, researchers mangled a series of consecutive sentences by switching the position of two of nouns in each one — the way that ‘alcohol’ and ‘people’ were switched in the last sentence of the previous paragraph."

Very sneaky, Mr. Tierney. Verrrrry sneaky.

“Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind” (NYT)

(via freshphotons)

"The idea is that if a gravitational wave passes through GEO600, it will alternately stretch space in one direction and squeeze it in another. To measure this, the GEO600 team fires a single laser through a half-silvered mirror called a beam splitter. This divides the light into two beams, which pass down the instrument’s 600-metre perpendicular arms and bounce back again. The returning light beams merge together at the beam splitter and create an interference pattern of light and dark regions where the light waves either cancel out or reinforce each other. Any shift in the position of those regions tells you that the relative lengths of the arms has changed."

Damn, science is cool. Oh, by the way, our world may be a giant hologram.

(h/t Joe O’Sullivan)

"… Buddhism considers itself as an empirical approach of the functioning of the mind, the mechanism of happiness and suffering. And so, empirical means, you know, we can certainly work with scientist without any risk of feeling threatened by that because if something is false, it’s false. What’s the problem with that?"

Matthieu Ricard

Seriously, don’t let the “Bobby McFerrin” part scare you off — this video is awesome.

SOF Observed:

“Playing” The Audience
Andy Dayton, Associate Web Producer

Nancy just sent around a link to this video of Bobby McFerrin presenting at the 2009 World Science Festival (we’re hoping they’ll also release video of Xavier Le Pichon’s presentation soon). I don’t really know much about McFerrin, but admittedly my impression of him in the past has been cynical — his late-80’s chart-topper “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was always a little too earnest for my ears. But I was pleasantly surprised to see McFerrin give this simple, fun, and extremely effective demonstration of the universality of the pentatonic scale.

(read more & comment)

"I don’t know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough"

Richard P. Feynman, from the Omni interview, ”The Smartest Man in the World.”