Curt’s Basement

Today is Tau day (6.28), so here’s what Tau sounds like. (Spoiler: pretty good).

The latter half of the talk is actually paraphrased from his second book: More Information Than You Require.

The music is perfect and had me laughing. The video documents a seagull “dancing” to bring earthworms to the surface.  When humans do this, it’s called “worm-charming” or “worm-grunting.”  Wood turtles also use this technique, by repeatedly bumping their carapace against the ground. via Neatorama

Want to feel small?

Some people ask me “Why bother to collect old newspapers? If I want to read dry, boring history, I can just get a history book.” My answer to this is that even the best of history books leave out some mighty interesting aspects of historical events. The only way they can be re-discovered, is through [...]

Phew, I thought I had ADD or something! Discover Magazine references several studies on the importance of zoning out, including a University of Santa Barbara case that asked participating students to read from—what else—War and Peace and to tap on a computer key when they weren’t thinking about the book. On average, the students reported [...]

This man is a God! via Publick Nuisance – Score One for the Home Team.

Well, I’m thoroughly creeped out now.

Two big communications satellites collided in the first-ever crash of two intact spacecraft in orbit, shooting out a pair of massive debris clouds and posing a slight risk to the international space station. NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the crash, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on [...]

In humans, there are four tiny areas of the brain that some researchers say form a circuit of love. [Dr. Bianca] Acevedo, who works at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is part of a team that has isolated those regions with the unromantic names of ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus [...]

This is too cool. Like the guy on Neatorama said, this could be the new “mentos and diet coke” meme for the internet.

via Neatorama

A research team at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Japan has successfully displayed simple images produced in the human brain on a computer screen. Dream recorder anyone? In a nutshell, the device converts electrical signals sent to the visual cortex into images that can be viewed on a computer screen. In their experiment, they [...]

I’m immediately reminded of that line from Red Dwarf: Well, the thing about a black hole – its main distinguishing feature – is it’s black. And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is black. So how are you supposed to see them? But, more to the point, this from [...]

I’d say it’d be since Shell (the oil company) found this one (click for video!). Apparently scientists have known about this kind of squid before, just they’d never captured one on film. Sure sure, they’re hiding it from us. Before you know it, we’ll be attacked by giant walking squid that can shoot laser beams [...]