Science Made Cool

The Importance of Being Visual

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but only because humans are acutely visual animals. Large portions of our brains are devoted to making sense of the information we pick up with our eyes, processing changes in light and shadow, movement, and finding faces in everything we look at. (For more on that, here’s an interesting video from the MIT Museum -- Nancy Kanwisher talking about her research on human visual processing.) Visuals become particularly important in the sciences, where a well-drawn figure can be the difference between clarity and a confusing morass of conflicting data.

Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery and Howtoons: The Possibilities are Endless! are two books that are all about the figures.

Which Ones Were the Animals, Again?

When I picked up Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide, I expected a book full of stories about African wildlife, kind of like Wild Kingdom or the National Geographic Channel in print. What I got was better: a light memoir by Peter Allison about the experience of being an African safari guide, warts and all. Although Allison shares plenty of stories about animals, the real f ocus is on the people he met while guiding, from the “bird nerds” who wanted to stop to look at every bird on the drive into camp, to the camera-toting Japanese guests annoyed by the animals’ inability to follow instructions. Sometimes poignant, sometimes outrageously funny, but always entertaining, this book is a quick and rewarding read.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide
Peter Allison
2007
Lyons Press

So Simple, and Yet So Addictive

I’ve been fooling with a nifty new toy all weekend -- the Flip-‘n-Stack Acrobatz from Zing Toys. It’s really incredibly simple: a $14.95 kit gets you a metal square with a target printed on it, a small plastic launcher, and four chunky magnetic acrobat figures in blue and red. You put the magnetic figures on the launcher and flip them onto the target. It’s amazingly addictive. The blue and red figures stick together: one has north magnetic poles exposed on the ends of its little hands and feet; the other has south poles exposed. You can flip the figures onto one another and make them stick in stacks. There’s a simple scoring system so you can play competiively with another person, but everyone in my family seems to be just as happy to keep trying to build little towers of men. We may have to break down and buy a booster pack to get some extra magnetic figures soon. Our towers are starting to look a little puny.

Another Bone Wars Review

Brian Andres wrote a long review of Bone Wars: The Game of Ruthless Paleontology for the new issue of Palaeontologia Electronica. Have a look!

Assembly Required, Instruction Absent

My daughter is getting interested in robotics. I figured this out when she kept looking at the robot kits at our local toy store with the same expression I usually reserve for expensive dark chocolate.

So this week we sat down to build her first robot. It’s a cute little 2-legged walker shaped like an ostrich made by Tamiya. The kit is obviously made for beginners because instead of using solder, all the wires get squished onto their contacts with tiny rubber loops. I was grateful for that. It’s not that I’m afraid of soldering irons -- I’ve built my share of Wheatstone bridges and attached wires to innumerable strain gauges over the years. But I really didn’t want the Girl’s first electronics experience to include burned fingers and cursing.

The robot was really pretty simple – little more than a switch, a motor, a gearbox, and legs with a neck stuck on to make it look more like an animal. And it was easy to put together, once you got used to the pictographic instructions and exploded diagrams. But what I found remarkable, and disappointing, was the complete absence of any explanation of the science that makes the robot work. You would think that a toy that bills itself as “educational” could stick a couple of sentences into the instructions explaining why the wires have to run in a complete circuit, or how the gear box transfers forces from the motor to the legs. Maybe it’s the language barrier.

Capsule Review: A fun project, but not an enlightening one.
• Fun -------------- 4
• Scientific Rigor-- 1