The TED website now has a TEDtalk by Richard Dawkins. You can watch it here. There is also a very good audio book on the iTMS in which he is interviewed as part of the New Yorker festival.
Archive | Science
Helen Fisher TED talk
I’ve posted about the excellent TED talks before. The one just posted by Helen Fisher is very good indeed. You can get it at the TED website or on iTMS.
Newsflash: Science is hard
Get details here. 🙂
Or maybe there were 8…
Heh! There has been a rival proposal to the one outlined in the last post about how to define a planet. The new proposal classes a planet as the largest body in its region of space that orbits a star. So by this definition the Solar System would have 8 planets and Pluto would not be one. it would be one of the Kuiper Belt objects. I vote for this proposal.
And then there were 12…
It looks like the International Astronomical Union will vote next week on a new definition of what can be classed as a planet. The new definition will be any body that has enough mass to form a near spherical shape, due to gravity, and that orbits a star. Under this definition the Solar System will have 12 planets. In addition to the classical 9 at present there will also be Ceres (in the asteroid belt), Charon (which was formally a satellite of Pluto) and UB313 (which was discovered last year). The Charon on is interesting. As Pluto and Charon orbit a common centre of gravity, and this centre of gravity is not within the body of either of them, then this is now known as a double-planet. The Earth and Moon also orbit a common centre of gravity but this is inside the body of the Earth so the Moon is a satellite of Earth.
The new definition introduces a new subclass for the objects out beyond Neptune (mostly – Pluto/Charon do come closer than Neptune in part of it’s orbit) with orbits longer than 200 years. These will be known as Plutons. Ceres can be called a planet in the asteroid belt it seems.
I don’t like this definition. I’m not sure we can can come up with anything better though. As we discover more and more bodies, both in the Solar System and in other star systems, we need to have a definition of planet that is based on a scientific definition rather than historical discovery. My gut feeling is that we should have 8 planets in the Solar System. This would exclude Pluto, Charon and all the other small spherical bodies that are being discovered and that are predicted to be discovered in the future.
I’ve not seen any mention of Sedna. Using this new definition then it should be a planet. I wonder how the discoverer whose page is linked to above will react to that. He seems to be in the historical 8 planet camp.
New build of YAPT
There is a new build of the Cocoa version of YAPT available. It now uses Objective-C rather than AppleScript internally (actually I’m still setting First Responder via AppleScript on application launch). See the YAPT page for more info and download. Here is a screen shot of the latest build with some data for Francium displayed.
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YAPT sub-page
I’ve created a sub-page of the soapbox for YAPT. There will always be a link to this sub-page in the side bar on the right. This sub page will have a link to the latest version of YAPT. It will say when the latest build was posted and the archive will contain the latest post date as well.
Podcasts redux
So who’s won my podcast war. Or, to put it another way, which podcasts do I look forward to? There are five that I listen too. Here they are in order of preference, but I do like them all.
2) Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American
4) Seed’s Science + Culture Podcasts
I’ve recently added the TED Talks video podcasts as well. They look good but as always time will tell.
Cocoa version of YAPT
As I said in a previous post I was switching the development of YAPT from REALbasic to Xcode. This was due to an overall slowness in the GUI in the REALbasic version. There was an irritating delay in activation and deactivating the buttons for each element when switching the application to and from the front on screen. Also the About… dialog box was sluggish in displaying. Add in the fact that REALbasic can’t create Universal Binaries for Intel based Macs yet.
The first development version of the Xcode Universal Binary version of YAPT is now available. It’s much snappier in use and uses the Cocoa framework and Applescript. Only Hydrogen and Helium do anything at present. I plan to finish the interface using these two elements and then add information for the other elements once I’m happy with the layout etc. I’d be interested in any comments. This switch to using Xcode and Cocoa means that YAPT will be Macintosh only. There will not me a Windows or Linux version. There are plenty of other Periodic Table applications for those platforms anyway. Actually there are several for Macintosh as well but I don’t like them 🙂
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Physics for future Presidents
This is good. There are videos of the lectures given earlier this year, by Professor Richard A. Muller of UC Berkeley, for the course Physics for Future Presidents. Basically physics overviews of the important stuff you should know if you are not going to be a physicist but are going to be a CEO, Judge, politician, etc.
There are other UC Berkeley lectures available on iTunes U as well. You can watch videos as well.