The Science Thread

More scary stuff...

Set of science gifs that are worth the watch, I think: http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/20-gifs-teach-science-concepts-seconds/

Thanks. These are awesome.

Y'all might like this "Spooky Science" thing, too: http://www.livescience.com/12910-twisted-physics-top-findings.html?cmpid=514627_20150208_40066006&adbid=10152553348456761&adbpl=fb&adbpr=30478646760

The enigma of time. Don't know how true it all is, but interesting nonetheless.

http://higherperspective.com/2015/02/understanding-time.html?utm_source=HP

I'd run across some of those before, but a lot of them were new to me. Wow.

Love this stuff

I've got some neodymium (however you spell it) magnets. I'm going to make a turbo-charged version of that thing.

Hey, FBM, could you (or anyone) tell me how you imbed youtube videos at this site?

Yeah, you copy the url and paste it into the window. (Often there's an 's' that needs to be deleted: https://.) Then you have to type in these tags on either end: [youtube](url)[/youtube].

So it'll look something like this: [youtube]http://www.youtube....[/youtube]

Thanks. I'm going to try it now.



The post about "time" made me think of this tune

Not too terribly science-y, but I stacked about 13 images I took (ISO a smidge too high) of the moon at 99.9% illumination (according to the internet, which knows everything):

Excellent

Did that in high school.
Cops suspected me.
I don't know why.

Danke.

This woman claims bacteria are able to talk to one another.

I'm not all that convinced of her claim, since all they seem to be able to do is sense the presence of other bacteria.

Still it's impressive they can even do that -- and modify their behavior based on how many of them there are.

Bonnie Bassler is the chairperson of the department of molecular biology at Princeton University, so she not just some wack job makin **** up. Very interesting video, Kolyo. Thanks for posting it.

Of course she isn't making it up!

What I meant was that I don't see how what she describes constitutes "bacteria talking to each other."
It looks to me like they can just about tell when each other are around and that's about it.

(Really what the title led me to believe was that bacterial colonies could be said to have some kind of intelligence, and I didn't see that in the video. It just looks like they're slightly more complicated automata than we thought.)

There are different ideas of what constitutes "intelligence" and "communication," I suppose. By the definitions I would use, there is definitely "communication" going on here (she refers to "talking in a chemical language," which is just a metaphor, I figure).

And, to me, information processing entails some kind of "intelligence" at some level. A computer may not be "intelligent," per se, but it can process info like a mofo. The "intelligence" comes from outside the computer, but, without it, there would be no information processing.