This week, BBC Radio 4 launched a really excellent six-week series on the history of modern medicine, beginning with the Greeks. Today’s episode was about Andreas Vesalius, the 16th Century Belgian doctor who single-handedly gave birth to modern anatomy (ewwww…bad mental image). He had a definite advantage over his predecessors, in that he got to […]
Category Archives: science
I Moon You — Twice!
January 3, 2007 – 5:12 pm
The last 20 full moons, from May, 2005 until December, 2006. APoD points to this animation of the sequence, but I think it’s a little clumsy, so I made my own. I can do that, can’t I? Only, my .gif animation dingus crapped out and I had to download…look, are we here to […]
The hundredth macaca
December 13, 2006 – 5:53 pm
Raising awareness. Has there ever been an activity more utterly fucking pointless? If you want to do something to fix, say, breast cancer, you could become a doctor or a biochemist or something. You could give money to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Or, you know, ask your mom if she’s had a breast exam […]
Cool.
December 10, 2006 – 7:58 am
I’m no fan of NASA’s flying space bus, but last night’s after hours takeoff was impossibly cool. The launching pad was once a plain concrete slab. The heat of a launch is so intense, the cement was always ruined and had to be broken up and replaced each time. So some bright spark came up […]
A brief astronomically-based political affiliation test
December 4, 2006 – 6:24 pm
Below is one of the most beautiful and famous images in astronomy. It was taken by the Hubble Telescope. It depicts the region called Messier 16 in the contellation Serpens, one spiral arm over from us in the Milky Way galaxy. It’s an open, luminous cluster of hot young stars. Those huge spires of interstellar […]
S. Weasel 