The Walking Dead’s Bloody Mess [repost]

Originally posted on 27 March 2012, we are reposting this piece to make sure you are adequately prepared for The Walking Dead to return from hiatus on AMC Sunday, 10 February 2013 at 9PM (ET). We’ll have a third post in this series for you on Saturday. 

There are spoilers below. You’ve been warned. If you are even further behind watching The Walking Dead – Season 2 than me and can’t bear the thought of being spared the waste of those hours of your life, this is not for you.

I have recently started catching up on The Walking Dead – Season 2. At the end of Episode 1, Carl Grimes, son of our hero, Rick Grimes, is wounded in a hunting accident. Episode 2 is then devoted to keeping Carl from bleeding out. This means surgery and blood transfusions. Unfortunately, you can’t just stick blood from one person into someone else1. The immune system will attack a blood transfusion as a foreign invader if the donated blood is not compatible with the recipient. These reactions can be fatal. Keeping blood banks stocked is difficult in our modern world. Trying to find appropriate blood donors for a kid with internal bleeding in a zombie-filled, post-apocalyptic wasteland poses a particular challenge. Continue reading “The Walking Dead’s Bloody Mess [repost]”

The Art of Science: Caleb Charland Experiments with Photography

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Caleb Charland’s photos explore many aspects of physics and chemistry to stunning effect – all without the use of photoshop. He uses a number of elaborate but essentially old-school techniques, including scanning and multiple exposures, to create his amazing images. One of my favorites is this relatively simple photo, Helix with Matchsticks, a DNA-style double helix engulfed in flame. Besides the obvious connection of the flames and life-force, could it allude to the fiery conflicts over evolution?

Charland, who is based in Maine, has recently been working on creating “photos” without a camera – using a burning candle to expose, and drip on, photographic paper. Before that, he used images to demonstrate unusual power sources, like using an orange to run a light bulb for 14 hours. He described his work in 2010 as being “like 5th grade science mixed with sculpture. It’s about being curious and playful. There is still a lot to wonder about.” (source)

You can see many more images at  Charland’s website.

Last thoughts on football, for now

Some thoughts from the Super Bowl on loyalty to a feud, refereeing, logical fallacies, and how hard it is to write rules that cover every situation:

Continue reading “Last thoughts on football, for now”

Science Tourist: Cambridge Science Centre

Most of the science museums in Cambridge are like the Sedgwick museum I wrote about a few weeks ago: very interesting, and full of things to look at, but mainly historic and academic. They celebrate science as things that have been done before. What Cambridge doesn’t have is a more educational and hands-on museum about science. But not for long: on February 8, the Cambridge Science Centre will open a small exhibition space, filled with interactive displays, in a temporary location in the centre of Cambridge. It’s the birth of a new science museum.

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Ultimately, the Cambridge Science Centre hopes to find a larger, more permanent space, but for the next few years they’ve taken over the space of a former shop with levers, pulleys, buttons, sounds and lights.
Continue reading “Science Tourist: Cambridge Science Centre”

Empty World 1956: Shock and Awe in Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars

clarkeCitystarsArthur C. Clarke didn’t write write typical post-apocalyptic stories, but he sure liked to write about dying worlds, long-abandoned constructions, last cities, the end of humanity, and vast, empty spaces. In his stories, humans who face extinction, or who live as the last holdouts on a barren Earth, are not doomed. Instead, they’re about to have their consciousness expanded as they become tied into a grand galactic narrative. But unlike other galactic narratives like Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which treat the galaxy or universe as a gigantic platform on which to re-stage Edward Gibbon, Clarke keeps his universe unfailingly mysterious. Pursuing that mystery is humanity’s noblest aim – it is an essentially religious imperative that becomes a means of transcendence.

What that means for Clarke’s End of the World stories is that the theme of extinction or a dying Earth is an opportunity to encourage us to leave our petty terrestrial concerns behind and embrace our galactic manifest destiny. Continue reading “Empty World 1956: Shock and Awe in Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars”