Get that tune out of your head→

Richard Grey, Science Correspondent, The Telegraph: ​

They are the songs you cannot get out of your head. Now scientists may have found a way to help anyone plagued by those annoying tunes that lodge themselves inside our heads and repeat on an endless loop.
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​Researchers claim the best way to stopping the phenomenon, sometimes known as earworms – where snippets of a catchy song inexplicably play like a broken record in your brain – is to solve some tricky anagrams.
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​This can force the intrusive music out of your working memory, they say, allowing it to be replaced with other more amenable thoughts.
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​But they also warn not to try anything too difficult as those irritating melodies may wiggle their way back into your consciousness.
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​For those unwilling to carry around a book of anagrams, a good novel may also do the trick.

Recently the 1812 Overture took over my mind. I have no idea how it got there, all I know is that for the rest of the day I had the last five minutes (cannons and all) playing on a constant loop in my head while I was trying to work. If only I had known that a quick game of scrabble would have taken care of it. ​

How Pixar Used Moore's Law to Predict the Future→

Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith in Wired: 

We know what Moore’s Law is and how it works, but not many people reflect on why it exists. Yes, there are often physical barriers to innovation. But there’s no imminent physical barrier to the realization of a bit: A bit is merely presence or absence of something, say a voltage, which means it can get exponentially smaller. So with no physical limitation, Moore’s Law reflects the top rate at which humans can innovate. If we could proceed faster, we would.

There are no shortcuts at the edge of discovery and invention. ​

Second Sleep

"Numerous other studies have shown that splitting sleep into two roughly equal halves is something that our bodies will do if we give them a chance. In places of the world where there isn't artificial light -- and all the things that go with it, like computers, movies, and bad reality TV shows -- people still sleep this way. In the mid-1960s, anthropologists studying the Tiv culture in central Nigeria found that group members not only practiced segmented sleep, but also used roughly the same terms of first sleep and second sleep. ... [Yet] almost two decades after Wehr's study was published in a medical journal, many sleep researchers -- not to mention your average physician -- have never heard of it. When patients complain about waking up at roughly the same time in the middle of the night, many physicians will reach for a pen and write a prescription for a sleeping pill, not realizing that they are medicating a condition that was considered normal for thousands of years. Patients, meanwhile, see waking up as a sign that something is wrong."  

I've been obsessed with sleep since a young age, mostly because I can't remember when was the last time I got what felt like a restful, solid night of good sleep. ​

Recently I read Dreamland by David K. Randall and ran into this passage. This is an experience I can relate to. I often joke that I don't go to sleep but that instead I take two or three naps a night with reading intermissions. ​

Nine Decades of Science in The New Yorker: Looking Back to Look Ahead→

The New Yorker has been writing about science and technology for almost a century. In one of the magazine’s earliest science articles, “Invention Factory,” from 1931, the reporter Malcolm Ross visits Bell Telephone Laboratories, which occupies a ten-story building on the Hudson, at West and Bank Streets in the West Village. Ross tours the building, eager to see the research that, “depression or not,” the telephone company is funding to the tune of nineteen million dollars a year. On the roof, to test its durability, telephone equipment is being prematurely aged in the wind and rain; inside, technicians are working to find the combination of metals that will most efficiently carry a signal. In one lab, hundreds of researchers have been working to create an automated switchboard; in another, a hushed “sanctum,” mathematicians are exploring the relationship between population density and what we’d now call bandwidth. For the past year, Ross writes, “two airplanes have been flying around New Jersey, by day and by night, in the worst weather they can find,” so that Bell Labs’s scientists can improve the radio systems that connect airports to pilots; related technologies are being developed for Hollywood, to help clean up “the buzzing noise which is continually present in all talkies.” Ross speaks to one scientist about the prospects for 3-D cinema but has sad news to report: it’s unlikely that “movie heroines will soon appear on the screen with the rounded effect of your Uncle Stephen’s stereopticon collection of stage beauties.” But there’s better news in the ultraviolet photomicroscope lab, where a microscope Bell commissioned to look at metals is now being used to peer at chromosomes.

The New Yorker has launched NewYorker.com/tech and plans to feature current coverage and articles from the archives, which as the excerpt above shows goes back a long time (and proves the more things advance the more the process of progress is the same.) ​

I am curious to see how the new content will be received given the reaction by some tech writers to a recent post about Apple. ​

The Science of Life, Love and The Sky

Today we conclude our visit through my favorite PBS Digital Studio offerings, in honor of the one-year anniversary of PBS Idea Channel, with a look at the recently launched It's Okay To Be Smart based on the great blog of the same name. Through the witty episodes we'll learn about the Auroras, why the sky is blue, and lastly, the odds of finding life and love. ​

Space might seem like an empty place, but the area surrounding Earth is constantly being bombarded by waves of charged particles released by the Sun: The solar wind. Luckily, thanks to Earth's swirling, molten core (and the magnetic field it provides), we are protected from this planet-sterilizing onslaught like an invisible force field.

All that science has a beautiful side effect: It makes the auroras! The Northern and Southern lights are the result of the solar wind and its dance with Earth's magnetic field and polar atmosphere. It's Earth's own cosmic light show!

References for this episode.

Why is the sky blue? It's a question that you'd think kids have been asking for thousands of years, but it might not be that old at all. The ancient Greek poet Homer never used a word for blue in The Odyssey or The Iliad, because blue is one of the last colors that cultures pick out a word for.

In this episode, I'll tell you not only why the sky is blue, but why it's red at sunset. It turns out, those colors are all part of the same sunbeam. And when you're looking at a blue sky, you could be sharing a special moment with someone thousands of miles away. Next time a kid (or the kid inside you) wants to know why the sky is blue, you'll have science to back you up!

(We know that the Earth turns the wrong direction in the animation, sorry about that. Something weird happened when we were programming the animation and it got reversed. Or maybe time travel!)

References for this episode.

Love is a complicated combination of brain chemicals and behavior that scientists are only just beginning to figure out. And it's remarkable that in every society that we have looked at on Earth, romantic love exists. So if love is so universal, and there are 7 billion other people out there looking for it, why can it seem like it's so hard to find?

In this episode, we'll look at what we can learn about the search for love from the search for extraterrestrial life. We'll start with Enrico Fermi's paradox of why we haven't been contacted by any extraterrestrials yet, and then at Frank Drake's equation to estimate the number of civilizations that might exist in our galaxy (updated with current numbers). Finally, we'll meet a young lady named Ann and see if we can calculate how many special someones there might be out there for her. It's a cosmic love story!

References for this episode.

Previously on It's Okay To Be Smart.