Author: Lori Jia
[Update 10/18 8:30 am: Honestly, when I wrote this post last night, I could only access the first couple paragraphs of the op-ed in question. But now the link takes you to the full text. Could it be that my cries were heard?? Doubt it, but open access is always nice.]
In today’s Wall Street Journal there was a very provocative op-ed by ecologist Daniel Botkin. He argues that the evidence of potential harm from global warming is overblown. Here is what you can see for free…
Permit me a wee bit of nepotism. My brother Ben is on ABC News: World News tonight to celebrate National Dictionary Day. He talks about how language evolves in weird ways. It’s already on their web cast here .
Originally published October 16, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
If you live anywhere near my home town of Guilford, Connecticut, I’d be delighted if you could join me Thursday at 7:30 at the Guilford Free Library for a talk, “Will Global Warming Redraw the Map of Life?” (flyer pdf) I’ll be discussing extinction projections, assisted migration, and more.
Originally published October 16, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
It is an approximation of the locus of connectedness for the Julia sets of the family of functions f(z) = z^2 + lambda/(z^2) (rotated by pi/2). This is analogous to the standard Mandelbrot set (which applies to the family f(z) = z^2 + c), but holds additional fascination because for lambda values which are in the interior of one of the subdomains of the connectedness locus, the Julia set is a Universal Curve. To me this represents the structure unifying chaos (since Julia sets are chaotic) and order (since Universal Curves act as a sort of catalog of all planar curves).–Aaron
Continue reading “Science Tattoo Friday: Chaos And Order Battle For Aaron’s Back”
We do a pretty good job at appreciating the visible intricacies of nature: the antennae and legs and claws of a lobster, the geometrical order of the spots on a butterfly’s wings. But a lot of nature’s intricacies are hidden away inside single-celled creatures, such as the baker’s yeast that makes bread rise and beer ferment. At an audition for a David Attenborough documentary, a yeast cell guzzling away on sugar is bound to do a lousy job. (“Thanks, don’t call us; we’ll call you. Send in the King Cobra!”) But the intricacy of its metabolism is no less impressive. What’s more, scientists know how to manipulate yeast in ways they can’t with animals, and that power lets them set up experiments that yield clues to how that intricacy evolved.