Month: June 2013
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It’s a 24-hour dance…er, science party!
Tomorrow, I’ll be spending an hour talking about my work with CosmoAcademy: the online classes offered through CosmoQuest. However, my colleagues Pamela Gay (AKA StarStryder) and Nicole Gugliucchi (AKA the Noisy Astronomer) will be hosting an entire 24 hour fundraising hangout! Please check in tomorrow, watch the conversations, and please please donate if you can.…
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The priors don’t lie: all the ladies love Bayesian statistics
Statistics is rarely sexy, sometimes satisfying, occasionally misused, but useful enough that more people should know how to use it than do. (Insert obvious condom joke here.) However, a particular method in statistics got additional attention last fall during the United States national elections: Bayesian inference. I wrote two pieces last week, drawing from a…
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A century of the Bohr atom
Many of us are familiar with the Bohr atom: a simple model with a nucleus and planet-like electrons orbiting in circular paths. It’s a useful picture, even though it’s not complete. Bohr proposed it in 1913, but it took about ten more years for physicists to work out why it worked — and to refine…
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On the multiverse, metaphysics, and meaning
I don’t spent a lot of time thinking about the multiverse: the possible existence of regions of the cosmos that have never been connected to ours at any time, and may never be in the future. That’s because those parallel pocket universes aren’t directly detectable, and may never be even indirectly detectable, putting them into…