Hello again science fans!   科学迷们，大家好！(7 out of 100 Bay Area residents speak Chinese at home.)

ENVIRONMENT

The photo of a Bali beach covered in plastic waste (photo above) is in stark contrast to my mind’s eye image of the renowned Indonesian vacation paradise. If you watch TV with advertisements, you’ve probably seen colorless squashed plastic containers arise into pristine pastel plastic receptacles in an ad from America’s Plastic Makers. It is disingenuous hype f

Bob Siederer
27 May 2024

Hello again Science Fans! It is a 3-day holiday weekend for most of us, so enjoy the unofficial beginning of summer. The astronomical start of summer, the summer solstice, occurs on Thursday, June 20 this year. If you want to know more about the solstice, check out this article from the Farmers’ Almanac.

Archeology

Way back in 1930, the

Herb Masters
It's 5.20.24 with the SciSchmooze

Greetings Friends of Science and Reason,

I have recently been noticing a lot of articles about how our world seems to be working now that we have really been tampering with it for the last few hundred years. One of the most compelling is Human Footprint | Top Predator | Episode 2 | PBS from PBS. (If you only open one link from this week’s missive I hope you can watch the

Herb Masters
May 13 2024

Hello to the Children of Mothers, who Support and Love Science,

Let’s get this off and running as many mothers would do! I hope that even if you didn’t celebrate Mother’s Day you at least reflected a bit on how essential mothers have been throughout history to science. For instance…

Celebrating Some Mothers of Science and Engineering

Hello again science fans! Kumusta muli mga tagahanga ng agham! [Three out of every 100 people in the Bay Area speak Tagalog/Filipino at home.]

BIOLOGY / ETHOLOGY

In 1967, Roger Payne and Scott McVay discovered that sounds made by male humpback whales were complex arrangements that lasted as long as 30 minutes before being repeated. Multiple males even sang in unison. From year to year some ‘phrases’ were replaced by new ones. ¿Language? More recently we’ve learned that brain anatomy suggests whales could be capable of language. Also, t

Bob Siederer
29 April 2024

Hello again Science fans!

If you are one of those people who, like me, is interested in how things work, you may enjoy this video. It is about Olympic Curling Stones, how they are made, and why they cost so much. The process is fascinating. The granite only comes from one place on earth, Ailsa Craig off the Scotish coast. Two types of granite are used in each stone.

Curling can only be described as an odd sport. It is sort of like shuffleb

herb masters
24.4.22 SciSchmooze

Greetings Science Reasoning Readers,

These are amazing times to be alive. Humans have done fairly well for the last 300,000, or so, years. It seems that as we have become more numerous we have had to increase our resourcefulness and understanding of how things work. Many amazing things have been invented and discovered. Now after a few hundred years of 

4.15.2024 another taxing day
Herb Masters

Hello Science Fans and Acceptors,

I hope everyone had a chance to see the last week’s eclipse in one form or another. I was fortunate enough to see it with a few thousand people in Torreon, Mexico. They were in the park that surrounds the Planetarium in Torreon. It was great to experience it with a bunch of astronomy loving high schoolers who had been working for months with staff to collaborate with the 

Bob Siederer
8 April 2024

Hello again Science fans!

Are you ready for the big eclipse? It may be my imagination, but I don’t think there was this much press and excitement fo

Bob Siederer
March 31 2024

Hello again Science Fans! I’m filling in for David this week (and next). For those of you who celebrate, Happy Easter!

More about Time

In my February 25 SciSchmooze, I went into a discussion about time. There was one error (that I know of) in that discussion where I said how there was a two week difference between the start of Daylight Savings Time here in the US versus Europe, with them making the change later than us. The difference is actually three weeks, with Europe changing to Daylight time early this morning. They will return to st