The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
November 27th, 2009
THERE IS A story about two friends, who were classmates in high school, talking about their jobs. One of them became a statistician and was working on population trends. He showed a reprint to his former classmate. The reprint started, as usual, with the Gaussian distribution and the statistician explained to his former classmate the meaning of the symbols for the actual population, for the average population, and so on. His classmate was a bit incredulous and was not quite sure whether the statistician was pulling his leg. “How can you know that?” was his query. “And what is this symbol here?” “Oh,” said the statistician, “this is pi.” “What is that?” “The ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter.” “Well, now you are pushing your joke too far,” said the classmate, “surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle.”
Must read for physicists: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner.
Leave a commentHumans can outrun almost any animal
November 25th, 2009
Over long distances, that is. Quite astonishing, isn’t it?
Here is what the NY Times has to say in an interesting article titled “The Human Body Is Built for Distance“:
Leave a commentMost mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a 26.2-mile marathon.
Il pipistrello – Part 2
November 23rd, 2009
When I wrote that the bat was gone, that was not the whole truth. We found it in another corner and of course proceeded to take a couple more pictures.
The poor bat on the next day
Interesting trivia: According to the Wikipedia article on bats, there are about 1100 species of them, which represent about 20% of the classified mammal species.
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