Interactive Periodic Table

Another in my loose series of great science-imagery websites: visit http://periodictable.com/ for an illustrated, interactive Periodic Table of the Elements. Hover your mouse over any element for a picture and basic facts or click for more information and pictures. It’s more fun than it sounds, since the graphics are great and all of the information is solid but some of it is quirky. Ages: 9 – 90.

Geeks will appreciate the fact that the website’s author, Theodore Gray, is responsible for the user interface of Mathematica. He has an interesting background essay to the Periodic Table site here; as someone said, it is inspirational in a sobering kind of way.

More netizen science

Encyclopedia of Life

One of my first posts to this blog mentioned Encyclopedia of Life, a major international collaborative effort to document the living world around us. Its list of sponsors and supporters starts at the highest possible levels (Smithsonian Institution)  and goes all the way down to amateurs like myself, contributing by uploading photographs of my local wildlife.

Dragonfly perched on twig
Local wildlife: Australasian Slimwing, Lathrecista asiatica festa

There is only one way for an ordinary person to contribute images, i.e. the EOL Flickr group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life/. The rules for the group basically say that images need a creative commons license allowing third parties to use them free of copyright and a ‘machine tag’ which will enable automated harvesting of images from the group to EOL itself.

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The Magic of Reality

Book cover imageRichard Dawkins: The Magic of Reality – how we know what’s really true
Illustrated by Dave McKean
Bantam, 2011.

Richard Dawkins made himelf famous decades ago with The Selfish Gene (1976) and famous all over over again with The God Delusion (2006), a merciless attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular. Between those two he wrote a string of popular science books, mostly about evolution but including Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) which was a reply to those who said his hard-line scientific approach took all the pleasure and poetry out of life. He argued in that book that there was as much pleasure and as much magic in science as in art or mythology, with the significant bonus that science was really true.

The Magic of Reality is a combination of The God Delusion and Unweaving the Rainbow, but for younger readers. The first and last chapters are ‘What is reality? What is magic?’ and ‘What is a miracle?’ Reality, he says, is what we can perceive with our five senses, aided if necessary by extensions such as telescopes and microscopes. Magic, he says, is slipperier but can be divided into ‘stage magic’, which tricks people into believing things which didn’t actually occur, ‘poetic magic’, the feel-good magic of a starry night or great painting, and ‘supernatural magic’, the magic of fairy stories and J K Rowling, which he rejects outright, saying, “we all know this kind of magic is just fiction and doesn’t happen in reality.”

The outer chapters bracket Dawkins’ examination of the standard Big Questions – the origins of animal life (including ourselves) and the universe – and the causes of such natural phenomena as rainbows and earthquakes. Each of them begins with myths ‘explaining’ the answers, which the author counters with the scientific answer. The myths come from people all around the world – Maori, Japanese, African, American Indians, Jews … yes, Judaism and Christianity are in there on an equal footing. The science, in reply, is genuine but lucid and nontechnical.

His next-to-last chapter, structured the same way, is ‘Why do bad things happen?’ and he discusses demons, angels and original sin before explaining chance and evolutionary necessity: ‘bad things’ happen because ‘things’ happen, and life is a constant struggle for survival which some of us, inevitably, lose. That leads naturally into his discussion of miracles. He argues, of course, that the universe doesn’t care about fairness or mercy and that miracles don’t exist, saying that anything that looks like a miracle is a natural event which we can’t yet explain but should work on understanding, or something that didn’t really happen in the way people thought, i.e. the observers were mistaken, or reports were exaggerated.

Summarised as quickly as this, The Magic of Reality is transparently an attack on religion and celebration of science – on this side, science; on that side, superstition; which side are you on? That is, indeed, what the book does but the young reader is unlikely to be fully conscious of it because my summary doesn’t accurately reflect the space given to the issues in the book. In reality, those first and last chapters add up to barely 40 pages with 220 between them.

In its favour, the writing is lively and direct, the information is accurate and brilliantly presented and the illustrations are colourfully inventive. But The Magic of Reality left me slightly uneasy.

Why? Because of a gap which Dawkins doesn’t acknowledge and (for all I know) may not even be aware of: art, mystery, magic and religion do have functions which do not conflict with the functions or discoveries of science and yet cannot be addressed by science. If we teach our children to throw them out, we impoverish our civilisation. Morality and ethics? Science says nothing, but hints that Darwinian survivalism is the only rational rule. Art? Science says nothing but seems to suspect that it is a delusion or a mating ritual. And so on.

Science is so strictly focused on objective observational evidence that it is deliberately blind to anything that happens behind the eyes and between the ears of every one of us. Love and hate, generosity and compassion, ambition and lust, joy and despair – science doesn’t want to know about them. But they are intrinsic to our make-up and if we don’t somehow learn about them we have no way of understanding them.

I find myself applauding the book for its many good points but hoping that readers balance their diet. The Magic of Reality is food for the growing brain, but we do need food for the heart and (dare I say it) the spirit as well.

Grab bag: Just for (slightly geeky) fun

The web brings me lots of cute and/or entertaining snippets which are worth sharing but don’t really deserve a whole page to themselves. Here’s a selection of recent ‘grabs’, with thanks to those who pointed them out to me.

Tata Develops Car That Can Run On Air

A car that runs on air sounds like an interesting idea that’s too good to be true. I followed it up to the extent of finding more technical details, here, and it is, in fact, both.

Continue reading “Grab bag: Just for (slightly geeky) fun”

Aah! not Eeek!

The day after a post about a tiny, cute (if doughty) spider may be a good time to post this (oldish) book review. I never had any dislike or unreasonable fear of spiders myself but I know people who do … 

Lynne Kelly: Spiders – Learning to Love Them

book cover image
It’s all right, the spider is far smaller than this image.

Lynne Kelly suffered horribly from arachnophobia so she set out to cure her terror by familiarising herself with its cause. From watching small spiders at safe distances, she worked up to letting a tarantula walk on her hand. This book details her healing – and learning – process.

She is now a confirmed arachnophile and her book is full of affectionate observations of the spiders in her Melbourne garden, with their bizarre hunting and mating habits, complemented by a generous amount of scientific detail. It is probably more than you ever wanted to know about spiders, but she is a science writer so it is all accurate, clearly written and well illustrated.

Allen & Unwin, $29.95, Feb 2009

Kelly’s latest project is The Spiderblogger. I did call her a ‘confirmed arachnophile’, didn’t I?

[Update, Jan 2022: her blog has been discontinued.]