Category Archives: Culture

Beyond the great beyond

Burial image
By Caustic13, via Wikimedia Commons

Anyone can make a bucket list, but why stop with stuff you want to accomplish while you’re alive? Death offers all kinds of opportunities that life simply cannot match: You can be transformed into a diamond, launched in fireworks, propelled in ammunition, or installed as a permanent part of a coral reef community — none of which I would recommend doing while still drawing breath.

Finally, for those who prefer their final resting place out on the final frontier, there’s the ultimate infrequent flyer plan ….

How Space Burial Works
To Star-stuff We Return: The Space Burial Quiz

Road trips: The esthetic of lostness

Road trips answer a deep human yearning to be free. For a time at least, they allow us to escape our quotidian cares and simply be. At the same time, they indulge our love affair with automobiles and our craving for novelty. As authors such as Jack Kerouac remind us, the road is where we discover our country, our fellow human beings—and ourselves.

How Road Trips Work

Armchair eschatology: The shifty business of True Polar Wander

True Polar Wander
True Polar Wander

Some say the world will end in fire; some say ice. Others prefer to trot out obscure scientific theories. Strange as it might seem, the pole shift hypothesis, in which the Earth’s crust and mantle (or outermost layers) move as one piece, did not spring from the fevered imaginations of the sandwich-board set, but from scientific circles, and it’s rooted solidly in physics.

Of course, that doesn’t mean Hollywood got it right …

Are the Earth’s poles shifting in 2012?

Fearful symmetry: the beauty and power of tessellations

Irregular pentagon tessellation
Irregular pentagon tessellation. Image by R.A. Nonenmacher

We study mathematics for its beauty, its elegance and its capacity to codify the patterns woven into the fabric of the universe. Within its figures and formulas, the secular perceive order and the religious catch distant echoes of the language of creation. Mathematics achieves the sublime; sometimes, as with tessellations, it rises to art.

How tessellations work

Related Article:
Quiz: Tessellate this!

Under pressure: Pascal’s many places in the sun

The Pascaline, an early digital calculator invented by Blaise Pascal
The Pascaline, an early digital calculator invented by Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was the quintessential Renaissance man. After all, how many people have a computer language, a religious argument, a triangle, a mathematical theorem, a law of physics and a unit of pressure named after them? Here was a man who could not only pose a philosophical wager, but also invent the system for calculating its odds and a digital calculator with which to tally the results.

It is unusual for a prodigy to stray so widely and successfully from their first area of excellence, but, as Pascal put it, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.”

What were the famous Blaise Pascal inventions?