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Science Luminary Martin Gardner Dead at 95
From James Randi's blog comes word that science writer Martin Gardner has died at the age of 95. I never met Gardner, but one of his books (Entertaining Science Experiments With Everyday Objects) has been a favorite of mine since I was 6 or 7 years old; I didn't realize until just now quite how many books he authored.
Let me put in a cheer for the "Alice in Wonderland" he annotated.
Phil Plait has a writeup as well.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I agree...his Scientific American articles brought out all the magic in mathematics.
Gardner had a character called Dr. Matrix, an eccentric mathematician (perhaps not unlike the real life Paul Erdos, or Gardner himself) who popped up periodically in his columns. One I remember was Gardner interviewing Dr. Matrix in prison; seems the doc was busted for slicing twenty dollar bills into 20 strips, and "rearranging" them into modified bills composed of 19 strips each. Unfortunately, after that charming episode was published in Scientific American several people were similarly busted for copyright behavior... I suspect Mr. Gardner was amused rather than horrified by this turn of events.
Organic farming in and of itself isn't pseudoscience, but sometimes the claims made about it fall into that realm. Examples being that the products of organic farming are necessarily healthier for you, or better for the environment, or conversely, that the use of pesticides and genetic modification are necessarily detrimental. They can be or not be, and such claims have to be analyzed on an individual basis. But there does exist a large segment of the population that adheres to the naturalistic fallacy that what is "natural" is better for you than what isn't, despite straightforward counter-examples (all-natural poisonous mushrooms and berries), and despite the fact that "natural" in this context is not well-defined (is a domesticated food crop that has been genetically modified by hundreds of years of selective agricultural breeding considered "natural?").
Hey, Cliff Stoll! I remember thoroughly enjoying The Cukoo's Egg.
For those who are unfamiliar with it, it's his late 80's account of tracking down a spy who had gained root access to Lawrence Berkeley.
Here are some links (provided to you via Arts and Letters Daily):
The Associated Press
Sci Am
Discover
James Randy
Roger Kimball
The Man's last essay. It's titeled Oprah Winfrey: Bright (but Gullible) Billionaire.