Science sharpens our minds to discern proper evidence from flimflam, to tell good experimental design from bad and to separate statistics from exaggerations. More than that, it reveals the beauty and intricacy woven into the very fabric of reality.
In this article, I suggest some easy and fun ways for your family to explore science together.
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.
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.
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• Quiz: Tessellate this!
Ansel Adams once called landscape photography “the supreme test of the photographer—and often the supreme disappointment.” Winter photos, with their compositional challenges, exposure headaches and spud-like textures, are even worse, and can leave you ready to chuck your camera into the nearest snowbank.
Popular television crime dramas, with their super-sleuth forensics teams and equipment so cutting-edge it borders on science fiction, have left us with an odd picture of what forensic pathologists do. In the name of plot convenience and ratings, show runners have given us worlds in which good-looking medical examiners obtain results almost instantly, deriving volumes of detailed information from minuscule, improbably preserved clues.
The phenomenon has become so pronounced that some decry a trend of unrealistic evidentiary expectations among jurors, dubbing it the “CSI Effect.” It’s time to set the record straight and find out…