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Newton's Ocean

http://newtonsocean.blogspot.com

science writing that celebrates the amazing world we live in and our scientific understanding of it

Added on: Jun 30th, 2008
Country: Canada
Language: English

Author: iidnoise
Listed in: Science
Tags: statistics biology physics mathematics science writing everyday science

Recent Posts

linear thinking

Posted on Friday October 9th, 2009 at 21:21 in mathematics

I feel I have always been taught just enough math to get by. Since I am by training a physicist and work in the area of medical imaging, that means that I have digested some amount of math, but I have come to realize that what I know mostly amounts t...
the strange world of mathematics

Posted on Thursday September 17th, 2009 at 18:30 in mathematics

Mathematicians use all sorts of evocative words and phrases to describe some of the fancy games they play with numbers and spatial constructs. A few posts back I quoted Penrose talking about fibre bundles, for example. This is supposed to bring to mi...
thoughts on the meaning of health "insurance"

Posted on Thursday August 27th, 2009 at 19:31 in medicine, economics, statistics

In the current health care debate going on in the US right now, one of the major issues has to do with individuals who can't get private health insurance because they have a costly existing condition. Similarly, individuals who develop a condition th...
lost in the equations

Posted on Monday August 17th, 2009 at 20:17 in books, mathematics, about me blog

Mathematics is my poor excuse for disappearing off the blogger radar screen for over three months. It started with Penrose's The Road to Reality which is pretty heavy on the math, even when accompanied by the author's rather splendid - and sometimes ...
giving a parabola its legs

Posted on Friday May 8th, 2009 at 19:07 in mathematics

I remember being taught in high school how to find the solutions to the equation: y(x) = ax2 + bx + c = 0. The parabola in the figure clearly crosses the horizontal x-axis twice and gives us two solutions for y=0 that are in fact:x = ( -b ± √(b2 ...
brake cables and drip coffee machines

Posted on Sunday April 26th, 2009 at 16:39 in everyday science

A while back, I had what might be called an epiphany of ignorance. In such a situation, what makes the sudden insight so mind-broadening is the realization that one has lived for so many years on this planet in complete ignorance of a simple aspect o...