The contrast sensitivity function shows how our sensitivity to contrasts is affected by spatial frequency. You can test it using gratings of alternating light and darker shade. Ian Goodfellow has this neat observation: It’s a graph that makes itself! The image is the raw data, and by interacting with your visual system, you perceive a […]

I know this blog has been dormant for a while…thought I’d get back in business with a few thoughts on today’s post over at In The Pipeline about a review in the journal Angewandte Chemie. The review and the post at In the Pipeline discuss the current state (and possible future) of computer algorithms that […]

One of the most incisive arguments I’ve ever heard about climate change came from Elon Musk, the guy who founded Tesla Motors. He started out with a simple inescapable fact: the supply of fossil fuels is very limited and sooner or later we will need to find another source of energy, because at the rate […]

California governor Jerry Brown recently signed into law a bill that eliminates religious or philosophical exemptions for childhood vaccines. Under the new law, parents may only opt out of vaccinating their child if a doctor signs off on a medical exemption. The new law was controversial for a while, especially among California’s small but vocal […]

Nearly everyone likes fireworks, with the exception of cats. (Cats hate them with a fiery passion like the cuddly little haters they are.) Something about the bright colors against a black sky appeals to our imagination. For me as a chemistry-type person, I love fireworks shows for an additional reason — because fireworks are a […]

For years now, many environmentalists and consumer advocates have called on the government to ban a chemical called bisphenol A or BPA. It’s found in various plastics like polycarbonate and the epoxy resins that line the inside of tin cans, and so it leaches into various foods (especially canned foods) at low concentrations. The FDA and […]

In the early 1770s London doctor Percival Pott noticed something strange about the chimneysweeps in his town: an unusually high percentage of them had a rare form of cancer. Most chimneysweeps at that time were boys under the age of fifteen because kids were better at squeezing into narrow chimneys. Orphans and street kids, most […]

Back in the 1940s before the polio vaccine was invented, the disease caused a lot of anxiety among parents of small children. How could you reduce your child’s risk of contracting this nasty illness? Some misguided public health experts apparently recommended avoiding ice cream, thanks to a study that showed a correlation between ice cream […]

You can live to be a hundred, if you give up everything that makes you want to live to be a hundred. -Woody Allen Last year I wrote about an author/blogger called The Food Babe who boasts a following of three million or more. She’s on a mission, she says, to find out what’s really in […]