For New Year’s Eve, a traditional song: Beaker’s Ode to Joy: BONUS: David Attenborough’s rendition of “What a Wonderful World” (HT Margo Howard and Ann Crichton-Harris): BONUS: “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”
Month: December 2011
A knighthood for Geim—he of frogs, magnets & pencils
The man [pictured here] who was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for using magnets to levitate a frog (a feat he accomplished together with a man who already had a knighthood) and then ten years later was awarded a Nobel Prize for having used scotch tape to tease graphene layers from a pencil, has now been […]
Oddies in air & sea: Hitchcock, pelicans, & flying rays
Some oddities from the air and the sea: A new study about what got Into Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” birds: “Mystery behind Hitchcock’s birds,” Sibel Bargu [pictured here], Mary W. Silver, Mark D. Ohman, Claudia R. Benitez-Nelson and David L. Garrison, Nature Geoscience, vol. 5, nos. 2–3, 2012. Published online 22 December 2011. “On 18 […]
Scrutinising the FACS: Cheek Raiser & Lid Compressor
The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) was first described by Paul Ekman and colleague Wallace V. Friesen in their article entitled Measuring Facial Movement for Environmental Psychology and Nonverbal Behavior1(1) fall 1976. The authors’ goal “… was to develop a comprehensive system which could distinguish all possible visually distinguishable facial movements.” The system presents a […]