Cortically Magnified

Did you know that the koala is the dumbest animal in the world? According to an Internet meme, koalas have really tiny brains because the eucalyptus leaves that they eat are toxic and poor in nutrition. That seems plausible to me, but you shouldn’t believe in Internet memes. Let’s turn to the most authoritative source of knowledge in the world, the Wikipedia, instead. This is what the Wikipedia has to say about koala’s brain:

This is a review of an interesting book:Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, about thought experiments in science.

Installed on the northern wall of the Monash University student centre (Melbourne) is a curious geometrical object. If you don’t pay close attention, you might think it’s just a decorative sculpture. But it is actually a functional sundial — conceived and constructed by the mathematician Carl Moppert in the 80’s. This design appears to be unique. I browsed through many photos on Instagram tagged with #sundial, and I couldn’t find another one that looks quite like it.

Fourier analysis says that complex patterns can be created by adding up a large number of patterns as simple as sinusoidal waves. To make the idea more concrete, I like to use the following analogy in teaching: Imagine that you lived in the early 19th century. If you wanted to listen to a symphony, the only way to make it happen was to hire a few dozen highly-trained musicians to perform it for you.

A recent paper shows that our vision is so sensitive to light that human subjects can detect the presence of one single photon shot into their retinas. While scientists have been trying to establish the lower limit of visual sensitivity for a very long time, and it is generally accepted that a small number of photons are sufficient for detection since the 40’s, new advances in quantum optics finally allow us to manipulate light at single photon precision, and it is the first time that direct evidence for single photon sensitivity is demonstrated in a psychological experiment.