Science Comedian

Brian Malow on Edison, Cell Phones, Vista…

August 2nd, 2008

An excerpt from “The Final Fron­tier?” pre­sen­ta­tion I gave at the Mar­ian Koshland Sci­ence Museum, in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., April 10, 2008.

Mostly about cell phones, but a bit about Thomas Edi­son and the light bulb, Las Vegas, Win­dows Vista, and cost-benefits analysis.

More to come…

Too Much Sodium

August 1st, 2008

My sis­ter told me recently that she won’t eat Chi­nese food any­more because it has too much sodium.

But isn’t that ridicu­lous? To sin­gle out one ele­ment from the Peri­odic Table? You’d have to have a pretty sen­si­tive palette:

“Oh, I don’t eat Mex­i­can food… too much mag­ne­sium!“

or

“Waiter, I’m sorry, I asked for the beryl­lium on the side…”

or

“Noth­ing ruins a ham and cheese sand­wich like a tad too much molybdenum.”

How many times have you said that?

Per­son­ally, I love Chi­nese food. I don’t care if there’s plu­to­nium in it… it might be a lit­tle hot, but I’m eat­ing it.

Why is there something instead of nothing?

July 25th, 2008

For all that astronomers and physi­cists, philoso­phers and poets have learned about the uni­verse since women and men first peered out of those tiny holes in our skulls, we are still no closer to answer­ing per­haps the most fun­da­men­tal cos­mo­log­i­cal ques­tion of all:

Why is there some­thing instead of nothing?

But I have my own theory:

It was a tax write-off.

It was more ben­e­fi­cial to have a uni­verse than not to have one. And it was designed to fail – which it has, if local con­di­tions can be taken as any indication.