31 August, 2008  Sunday Sensational Science  Tangled Banks
Ravenna Park, Seattle, WA  -Charles Darwin  I'm about to
annihilate you lot with science - The 113th Tangled Bank shall
be hosted here in just a few short days - so we're going to take
a leisurely walk along the banks, enjoy the glories of the
natural world, and explore to our hearts' content by way of
getting ourselves warmed up for the event.  The Tangled Bank is
ostensibly themed around "the science of the natural world," but
like so many other arbitrary divisions in science, the neat
categories break down upon further inspection. Physics,
chemistry, astronomy, and even mathematics aren't really
separate from biology and nature science. It's all
interconnected - inextricably tangled. That was the thing that
attracted me to science, so long ago: discovering that
everything is joined, and that any division we see is just an
arbitrary convenience, when you get right down to it.  This
leads to some entertaining juxtapositions. And it's the excuse I
us