Rosio Pavoris

Last month is here.
Impressive growth in traffic to my blog, and it seems to be pretty steady. 1.23 GB is more than or almost as much as all previous traffic combined, depending on whether you trust Awstats or whatever that other software is more.
Most blogs seem to be getting more traffic, in fact. Though Dotts seems to have forgotten about his. Twat. O\__/O

As for the other subdomains, Muffins gained a few players, and SWBHG is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Everything else is quiet, the way we like it.

Anyway. Onwards to next month.

I said I was going to do this, so I am~

The double-slit experiment is a classic experiment, first done in 1801 by the English Thomas Young, who was looking to solve the issue of whether light is particles or waves once and for all. Originally it was done with light, but it can be done with electrons or protons or neutrons or whatever as well.
First, let’s look at our set-up. It’s a box.

If we’re dealing with light, it’s a simple box out of which no light can escape. If we’re dealing with electrons, it’s a conductive plate over which the electrons can travel.
The important part is that O is the source of light or electricity or whatever we’re dealing with, and S1 and S2 are slits or openings in a central wall through which lights or electrons can travel. The back (green, here) is a detector type plate, which registers when light or electrons hit it.

Let’s think about what behavior we should expect, here.
If we’re dealing with particles, we can expect that O would fire a particle in a random direction, and if it happens to be aimed at a slit, it will perhaps bounce off the slit and hit the detector plate behind it. There will always be just one impact on the detector plate at a time.

You can see the area we’d expect the most particles to land in that picture there.
If we count the number of particles that hit a certain position and plot it on a graph, we get something similar to the one on the right. P₁ would be the particles that went through S1, and P₂ would be the ones that went through S2.
Of course, we can’t really know, when we look at a place where an electron hit, which slit it went through, so the actual graph will be the sum of those graphs, with two obvious peaks.
(I stole the graph picture from a scan of a Physics textbook someone put online, since I don’t really have the software to plot this sort of thing. This explains why it’s shoddy-looking.)

Now, what if it’s a wave? Well, it’d look a bit more complicated.

As you can see, a new wave would be started at each slit simultaneously, and this leads to a complicated-looking interference pattern, with light hitting the detector plate continuously.
The result looks something like the graph on the right. P₁₂ is the sum of two wave patterns. In some places the waves cancel each other out, in others they amplify each other, as you’ve no doubt seen in highschool Physics or Mathematics.
It’s a beautiful interference pattern.

It’s quite meaningless to talk about which slit every thing that was detected came through, since we aren’t dealing with discrete chunks.

Now, if we actually perform the double-slit experiment, the pattern we get on the detector looks something like this:

Obviously a wave interference pattern. Problem solved, then, right? Light is a wave!
Well, no, not quite.

See, we know light exists as particles, since we know about photons through things like the photoelectric effect. And electrons make the same pattern, and we know those are particles too. So why does it do this?

Another experiment we could try is to do this with electrons, but this time, we’re going to keep track of which hole each electron went through. We could do this by, for example, shining a really bright light in the first chamber, and looking at the slits from the other side. If the light in one slit dims for a bit, we know an electron has passed through, since it blocked out the light when it passed.

Someone did an experiment similar to this, and found something very interesting: when we watch the electrons like this, they generate a pattern like in graph 1.
If we keep track of which slit the electrons pass through, they behave like particles. If we don’t, they behave like waves.

And this isn’t just true when we use this particular set-up, in case you’re concerned that since light is so unusual itself, it may have done something weird to the electrons. If we observe the path of the electron in any way, it stops behaving like a wave, and acts like a normal particle.

So why does it do this?

I’m not actually sure.
The Copenhagen interpretation (remember Heisenberg and Bohr?) posits the existence of probability waves, essentially meaning that until the position of a particle is determined, it essentially exists in all places at once, just with a higher probability in some areas.
So unless someone actually determines which slit the particle goes through, it essentially goes through both slits at once, which creates this wave-like interference pattern.

It’s all very interesting, but unfortunately it also means Physics is incredibly counter-intuitive and hard to approach without explicitly using mathematics, which makes the whole field a bit inaccessible to the common man.

I finished The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman the other night. It’s pretty short (about 170 pages), being just a collection of seven lectures by Feynman on (surprisingly) the character of physical law.
The only other thing I’ve read by Feynman was The Meaning of It All, which is also a collection of lectures. I wonder if he wrote “proper” books.

Either way, it’s a very interesting read. These lectures took place in 1965, and no doubt some fundamental advances have been made since then (if you want to call string theory an advance, all of that only started in the late ’60s), but it’s general enough that it’s still a relevant and fascinating work.

Feynman talks about a number of things, starting, in the first lecture, with the law of gravitation as an example, going over Kepler, Brahe, Newton, and eventually Einstein, to demonstrate how the law was derived and refined further and further.

In the second lecture, he talks about the relationship between mathematics and physics, noting that physics is a very mathematical field, but that there are some important difference between doing physics and doing mathematics. In mathematics, you derive tons of conclusions from a fixed set of axioms, and in physics, we have a vast amount of conclusions, but nothing to unify it to come up with the central model from which they flow. In Feynman’s own words, we’re doing physics in the way the Babylonians did mathematics, rather than in the way the Greeks did it.

The next few lectures describe some interesting properties which seem to hold across the various laws of physics, including various principles of conservation, various types of symmetry (which, as he explains, is vital to being to derive new laws, through inconsistencies in known ones), and the principle of causality and the arrow of time.

In the sixth lecture, he gets into the basics of quantum mechanics. Probability and uncertainty, the way light (and electrons) behaves variously like particles or like waves (he goes into some detail regarding the double-slit experiment, which I think I’ll go into in a future post; every single popular science work on physics written in the past seventy or so years has explained it, but it’s an interesting and important experiment), &c.

And in the final lecture, he explains how physicists usually go about finding new laws, and more importantly, how he himself does it. It’s worth remembering that Feynman was perhaps the most influential physicist of the second half of the 20th century (and by second half, I mean part of the first half as well).

To sum up, The Character of Physical Law is a fascinating read, even if it shouldn’t really tell you anything new. If anyone but Feynman had written it, it would’ve sucked, but he makes it work.
Also, he spelled “connection” “connexion”, which made me happy.

Next up is Six Easy Pieces, also by Feynman. Apparently it’s supposed to cover much of the same ground, and it certainly seems to have the same preface by Paul Davies, but it looks a bit more advanced.

You remember this post, yes? Well, it’s not just Christians who are begging to be excised from the gene pool.

Dr Abdul Majid Katme, head of the Islamic Medical Association, is telling Muslims that almost all vaccines contain products derived from animal and human tissue, which make them “haram”, or unlawful for Muslims to take.

I don’t have to point out why this isn’t just an incredibly stupid thing to do, but also a very reckless and antisocial one, I assume?
I don’t feel sorry in the slightest for the people who are stupid enough to follow this twit’s advice (at least, not for those in the UK, where you have to try pretty hard not to know about why vaccination matters), but it’s just painful that these people will also force their decisions on their children, and, indirectly, on the people around them.

Fundamentalist religion really does just want to return to the Dark Ages, disease and all.

(Via Phil. The fact that I posted about Muslims twice in the same day is purely coincidental, but it’s worth remembering Christians aren’t the only backward theocrats out there.)

Remember when McCain was the sane voice of the GOP? Yeah, neither do I.

Obviously you could make a similar video for every single person running for president in ‘08, and people should. The American political system is rotten, and people like John McCain are both the symptom and the cause.

As you may or may not have heard (certainly a lot of newspapers seem not to have heard about it), the Belgian government called on the various Muslim communities here to make a decision as to whether or not meat from animals slaughtered under sedation is considered halal.
It used to be such that some communities sedated, some didn’t. Naturally, the consensus we were aiming for was sedation.
The EU already outlaws slaughtering animals without sedation, but it makes an exception for “religious practices”. Isn’t that brilliant?

And now they’ve come to a consensus, and guess what it is? Yes, they’re now never going to sedate, except for chickens, because apparently there’s “scientific evidence” that chickens never die from electric sedation and cows and whatnot do, which is bullshit.

The spokesperson they paraded on the various news broadcasts also claimed that if you cut the main arteries in an animal’s neck, it cuts off pain transmission to the brain as well, since apparently that goes through the arteries now. The same guy later claimed that, no, in fact it was the sudden drop in blood pressure.
Apparently there’s “some debate”. Which is funny, since the debate only seems to exist within religious communities.

When confronted with the fact that some Muslim countries actually consider slaughter under sedation to be halal as well, aforementioned spokeperson sputtered that there was no global consensus, but the Belgian Muslim community was very clear on the matter.
The journalist pointed out that religious communities abroad are often more conservative than religious communities at home, which needed saying, even if most wouldn’t have said it under the guise of “objective” reporting. Bloodthirsty twats.

(Speaking of objective reporting, it seems the various news programs are united in decrying this as barbaric. Siegfried Bracke had Mr. Spokesperson on an interview type show and literally the first thing he said to him (after hallu) was “Dit lijkt veel op barbarij”.)

And obviously, the government is going to leave it at this. Dedecker tried to get halal slaughter outlawed entirely, but he was shot down on grounds of separation of church and state.
Because clearly separation of church and state means that the religious get to ignore laws if they don’t like them.

(Oh, and the Jewish community is siding with the Muslims for their own kosher things. I didn’t even know we had a Jewish community.)

And a lot less boring when you’re dealing with visualisations rather than highschool textbook descriptions.

“If I were an enzyme I would be DNA helicase so I could unzip your genes.” Ho ho.

(Via Larry Moran. Y’know what? Just read his blog, so I don’t have to repost almost everything he posts, because it really is a very good blog. Go on, read it.)

Welcome to another installment of Weird Creatures. It may seem like cheating to talk about an Australian animal (the only normal animal in Australia is probably the dingo), but at least it’s one that, on the face of it, doesn’t look that weird: the koala!

The koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) is, as you undoubtedly know, an arboreal marsupial herbivore native to Australia (where it sits in roughly the same niche as the sloth does in South America). They’re near-threatened (they were hunted to near extinction in the early 20th century, but have bounced back quite violently), and it’s illegal to keep them as pets (you probably wouldn’t want to anyway, since they’re notoriously ill-tempered). There’s the obvious bit of trivia everybody thinks they’re clever for knowing: they aren’t bears. Obv.
The name “koala” is derived from the Dharuk “gula”. There’s a popular story that the name means “no drink”, because they drink very little water, but I haven’t found any source to substantiate this.
(Fun fact: another aboriginal name for the koala is “bangaroo”. How pathetic is this?)

They do indeed drink very little water, because their diet consists mainly of eucalyptus leaves (the age of which they seem to be able to tell with remarkable accuracy), which contain a relatively large amount of water.
They’re also low in protein and high in indigestible materials, though, so they spend most of their day sleeping (19 hours of it), and most of the remaining time eating (3 hours; they consume about half a kilogram of leaves in a day). The remaining two hours are presumably spent posing for pictures with tourists (or biting their fingers off).

Eucalyptus leaves, incidentally, are also poisonous to most animals. Add all this up, and it becomes hard to see why the koala would eat it. One benefit, of course, is that few other animals would, so there was a niche to fill. And their diet turns their flesh rather poisonous, so few predators would eat koalas.

Because eucalyptus leaves are so hard to digest, koalas have an unusually large hind gut, to extract as many nutrients as they possibly can. Most of the digestion happens through bacterial fermentation.
These symbiotic bacteria aren’t passed on to their lolis during their development in the uterus or the pouch (marsupial, remember), so the mother has thought of the obvious trick to pass them on: while the young are weaning, she will pass unusually soft stool, which the young will consume, both for nutrients and for the precious bacteria. This stool is called pap or soup.

Quite interesting, no?
You can find more pictures of koalas here, as usual.

Alright, alright. Here’s a video of a loli koala and its mommy as well. It’s too adorable. ;.;
I was actually looking for a video of a koala just chewing on eucalyptus, because that’s hypnotic to watch. It’s just chewing. And chewing. And chewing.

Three cheers for Google Video.
The God Who Wasn’t There is a 2005 documentary by Brian Flemming, about the historicity of Jesus and the sheer silliness of Christianity, and the harm it does.

For the Jesus bit, it pays less attention to the lack of historical sources, and more to the similarities to other religions, so it complements my post on the matter nicely, even if it’s kind of crap.

He also criticises the blood-thirst of the Bible and its various fundie followers (Mel Gibson among them), and a score of other things, including moderate Christianity (which makes even less sense than fundamentalist Christianity). With a cameo by Sam Harris.

About an hour long. It’s probably worth watching, though it’s not actually a very good documentary. Not as good as it could have been, anyway.
The ending is cute, though.

It tends to. Anyway.

Larry Moran talks about genes, and why Dawkins’ definition of a gene is in danger of giving people the wrong idea about the whole thing.

In barely related news, people who believe in evolution but don’t understand it at all, and in fact only believe in a caricature of it similar to the straw man some creationists are attacking, annoy me almost as much as creationists themselves do.
I mean, yes, getting people to not just knee-jerkily reject evolution is a necessary first in educating the public, and this is perhaps a necessary step towards that, but it’s still annoying as fuck.

Lamarck was wrong, people. And natural selection works by decreasing genetic diversity, and does not, in fact, speed up evolution.

Meerkat.

How anticlimactic.
Somewhat crooked, but stable. I need a better webcam. Or to reclaim my digital camera from my parents.

Because everyone needs a bit of Fry and Laurie.

No doubt you remember Maher Arar, the Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was arrested by the FBI in New York in 2002 “on suspicion of terrorism”, and shipped to Syria where he was tortured and held for over a year, after which he was returned to Canada. He was, of course, perfectly innocent, and a Canadian judicial inquiry confirmed this.

Canada formally apologised to Arar, and gave him $10.5 million to ease his pain (I’m assuming that’s Canadian dollars, so that comes to about 308 €).
The US government, on the other hand, refuses to admit it made a mistake. They even refuse to remove Arar from their no-fly list.

A lawsuit is pending now, but the message is clear: the US doesn’t care about human rights, and it certainly doesn’t care about international relations, even with its principal trading partner.
This is beyond potentially well-intentioned incompetence; this is well into the area of arrogant malice.

It’s also worth noting that this entire thing happened before the suspension of habeas corpus and legalisation of torture by the 2006 Military Commissions Act.

A year of someone’s life spent in jail being tortured is a big deal. It would be a big deal even it hadn’t been entirely arbitrary, if Arar hadn’t been perfectly innocent. It would have been a big deal even if the Bush administration had displayed any competence in fighting terrorism instead of just starting illegal wars.
Right now, the most dangerous “rogue nation” in the world is the US.

(Via Larry Moran.)

I am: Kurt Vonnegut For years, this unique creator of absurd and haunting tales denied that he had anything to do with science fiction.

Gah, I say.
(Via this guy.)

In unrelated news, I’m moving my old bookshelves around in my room in an attempt at finding a configuration that doesn’t just make the whole thing look cluttery. Tomorrow, I’ll actually start putting together the new shelves.
I know people were dying for a bookshelves update.

Have some ducklings to wash the Vonnegut away.

The third installment of our series of indeterminate schedule or length. This time, I’ll discuss a creature that might not sound particularly weird: the desert locust!

The desert locust, or Schistocerca gregaria, is a grashopper native to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. It lives for three to six months, weighs about two grams, and is the fastest flying insect in the world.
It’s a well-known pest, threatening the livelihood of as much as a tenth of the world’s population. Most recently, in 2004 they threatened the crops of Western Africa and were largely responsible for a famine in Niger. And of course, they’re mentioned as punishments from God in various religious texts. Other than that, they aren’t very interesting. Or are they?

Most of the time, the desert locust is a solitary, rather bland grasshopper, feeding on vegetation, but not really being a threat to anything. What causes the transition to Biblical menace?

Well, when the rainy season comes, suddenly countless locust eggs hatch, increasing the population by tenfold!
(As a side note, locusts have no larvae, they have nymphs; nymphs are young insects that still quite resemble their parents, and unlike larvae, they only undergo partial metamorphosis.)
If there isn’t a lot of food around, or there are a disproportionately large number of nymphs born, large numbers of locusts will gather around relatively small sources of food, and they will undergo a curious change.
They will change appearance (see picture to the right; top is the normal, solitary form), and secrete a pheromone that causes them to be attracted to one another. In large groups, they will then spread out and look for other sources of food: the mythical locust swarms.
These swarms regularly cross the Red Sea, and are even said to have crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean. An individual locust can consume up to his own body weight in food in a day (as said, about two grams), so in large swarms, they can easily devastate crops and natural vegetation. What’s more, locust dropping are toxic, so even if they don’t eat all of your stored crops, they’ll still render them inedible.

Interestingly, the attractive pheromone the nymphs give off is different from the one adults give off. As they find food and undergo their partial metamorphosis, they will also lose their tendency to swarm, and become solitary again.

Anything that changes form and behavior that dramatically is worthy of discussion, I say.
Incidentally, the change seems to be triggered by physical stimulation of the limbs, as is likely to occur in cases of overpopulation. Apparently some scientists have nothing better to do than rub locusts all day, since that’s how they found this out.
I imagine they just gave a random guy in the street a dollar and a cotton swab.

You remember what neoteny is—I talked about here: the retention, by adults in a species, of traits normally seen only in juveniles, though a slowing of somatic development.
Obviously, the only way to study this is by comparing it to other individuals, either earlier in the evolution of the species, or in closely related species.

The idea that humans are a neotenous species is somewhat controversial, but there are good arguments in favor of it. A famous proponent of the idea was Stephen Jay Gould, to whom I haven’t been particularly kind.
Comparison to other primates especially seems to support the hypothesis. The picture to the right is a juvenile chimpanzee, probably our closest relative. The similarities in bone structure are uncanny. Another thing we seem to have in common with young chimps is our ability to learn. This is something older chimpanzees mostly lose, but humans retain it throughout their life. I’ve heard that until they’re about two years old, mental development of humans and chimpanzees is about equal. I can’t seem to find a source for this now, though.

Other physical features that speak for our neoteny: our flat-faced orthognathy, reduction of lack of body hair, the form of the external ear, the epicanthic (or Mongolian) eyefold, the central position of the foramen magnum (they hole at the base of the skull; it migrates backward during the ontogeny of primates), high relative brain weight, persistence of the cranial sutures to an advanced age (joints between bones of the skull), the labia majora of women, the structure of the hand and foot, the form of the pelvis, the ventrally directed position of the sexual canal in women, certain variations of the tooth row and cranial sutures, absence of brow ridges and cranial crests (the picture to the left compares adult and juvenile human skulls to capuchin monkey skulls; I couldn’t find a chimp picture, but apparently it’s even more obvious there), thinness of skull bones, position of orbits under cranial cavity, small teeth, late eruption of teeth, lack of rotation of the big toe, prolonged period of infantile dependency, prolonged period of growth, our long life span, and our large body size (related to retardation of ossification and retention of fetal growth rates).
Okay, so I didn’t come up with that.

It’s well-documented that men are attracted to paedomorphic characteristics in women, for which there are several possible explanations. Given the level of investment by males in their children, it’s obviously a good idea to make sure your kids are your own. One way to do this is by being the first to mate with your mate, and one way to be sure you’re first is by mating young. Perhaps this caused a positive feedback loop of some sort.
Since this holds for most mammals, it’s obviously not the whole story, but it’ll do for now.

Incidentally, there is some evidence for psychological neoteny as well. I could take some cheap shots at the immaturity and mental developmental retardation of Western culture (as Bruce Charlton did—he thought it was a recent phenomenon and blamed education, though; actually, that article tries to equate a midlife crisis with neoteny, though its causes are well-understood and quite different), but the most obvious argument must surely be religion.
A yearning for a heavenly parent figure, who is in firm control of things that are beyond our influence or understanding? This may not describe every religion out there, but it describes the dominant ones, and every religion tends to at least have a comforting element at its core; something to say that, yes, the world makes sense, you just don’t understand it, but “I” (be it the priests or just God himself) have the answer.
This is probably the only thing I agree with Freud on. I’m sure you’ll remember he called religion at its base neurotic and infantile.

It’s all very interesting, and requires more study.

Apparently Maia tagged me with memery. It’s been too long since I did a meme anyway.

Rules: Each player of this game starts off with 10 weird things/habits/little known facts about yourself. People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 10 weird habits/things/little known facts as well as state this rule clearly. At the end you need to choose 10 (5) people to be tagged and list their names. No tagbacks.

1. I’m not nearly as lazy as I pretend, but I maintain the image of laziness so I more easily pretend mediocre work I do is just a result of not trying very hard.
2. Often it still is, but not nearly as often as before. It’s important to me that people don’t know when.
3. I often carry a clipboard with blank paper around, because I don’t trust my memory. This is also probably why my memory is so untrustworthy now.
4. I usually get along well with animals, but only if they’re mammals. Children, too, which is odd, because older people tend to describe me as intimidating.
5. I hate your kids, though. Keep them away from me. If they drool on my stuff, I will make them cry.
6. Probably not, actually. I’m mostly non-confrontational around strangers, because I want to go home. This is also why I hate it when people slow down to look at accidents or try to kill themselves by throwing themselves in front of my train. This has happened twice now.
7. I hate wearing shoes. If I could get away with it, I never would, even outside. This is because I like stretching my toes and picking stuff up with them. For similar reasons, I hate mittens.
8. I like classical music, but if it has lyrics, I will always judge a work by them before caring about the music.
9. I loathe most “classic” works of literature, and I suspect everyone else does too. James Joyce is a terrible writer. If a work has “human condition” in its description, it’s not worth reading.
10. One of these statements was a lie~

Mmhm. Tagging Coren, Skatje, Terru, Codu, and Sparky, because ten is indeed too many. That leaves, like… three other people to tag, I guess.
We need more bloggers. Though probably not if all they’re going to do is memes.

First time in a long time I remembered what I dreamt about when I woke up. I usually don’t when I’m actually tired when I go to bed, which I was, so that’s odd.
Well, “remember”. I remember bits of it. At one point I had a really good idea that’d be fun to implement in Muffins, but now I can’t remember what that was. Anyway.

My dad went to pick up my bookshelves today (they were larger than my mom’s car, so we couldn’t take them with us when we bought them), but I’ve been told I still can’t put them together, because apparently it’s antisocial to engage in carpentry at 9 PM when your room borders on that of a woman in her 70s. I don’t see how it’s more antisocial than her vacuuming hers at 8 AM when she knows her room is next to that of a college student.

There’s a quote I’d like to share with you (probably you’ve heard it already) from Christopher Evans‘ The Mighty Micro. Dawkins quoted it in Unweaving the Rainbow, but I’d heard it before.

Today’s car differs from those of immediate post-war years on a number of counts. It is cheaper, allowing for the ravages of inflation and it is more economical and efficient… But suppose for a moment that the automobile industry had developed at the same rate as computers and over the same period: how much cheaper and more efficient would the current models be? If you have not already heard the analogy, the answer is shattering. Today you would be able to buy a Rolls-Royce for £1.35, it would do three million miles to the gallon, and it would deliver enough power to drive the Queen Elizabeth II. And if you were interested in miniaturization, you could place half a dozen of them on a pinhead.

This was written in 1979. Even if this were an exaggeration at the time (and I don’t believe it is), it surely hasn’t been for decades.

This is a young fennec (Vulpes zerda, though some prefer Fennecus zerda). It’s the smallest canid in the world, weighing up to 1.5 kg (or 3.3 lbs). It’s native to the Sahara desert, and its name is derived from the Arabic for “fox”.
It’s popular among furries, but that does not make it any less adorable.

I finished Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow last night. It’s a much more philosophical book, more like The God Delusion than The Blind Watchmaker.
In it, Dawkins talks about the importance of science, and the depth understanding of science and the scientific method adds or can add to everyone’s life. One of the first people he quotes is Richard Feynman, and this is a very famous quote I’ve repeated often enough, but I think it’s important enough to reproduce in full.

I have a friend who’s an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don’t agree with. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. But then he’ll say, “I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.” I think he’s kind of nutty.
There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

(It’s also at the start of this interview with Feynman, in a slightly longer version.)
Dawkins then goes on to say there is poetry in science, and if only more people, particularly artists, understood this, we would have a lot fewer people writing about mystery and religion and whatnot, and a lot more about the actual natural wonders around us.
This is a point that people like Carl Sagan have made before him, and that I kind of tried to make myself in this post.

He warns against abuses of science, either through bad poetry (as has often been the case with Gould, he points out) or through poor understanding of how chance works.
He talks about the nature of light and spectroscopy for a bit (the literal unweaving of the rainbow, pioneered by Newton).
He talks about how important proper understanding of statistics is in law, including in regular jury members. For the science junkies among us, he also talks about genes in this context.
He spends a chapter explaining why “psychics” and conmen are so successful, and how a proper background in science can put these people out of a job.
He spends another chapter talking about how we perceive the world, unweaving it through our senses, and then reweaving it in our brain. He also talks about how the evolution of the human brain is a fascinating topic, both for its speed and for its apparently unneccessariness, but he then poses a few good hypotheses as to why this might have happened.

The overall message, though, is that science is both incredibly important and incredibly beautiful. This is a very important message indeed.
If you’re just expecting the same type of collection of zoological trivia that you found in The Blind Watchmaker or Climbing Mount Improbably, you may be a bit disappointed; this does not change the fact that Unweaving the Rainbow is a very important and well-written book a lot more people should be reading.
Buy it. Give it to someone. Then buy another copy.

Next up is one of the Richard Feynman books I bought. Probably The Character of Physical Law. I’m never going to get around to reading Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, at this rate.