If you enjoyed yesterday's post Richard Feynman Explains Trains, here are some more clips from the same interview -- from a 1983 BBC program called Fun to Imagine. First up, Feynman explains why mirrors only reflect left-to-right, not top-to-bottom. This clip occurs before yesterday's train explanation; it starts with Feynman talking about his fraternity at MIT. Next, Feynman explains magnets and challenges "'why' questions." Actually, he doesn't really get into the magnet thing so much, but... READ ON

I've mentioned statistician Nate Silver before (How Nate Silver Predicted Obama's Win; Nate Silver's Oscar Predictions, Reviewed). He's best known for his statistical work on the 2008 US Presidential election, in which he analyzed various publicly available poll results, handicapped them using baseball-style analysis, and did a surprisingly good job of predicting how specific areas of the US would vote. After the election, Silver gave a TED Talk in which he talked about racism as a factor... READ ON

In a TED Talk released this week, medical statistician Hans Rosling presents a new way to visualize the global AIDS epidemic. By displaying dollars spent per person, graphed as a function of the percentage of the population infected with HIV (by continent), we can see both how AIDS has spread, and how the money spent per patient has affected that spread. Starting in 1983, Rosling's visualization is an animated graph that dramatically demonstrates how the epidemic works, and even allows interaction --... READ ON

Crank up your speakers or strap on your headphones, here's an awesome science film from 1953. In A Communications Primer, the Eames power couple (creators of Powers of Ten, among others) explain how communication works in an increasingly technological world. Now, given that this film is now fifty-six years old, can it be relevant today? In a word: completely. The first topic here is signal versus noise, a problem that we're all familiar with -- think spam, Twitter, Facebook, even just the forlorn... READ ON