Cognition and Culture, a weblog devoted to cognitive science and anthropology, has an interesting post about folk theories of physics. People naturally subscribe to a view they call “impetus physics”, where objects only move if they receive an impetus from an outside agent, which leads to a variety of false predictions. Physicists learn to give the right predictions, but a recent experiment showed that when asked to make intuitive predictions under some circumstances physicists will revert to the intuitive folk theory.

Did you ever wonder what Jim Stewart of Stewart’s Calculus did with his ill-gotten millions? Apparently, he built a really big house one with a concert hall in the middle. In addition to his textbook writing, Stewart is also a classical violinist, and he built the hall so that he and others could use it to perform.

Sean at Cosmic Variance wonders why we can’t visualize more than three dimensions. I find it both hard to imagine how you could visualize four dimensions and hard to imagine what biological feature of our brains prevents us from doing so.