The tagline of SEED magazine is “Science is Culture” and when I picked up my first issue, their twentieth, last month I was struck by its beauty and the number of times it touched on concepts relevant to this blog.
Did you know that the amount that people talk in a city does not increase linearly with its increase in size, instead the growth of the network creates new behavior? There are novel problems rising out of complexity that we must still work to understand.
The visualizations presented included an abstract treatment of the effects of population growth, from a systems perspective, and maps of neural pathways. An article on genetics mentioned how biologists now often want to think about many genes at once instead of one at a time.
There were articles on how science intersected with policy in international diplomacy and the structure of the United States government. Another described how data that doesn’t match the theory it is intended to prove is sometimes disregarded, making it so those “unknown unknowns” aren’t actually revealed.
A few of the articles are online, such as this one on metacognition and a new ongoing column on the points of contact between science and design in a that just started in this issue.
The most intriguing piece to me showed slides and quotes from a talk about science as a lens. Unfortunately, the web link to the full piece is not working.
Nevertheless, I am subscribing to the magazine to see what else they discuss.
If you have a scientific background, or even just read Discover in your spare time, and are reading this blog then you’ll likely enjoy SEED as well. If you don’t pick it up, then you’ll likely see highlights here from time to time. They also offer a feed of the articles that go up on their website.
