November 19, 2009
Category: About this Blag • Social Events
I'll be busy on through the weekend. The good news is that some of the busy-ness derives from art and mathematics and writing, although a dismaying proportion comes from less enjoyable stuff. I might be away from my computer during much of regular working hours, so comment moderation will be slowed.
Local events I might as well announce now, as I won't likely get a chance to do so later:
Or, you could just stay home and read TV Tropes.
Posted by Blake Stacey at 8:45 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 18, 2009
Category: Evolution • Pseudoscience
I snared two copies of Ray "I like the feel of a good banana in my hand" Comfort's idiotically amended edition of The Origin of Species. Hearing that his minions were giving them out a day early, I swung by MIT and scoped out the places where I figured they might set up. No luck finding the Bananamobile itself, but a few copies had been left in the Student Center by, it appears, students who picked them up and then decided they didn't care. I asked the young woman sitting next to one such copy where it'd come from, and she said that it had been discarded there, but that the people giving them away had been stationed on Mass[achusetts] Ave[nue]. Not seeing them on my second look up and down the street, I figured they'd moved camp before my arrival, so I hopped on the No. 1 bus to head towards work. Getting off at Harvard Yard, I saw an older fellow sitting against the brick wall, reading the Comfort-addled Origin. I asked where he'd found it, and he said that this one had been left behind. It even came with the "Will you go to Heaven when you die?" bookmark.
The man at the bus stop said that I could have the copy he'd found. "I've read the Introduction," he said. "It's. . . far-fetched."
When I got to work and showed my scientist colleagues my finds, they said that my reaction to Comfort's Introduction would make great performance art. "Wrong," I said. "Wrong!" I exclaimed. "Ach, my brain! This has more fallacies than it has sentences!"
To pick only those stupidities which I found upon opening the Introduction to random pages:
To ponder how DNA's amazing structure could have come together by sheer accident is indeed amazing, and has even led some to consider the possibility of design.
Yes, Comfort has yet to grasp what selection means. He goes on to complain that mutations can't increase the information content of a genome. He quotes the Understanding Evolution website as saying,
Mutations can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful for the organism, but mutations do not "try" to supply what the organism "needs." Factors in the environment may influence the rate of mutation but are not generally thought to influence the direction of mutation. For example, exposure to harmful chemicals may increase the mutation rate, but will not cause more mutations that make the organism resistant to those chemicals. In this respect, mutations are random — whether a particular mutation happens or not is unrelated to how useful that mutation would be.
(Parts in bold are those actually quoted by Comfort. The gap in the middle is marked with an ellipsis, but not the one at the beginning.)
For some reason, Comfort thinks this is a problem. Because the variation among organisms was there before selection pressure was applied, evolution didn't happen. Because experiments show that something which is not Darwinian evolution is not happening, Darwinian evolution can't happen.
You think I'm joking? Here's Comfort:
Therefore, mutations are not logical adaptations that make a creature better suited for its environment. They are completely random—the result of mindless, undirected chance.
There's some serious brain-wrong here. Comfort's reading in excess of 0.7 timecubes, at the very least.
Comfort goes on to claim that hearts couldn't have evolved before blood, and that blood couldn't have evolved without a heart to pump it and vessels to pump it through, ergo, Jesus died for your sins. Now, even in my ninth-grade biology class — taught by a man who'd rather be coaching the basketball team — we did cover open circulatory systems. While our coach shied away from teaching the E-word, for fear of provoking angry parents, the evolutionary history of circulatory systems was in the textbook for anyone even mildly curious to learn about.
These small samples are insufficient to show just how awful Comfort's Introduction is. What isn't plagiarised is incompetent.
Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:59 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 17, 2009
Category: Bibliophilia • Mathematics • Popularization
I just noticed on my blag sidebar that the ScienceBorg Collective is offering ten free copies of Jason Rosenhouse's much-lauded book, The Monty Hall Problem (2009). Ten winners will be chosen, one each day for ten days, and the urn will be refilled anew each day. Enter now (no purchase necessary, offer void where prohibited, etc.).
Posted by Blake Stacey at 5:51 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Bad Math • Pseudoscience
Now, this is entertainment! Creationist pseudo-mathematician Bill Dembski, unable to respond cogently to a critique of his "work", threatens to sue the critic for copyright infringement. (I guess he was just upset that his information was conserved, ha ha.) You know, creationists really shouldn't talk about respecting intellectual property.
Dembski: following in the hallowed footsteps of Conservapædia.
Posted by Blake Stacey at 11:09 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 16, 2009
Category: Fluid dynamics • Optics • Plectics • Statistical mechanics
The American Physical Society, in addition to pwning global warming denialists, runs a regular publication called, simply, Physics, which "spotlights" recent items of interesting research. One such item I saw today turns out to be relevant to my research interests:
The directed percolation phase transition, a phenomenon much mathematicized about, has finally been spotted in the laboratory. As the abstract of Takeuchi et al. (2009) says,
This is a comprehensive report on the phase transition between two turbulent states of electroconvection in nematic liquid crystals, which was recently found by the authors to be in the directed percolation (DP) universality class [K. A. Takeuchi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 234503 (2007)]. We further investigate both static and dynamic critical behaviors of this phase transition, measuring a total of 12 critical exponents, 5 scaling functions, and 8 scaling relations, all in full agreement with those characterizing the DP class in 2+1 dimensions. Developing an experimental technique to create a seed of topological-defect turbulence by pulse laser, we confirm in particular the rapidity symmetry, which is a basic but non-trivial consequence of the field-theoretic approach to DP. This provides a clear experimental realization of this outstanding truly out-of-equilibrium universality class, dominating most phase transitions into an absorbing state.
Why I care about this will be explained at a later date.
I'm also going to have to make the time to read about power laws in chess (not least because this corner of science is just a bit power-law-happy).
Posted by Blake Stacey at 5:40 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 7, 2009
Category: Bibliophilia • Mathematics • Popularization
Huzzahs are in order for SciBling Jason Rosenhouse, whose entertaining and informative book The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math's Most Contentious Brainteaser (2009) made Amazon.com's annual list of the ten best science books. Not bad for a book which actually has equations in it!
(Conflict-of-interest disclaimer: I was sent an Advance Reader Copy of The Monty Hall Problem and I really enjoyed reading it; so, feeling guilty about not finishing reviews of books I got for free, I try to compensate by posting brief, laudatory notes.)
Posted by Blake Stacey at 2:03 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 4, 2009
Category: Cellular automata • Network theory • Statistical mechanics • arXiv
Jean-Daniel Bancal and Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, "Steady-State Dynamics of the Forest Fire Model on Complex Networks" (arXiv:0911.0569).
Many sociological networks, as well as biological and technological ones, can be represented in terms of complex networks with a heterogeneous connectivity pattern. Dynamical processes taking place on top of them can be very much influenced by this topological fact. In this paper we consider a paradigmatic model of non-equilibrium dynamics, namely the forest fire model, whose relevance lies in its capacity to represent several epidemic processes in a general parametrization. We study the behavior of this model in complex networks by developing the corresponding heterogeneous mean-field theory and solving it in its steady state. We provide exact and approximate expressions for homogeneous networks and several instances of heterogeneous networks. A comparison of our analytical results with extensive numerical simulations allows to draw the region of the parameter space in which heterogeneous mean-field theory provides an accurate description of the dynamics, and enlights the limits of validity of the mean-field theory in situations where dynamical correlations become important.
Their approach looks reasonable; extending their technique to include pairwise correlations (the first order of sophistication beyond the simple mean field) might be a worthwhile thing to try.
Posted by Blake Stacey at 2:13 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 3, 2009
Category: Carnivalia • Elitist Bastardry
The most recent Carnival o' ye Elitist Bastards is now sailing the global ocean of discourse.
Also, my SciBling Bora Zivkovic recently interviewed me about science and fiction. For those who missed it, the questions and responses can be read here.
Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:54 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: A funny thing happened on the way to the academy • Wobosphere Silliness
I got forwarded this from someone who got forwarded this from someone whose sister's former roommate got it from Al Gore.
Today CBSG continues with its pointers for budding scientists with the
second part on serving as a peer reviewer for papers and grants.
Okay, you've decided that you are going to reject a manuscript. The naive reviewer might think that it is enough to simply state the reasons for the rejection as clearly and succinctly as possible. But this overlooks a major issue: ensuring that the authors do not know that it is you who rejected the manuscript.
Because the peer review process is anonymous, this may seem like no concern, as long as you extirpate all references to your own work to keep your identity secret. Wrong! You have to keep in mind that no matter how crappy the paper is, the authors are going to be pissed that it is rejected, and they are going to immediately begin wracking their brains to identify referees who might have done the dirty on them. Most will form a list of at least 5 or 6 people that they think are likely to have screwed them. Since most papers are reviewed by no more than 2-3 reviewers, this means you have a good chance of being on the list even if you were NOT the reviewer. Thus, particular pains must be taken to direct the authors ire elsewhere. Several different means to accomplish this are described below:
1. Pretend that you are British. (Note — this does not work well if you actually are British).
Just a few decades ago, it was enough to include a liberal sprinkling of "rathers" and "doubtlesses" throughout the review, and convert all colors to colours, analyze to analyse, polymerize to polymerise, etc.
I started doing this when I got my newest computer. Somehow, Firefox got installed with the English-English spell-checking dictionary, and compared to reconfiguring software, adding a letter here or there was a mere bagatelle.
However, the increasing intellectual and cultural cross-pollination brought by the internet has rendered such limited measures ineffective. Thus, you need to be au courant with all the most specific idioms available to the average Brit.
For example, you might want to refer to a poorly run gel as being "dodgy", "gammy" or "a bit pear-shaped". Especially effective are slang terms derived from cricket. This is because no self-respecting American knows anything about this sport (indeed, outside the British Commonwealth, cricket is universally reviled as the one sport even more boring than baseball). Here are some cricket-based phrases worked into sentences that you might include in a review. Instead of writing "Some of the data presented by the authors are mutually contradictory" write "The authors seem to have gotten themselves into a bit of a sticky wicket".
Instead of writing "The documentation of morpholino efficacy by monitoring expression of exogenously provided target rather than the endogenous target is not quite fair" write "Using GFP-ponticulin as a read out for the morpholino effects is not quite cricket". And, instead of writing "I was chagrined to see that the authors ignored the previous studies by the Jones lab", write "the failure of the authors to cite the seminal studies of Jones and colleagues hit me for six".
"While technically correct, the limited scope of the authors' results makes them rather small beer."
1B. Pretend that you are an American pretending to be British (Note: this does work if you are British, but does not work if you are American.) The strategy here is similar to #1 above, but instead of being a little bit subtle, you go straight over the top. Thus, instead of writing "I seriously doubt that anyone will believe ...": "Blimey! Blokes would have to be right daft if they were to believe ..."
2. Pretend that you are Canadian. This is harder because the only major language difference between Americans and Canadians is that the latter tend to mispronounce words with the short O sound such that they rhyme with newt. Needless to say, this sort of thing is not manifest in written reviews.
However, the canny reviewer can draw on the one or two features of Canadian culture that are unique. Interestingly (in light of the cricket discussion above) most of these revolve around Canadian football. For example, you might allude to a paper not being ready for the Grey Cup yet (a reference to the Canadian equivalent of the Super Bowl), describe an experimental situation as being "3rd and long" (an allusion to the fact that there are only three downs in Canadian football) or argue that the authors need to "bring in a couple more coaches" (referring to the fact that Canadian football teams have 4 head coaches). Cite obscure Canadian journals: "J Can. Med. Assoc." or "Can. J. Cardio." No one outside of Canada reads these journals.
They're still better than those Australasian journals.
3. Pretend that you are German. This is even harder, because even if you know some German, you have to write your review in English for most journals. Be extremely precise and technical. You could also try simply putting the verb at the end of your sentences (as in "The experiments in figures 5 and 6 should repeated be"), however this runs the risk of having yourself labeled not as a German, but as an imbecile or an incarnation of Yoda. Alternatively cite organic chemistry articles from the late 19th and early 20th century that have never been translated into English. Cite German aricles during the 30s and 40s when the rest of Academia was trying its best to ignore German science.
Too soon?
3B. Pretend that you are an American pretending to be German; sprinkle the text with flavorful comments such as "Ach mein lieber!" or "Du spinnst!" Or, if a line of reasoning is particularly awful, "Ist gibt ein Blutbat en der Hoelle!" Stick umlauts on random words, and make liberal use of the eszett. Downside: the editor will conclude you have flipped.
4. Pick one of the people from you own list of 5-6 enemies and pretend to be that person. Heavily cite their work. Reference their obscure conference presentations. Arrogantly suggest that person's methods in favor of the methods used in the paper, especially where they are clearly inapplicable.
Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:17 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
![[sex and science]](http://www.sunclipse.org/downloads/sexandscience3.png)
