Science After Sunclipse

Vertices for My Vacation

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:26:31 -0500

Last night, I had a nightmare about trying to reach ScienceOnline '09: our plane landed, and for some reason dismissed by everybody else as charming local colour, it had to taxi through the Appalachian foothills for five hours. It's probably for the best that ScienceBlogs.com will be undergoing a software upgrade starting tomorrow, causing posting and commenting to be temporarily disabled. I mean, my subconscious could probably use the vacation.

So, while I won't be saying anything here, there are good essays into life and learning elsewhere on the Blogohedron:

Zeno visits the den of illucidity known as Conservapædia and then describes his encounter with an odd fellow who accepts relativity in order to abuse it. You know, given the history of Conservapædian hostility to relativity, it'd be fun to throw these people in a room together and see who comes out.
I missed this the first time it came around, so I'll note it now: Tamiaki Yoneya reminiscences on early developments in string theory.
And on that note, Clifford Johnson ponders what gauge/gravity duality might tell us about gravity and thermodynamics.
Reading a few of the comments in that discussion makes me think of the Crackpot Index, to which Moshe has some addenda.
Greta Christina reminds us that it's time to score our "psychic" predictions for 2008 (mildly NSFW content is a click away from the aforelinked page).

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The Downside of Monomania

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:36:37 -0500

So, there's this video. It's apparently for a German electronics retailer whose motto is, roughly translated, "We hate expensive".

Phil thought it looked really kewl. P-Zed agreed, but he said that it portrayed evolution as a linear progression along a Great Chain of Being, and that this is the sort of bad media which fosters misconceptions about evolution.

All of that was somewhere in my head when I first watched it, but I must confess my initial reaction was more like the following: "Cyborg women? Robots? Evolving robots? Misconceptions about evolution? At the risk of sounding all Denyse O'Leary — I wrote about that in my book!"

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Not the Raptor Post I Was Expecting to Write

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:19:58 -0500

Today's xkcd was insufficiently nerdy for me.

Yes, that's right.

In order to make the comic adequately reflect what I do on a daily basis, I have at least to modify the temperature conversion chart:

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Social and Administrative Notes

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:27:48 -0500

Tomorrow evening I will be attending Boston's First Night festivities, which involve things like illuminated ice sculptures and whatnot outside and various artistic performances indoors. Joshua successfully inveigled me into attending a theatrical performance in the Orpheum, on the rationale that he would be in it. All that time I could have spent arguing on the Internet — gone! Forever! SIWOTI Cat would be displeased.

And speaking of the Internet, this blag had some spam issues over the holidays (comments were posted linking to Turkish prison pornography, and such). Consequently, I will be realigning the dilithium crystals, drawing new pentagrams in undergrads' blood and whatnot behind the scenes. If any of the Gentle Reader's comments are delayed in appearance, that's just me, trying to find a workable balance.

My next post will have raptors.

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Ooh, Shiny

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:20:04 -0500

How about a blog carnival devoted to the union of evolution and medicine?

Coming from the perspective of an individual who conducts medical research in evolutionary genetics, I have found that very few people outside of the world I work have been exposed to all of the ways evolutionary biology interfaces with medicine. My hope is that with this edition of Grand Rounds those who have not yet been exposed to this topic become, at the very least, sufficiently intrigued.

Indeed. It's like a giant intrigue machine!

(Tip a' the fedora to Orac.)

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Holiday Fluff: Judging Books by Hacked Covers

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 21:33:29 -0500

I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more.
Vladimir Nabokov

The other day after brunch, my friend Rebecca Watson said to me, "Skepchick is still getting nine hundred hits per day for Maria's review of Twilight." Yes, she and I both spend so much time on the damn Internet that we basically speak in hyperlinks. What's more, Rebecca said, the comments attracted by Maria's review — published the better part of a month before — were reaching new lows, descending to abyssal domains more familiar from YouTube. Shortly thereafter, Elles at Teen Skepchick got into the game by asking, if I may paraphrase, "Why is a 106-year-old vampire stalking a teenage girl any less creepy than Humbert Humbert stalking a nymphet?"

This is, I should think, a genuinely non-rhetorical question — loosely speaking, perhaps even a scientific one — about human behaviour. Why is it that readers of Lolita (1955) took the events described therein in one way, while readers of Twilight (2005) cast an analogous series of events in a remarkably different light? Where are the Humbert Humbert fans shouting into the Intertubes, "But it was OK because HE LOVED HER!"?

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Fuller's Plan for Financial Gain

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:43:03 -0500

Steve Fuller, pontificator on matters sociological, has joined the crew of the antiscience blog Uncommon Descent. I think I can already see a few steps in his plan:

1. Insist on calling modern biology "Darwinism", despite perennially repeated explanations that science has advanced since 1859, and thus that calling evolution "Darwinism" is like calling all modern music "Brahmsism".

2. Complain that "Darwinism" is still mired in the 19th century.

3. ???

4. Profit!

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Carnival of the Elitist Bastards IIX

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:25:46 -0500

The eighth Carnival of the Elitist Bastards, and the last of 2008 CE, is ontube at Submitted to a Candid World.

("2008 CE"? Yes, I do go out of my way to find ways to make my writing irritate the denizens of Conservapædia.)

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Post-Christmas Thoughts on Science Communication

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:31:34 -0500

On the evening of the twenty-fifth, my family and I were watching the DVD I'd given my mother for Christmas, All The President's Men (1976). This was, she told me, the movie which got everybody to go to journalism school; some time thereafter, they were all disappointed by, among other things, the fact that Woodward and Bernstein did not look like the young Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. Midway through the film, I thought to myself, "This would make the perfect lead-in anecdote for a post on that argument currently bubbling on the Blogohedron about the relative roles of bloggers and journalists!"

Then, I thought, "Wait a minute. That argument is dreadfully boring, and I'm not the only one to think so."

Indeed, a theme of science communication ran through the gifts exchanged this year, even if it was a theme inaudible to anybody except me. What's more, the thoughts provoked by these gifts go off in directions largely orthogonal to the standard, tediously cyclic arguments which people in these parts like to have. Consequently, I can indulge myself in that most subtle of blogospheric pleasures: being ignored!

I got a copy of Phil Plait's Death From The Skies! (2008), for example. While reading it, I had the distinct impression, "This would make a great TV show!" I may have had this impression because I fell ill before the holidays and thus had the choice to spend Christmas either feeling feverish or feeling medicated, but in my congested delirium, Death From The Skies! was perfect for TV.

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Audiobook Announcement: The Authoritarians

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 13:15:56 -0500

I have been informed that Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians (2007) is now available in audiobook format from Cherry Hill Publishing. Cherry Hill is now selling an eight-CD recording of the book read by the author, with a foreword by John W. Dean, author of Conservatives without Conscience (2006). A downloadable version is in the works and should soon be available at Audible.com, but it has not appeared yet.

The Authoritarians is a popularized account of Altemeyer's research into authoritarian psychology: how one can measure the tendency to be a demagogic leader or a devoted follower; how these psychological scores correlate with thinking styles, political affiliations and religious beliefs; and what our collective streak of authoritarian behaviour means for the future of American culture. This research is, I should judge, preliminary in the extreme, although great stretches of Altemeyer's writing carry a disturbing air of truth. For one thing, questionnaires given in a classroom or laboratory setting test people plucked out of the system in which they naturally act, whereas to understand the operation of a country, we have to know how those people behave in that system.

(On this point, I largely agree with Cosma Shalizi. Being an academic, I have now to disagree with Shalizi on some point, and I fulfil this obligation by saying I rather enjoyed Altemeyer's lengthy footnote cutting into Lakoff's hypotheses. In fairness, my delight may have been amplified by the distaste created by certain self-proclaimed apostles of Lakoff, which would be rather petty behaviour on my part.)

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Basement Cat Is Genuinely Perplexed

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 11:09:47 -0500

This is what happens when a cat discovers the existence of people who wholeheartedly reject the very idea of allegory.

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A Year of Regrets

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:14:59 -0500

Craig Silverman runs Regret the Error, a website dedicated to collecting media flubs and glitches. Recently, he put ontube a retrospective of the year's most memorable errors and corrections. Remember when the AP called Joe Liberman (I-CT) "the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent"? Good times, good times. And what about when that chef recommended using henbane in organic salad?

(A good deal of the copy about that incident says that henbane was an active ingredient in the poison which Romeo bought in Romeo and Juliet, but it seems more likely to me that the potion he bought off that poor apothecary was your basic plot juice, with properties invented as befits the story. There's a chance that the "cursed hebenon" of Hamlet refers to henbane, but others suggest yew or even nicotine, and again, it might have been the name alone which was lifted.)

Silverman also has a round-up of 2008's plagiarism and fabrication stories. Of particular interest is the case of Timothy S. Goeglein, a White House aide charged with rallying the conservative base, who turned out to have the ethics of a damnèd Darwinist.

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Two Lessons in Arithmetic

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:50:11 -0500

I don't know where we found examples of amusing and/or horrifying mistakes before the Internet.

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Doing My Part to Help a Meme

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:36:38 -0500

Happy Monkey to all!

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Vertices on the Blogohedron

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:51:10 -0500

First of all, my thanks go out to Rebecca Watson and Dana Hunter for calling attention to my attempt at an SF novel. Elsewhere on the Blogohedron, interesting discussions have been unfolding:

Close to home, Brian Switek asks, "What sort of evolution book do we need?" He plans to make the case that Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True (2009) is not it. Interesting exchanges of comments follow.
Abbie Smith finds some talk of epigenetics overblown.
Moving out beyond the ScienceBorg cube into the torus-at-large, Russell Blackford is gobsmacked by Dignitas Personae.
Greta Christina describes her experiences being an atheist in the queer community.
OK, for something more cheerful, both Bad Astronomy and Cosmic Variance have nice write-ups on a recent result on dark energy (arXiv:0812.2720).
Our friend gg of Skulls in the Stars explains three fallacious "proofs" of mathematical untruths.

Back to work I go. . . .

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