tqa | December 24, 2006Merry Christmas.
"DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?
"VIRGINIA O'HANLON.
"115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET."
VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere…
tqa | December 23, 2006When the time came to schedule this European odyssey that we're currently on, I discovered two things. First, that it was going to be a hell of a lot cheaper to fly on the 18th of December than on the 22nd, and second that it really is cheaper to book a regular round trip ticket than a multi-city ticket. That was all good, though, since it let me schedule a couple of days in London at the start of the trip.
Or so I thought.
When I'm on the road, I've got this habit of ignoring the news. There are just so many better things to do while traveling than waste time learning about the various…
tqa | December 22, 2006"The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
--Thomas Henry Huxley
"The Coming of Age of the 'Origin of Species'"
tqa | December 20, 2006A little passage from Hogfather for the Winter Solstice:
Ridcully, after a few more trial runs, settled on a song which evolves somewhere on every planet where there are winters. It's often dragooned into the service of some local religion and a few words are changed, but it;s really about things that have to do with gods only in the same way that roots have to do with leaves.
"-the rising of the sun, and the running of the deer-"
Happy Holidays to all, regardless of which holiday you might be celebrating during this time of year, as the days finally stop getting shorter and the sun begins…
tqa | December 20, 2006The kids and I get to London last night just in time to catch an early dinner and fall asleep. The kids, being used to Hawaiian Time (GMT -10) were up at 3 this morning. We went to see Father Christmas at a well-known London department store, and by the time we got to him at 10:30, I was already set to call it a day. The result was the following exchange:
Santa: And who's that there? (pointing to me)
Joshua: That's my dad.
Santa: And what does he want for Christmas?
Me: Oh, just a little peace and quiet.
Santa (Laughing): Well, I can't fucking guarantee that one, mate!
tqa | December 18, 2006My statistics class took up a great deal of time this semester, so this quote seems particularly appropriate:
No study is less alluring or more dry and tedious than statistics, unless the mind and imagination are se to work, or that the person studying is particularly interested in the subject; which last can seldom be the case with young men in any rank of life.
--William Playfair
(found in The Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations)
tqa | December 17, 2006As you can tell by looking at the main page, I haven't been blogging much (again) lately. It's been a long semester, and I've had a lot of catching up to do at school. Between grading papers and trying to catch up on my own work, I haven't had very much time to spend here. And, of course, now that the semester is over, I'm going out of town - to Europe - and I don't know how much internet access I'll have. Access permitting, I'm going to try to post at least a few things from the road, and I'm going to put a few things into the hopper right now to make sure that I'll have at least a few posts…
tqa | December 8, 2006As I mentioned recently, a number of soldiers in Iraq will be running the Honolulu Marathon this weekend. The course goes around a base several times, mostly over dirt roads. In part, running the Honolulu Marathon lets folks maintain a connection with home, but that's not the only reason that they are running. They're also running to support TAPS - an organization that provides support to the families of people who die while on active duty in the armed forces.
A death in the family is a massive tragedy, and creates a great deal of upheaval in the lives of those left behind. For the families…
tqa | December 7, 2006A scientific paper just published in the journal Nature provides an in-depth scientific analysis of the evidence in the case of the six medics on trial for their lives in Libya. Scientists obtained RNA sequences from the HIV virus present in 44 victims who had been treated outside Libya. They used well-established techniques for determining evolutionary relationships to see if the infection came from a single source, and they used what we know about the rate at which HIV evolves to determine when the infections began at the hospital.
The analysis demonstrates, beyond even an unreasonable…
tqa | December 4, 2006Go read this story in the New York Times and cry for what our country has become, and for what we have lost. The story is about Jose "Dirty Bomb" Padilla, and his treatment while incarcerated as an "enemy combatant" in a military brig.
He was locked up there, with no access to lawyers, for 21 months. He was, his lawyers claim, the solitary prisoner in a 10-cell wing. He was kept in a cell with blacked out windows, no clock, and no calendar. When he was removed from his cell for things like dental work, as you can see in the photograph on the Times website, he was moved around wearing blacked…
tqa | November 27, 2006Today's quote comes from Alfred Russell Wallace's first paper on evolution - his 1855 paper On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of Species. In addition to paving the way toward his later work on natural selection, this paper laid the foundation for an entire subdiscipline of biology: island biogeography.
Such phænomena as are exhibited by the Galapagos Islands, which contain little groups of plants and animals peculiar to themselves, but most nearly allied to those of South America, have not hitherto received any, even a conjectural explanation. The Galapagos are a volcanic…
tqa | November 27, 2006I woke up early today, went downstairs, turned on the news, and very quickly discovered that I'd made it all of 5 minutes into my morning before making a bad decision. The lead-off story on MSNBC's top of the hour coverage: NBC News' decision to start calling what's happening in Iraq a "civil war." This was followed by several minutes of self-absorbed commentary by Tucker Carlson. As I write, I'm being treated to another dose of coverage on this same "top story," this time complete with a "debate" between talking heads from the two sides of the political spectrum, each armed with a brand-new…
tqa | November 26, 2006This is why we need to get more people to spend more time thinking about science:
"If an issue is not on the tips of their constituents' tongues, they'll say, 'Well, we'll deal with that tomorrow,'"
- Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth.
tqa | November 26, 2006Bill Dembski seems to have decided that the sour grapes strategy is a winner - or at least less of a loser than anything else he's come up with lately. He's following up Denyse O'Leary's spectacularly bad series of peer review posts with a link to an article by Ross McKitrick on the evils of position statements by scientific societies.
McKitrick is a noted global warming "skeptic," and he's bitching about the quality of the grapes because the American Meteorological Society has released a draft position statement on climate change. Dembski is concerned about position statements because just…
tqa | November 23, 2006Another round of unholy wars seems to have broken out over the last few days. This particular round (again) focuses on the relationship between atheists and theistic evolutionists. The involved parties have broken into two groups, and I think both are being at least somewhat silly. On one side, we have PZ Myers, Larry Moran, and others. This group believes (among other things) that theistic evolutionists attack and weaken science, although not quite as badly as the out-and-out creationists. On the other, we find Ed Brayton, Pat Hayes, and a few others. This group thinks that theistic…
tqa | November 23, 2006Nothing too profound today - just something taken from a comic strip that's taped to the lab door.
"That's the problem with nature. Something's always stinging you or oozing mucus on you. Let's go watch TV."
Bob Watterson
Calvin and Hobbes
tqa | November 23, 2006This Thanksgiving, there's a lot that I am thankful for. There's also a fair amount that I'm not all that thankful for. I'm thankful that as of the email I got from her last night, my wife is still in good health. I'm not all that thankful that she is in good health on a base in Iraq. I'm also not very thankful that there are a lot of other families this year who have not been as lucky as we have in this regard.
For far too many people, supporting the troops begins and ends with the $1.93 spent on the magnetic ribbon. For many of those whose support extends a bit further, the support ends,…
tqa | November 22, 2006"On Thanksgiving Day all over America, families sit down to dinner at the same moment - halftime."
--Anonymous
Back to science quotes tomorrow. Enjoy the holiday.
tqa | November 22, 2006There's an article in Friday's Washington Post about the ongoing strike by Houston, Texas janitors. (The same folks who were getting trampled by police horses the other day.) Part of the article tells the story of Ercilia Sandoval, a Salvadorian immigrant who is one of the striking workers. If we take a look at her story, it becomes very easy to see who the real winners and losers are in right to work states. It should come as no surprise if I tell you that the losers outnumber the winners. It might surprise you if I tell you that you're probably (if you live anywhere in the US) one of the…
tqa | November 21, 2006In part to counteract the limited amount of time that I have available to write posts, I've decided to start a "quote of the day" series. Most of the quotes will be related to science or academics (or any of the other central issues I talk about here). Some may be chosen because they seem to be relevant to something going on in the world today; most won't be. The quotes will usually be short, but this first one isn't. Feel free to use the comments section of this post as an open thread, to talk about whatever.
Knowledge has been accumulating at an ever increasing rate, and knowledge, once it…