Free Thought

“A thing may be of deeper impossibility than another, in the sense that you can be more deeply underwater--but whether you are five feet or five fathoms from the surface you are still all wet.” -Brian McGreevy With everything going on in the world, it's always a wonderful reminder that here at Starts With A Bang! we're eternally focused on the cosmic story of what we know and how we know it. Regardless of what direction you want to push society, increasing our knowledge and understanding ought to be one thing we all agree on. This past week, here's a look back at what we've covered: What's so…
On Pharyngula, PZ Myers examines the work of Yoshinori Ohsumi, who was awarded the prize in Physiology for his studies of autophagy in yeast. Autophagy, or self-consumption, is a strategy used by all cells to recycle malfunctioning bits of themselves, or to survive during times of starvation. But autophagy is also involved in cancer metastasis and may play a role in other diseases such as Parkinson's. Meanwhile, the Nobel prize in Physics did not go to LIGO and the observation of gravitational waves as widely expected. Instead it was divided between three individuals for "theoretical…
"'Topology is destiny,' he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time." -Neal Stephenson If you want to understand the Universe, there are two big areas you need to know: Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which governs the gravitational force and the curvature of spacetime, and quantum physics, which governs all the particles, the states of matter and every non-gravitational interaction ever. While many were expecting the Nobel Prize to go to the LIGO collaboration for the groundbreaking first direct detection of gravitational waves, there are a slew of quantum discoveries that…
If there’s one thing that irritates me more than government agencies making bold proclamations about making progress in cancer but not providing sufficient funding to have even a shot of realizing such ambitions (I’m talking to you, Cancer Moonshot), it’s people in other disciplines that are not cancer biology making bold proclamations about how they’re going to “solve” cancer or coming up with new “theories” to explain cancer. That’s not to say that cancer research can’t benefit from new perspectives from different sciences and disciplines can bring or new ways of thinking about the problem…
I've been testing out the Teclast Tbook 16 Pro 2 in 1 Tablet PC. I think the emerging term for this kind of device is "2 in 1" because if configured one way it is a small notebook computer, configured the other way, it is a standard tablet. First, a bit of philosophy. When Apple and others invented the iPod Touch and various Smart Phones, it seemed obvious that a larger version of such a device might be helpful. So they went ahead and invented tablets. And tablets are cool. But, as often happens in technology, extreme coolness came to stand in for "the next big thing" in all applications.…
“Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.” -Mattie Stepanek After another tremendous week here at Starts With A Bang, including one where I recorded a new podcast (look for it later this week on SoundCloud), it's time to take a look back and review all that we've been through. From last Saturday through the past Friday, here's what we saw: Are there different types of time and space? (for Ask Ethan), Deepest view of the Orion nebula reveals shocking discoveries (for Mostly Mute Monday), Forty years ago, we landed on Mars... and found life?, Apollo 11's…
“All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.” -Cesare Pavese We're halfway through the year at Starts With A Bang, but it feels like the greatest things are just getting started! For one, enjoy our newest podcast: on Interstellar Travel, highlighted by an interview with Larry Niven last month at Balticon 50! As always, we've had a fantastic week leading up to right now. If you didn't catch it all, here's what you missed: Does Earth really have a second Moon? (for Ask Ethan), NASA's New Horizons views first distant Kuiper belt object beyond Pluto (for…
This is one of four related posts: Should You Install Ubuntu Linux?Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTSHow to use Ubuntu UnityThings To Do After Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Some Linux/Ubuntu related books:Ubuntu Unleashed 2016 Edition: Covering 15.10 and 16.04 (11th Edition)Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop: Applications and AdministrationThe Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction Why you should install Linux Linux is an operating system, as are Windows and Apple’s OSX. It is the operating system that is used on the majority of computing devices. Linux is the basis for the Android operating system, so if…
Certain things that come across one’s desktop, on the internet, are hard to turn away from. Train wrecks, for example. For me, this list includes commentary about grammatical errors and proper language use. I find this sort of discussion interesting because I’m an anthropologist, and probably also because I’ve spend a lot of time 100% immersed in a language or two other than my native English. This training and this experience each make me think about how we make meaning linguistically. Also, as a parent, I have observed how a child goes through the process of first, and quickly, learning how…
I'm not anti-government. I'm pro civilization. But I'm also an anarchist, of a sort. I think institutions should be dissolved and reformed regularly. What really happens is that institutions add bits and pieces over time, in response to things that happen, as solutions to interim problems, until finally the bits and pieces take over and nobody can move. Do you know the The Gormenghast trilogy? In this amazing story by Mervyn Peake ... ... a doomed lord, a scheming underling, an ancient royal family plagued by madness and intrigue - these are the denizens of ancient, sprawling, tumbledown…
As the nation’s largest federal employer of scientists and engineers, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has always been at the forefront of innovative and groundbreaking science and technology. DoD scientists and engineers have played a leading role in some of the world’s most advanced and life-changing technological breakthroughs, including the Internet, the Global Positioning System (GPS), virtual reality, voice recognition technology, autonomous vehicles, texting, and cloud computing. Get ready as the DoD -- one of the Festival´s earliest Sponsors -- brings an unforgettable array of…
Reader Beware: Please note the date of publication of this post. It's been really gratifying over the last year to see how my DSCaM scholarly communications empire has grown. From it's small beginnings, Dupuis Science Computing & Medicine has craved out a small but important niche in the discount APC publishing community. And I really appreciate how the scholarly communications community has encouraged my career progression from publisher of a journal at Elsevier to Chief Advisor on Science Libraries for the Government of Canada to last year's huge launch of DSCaM. And the DSCaM empire…
Rall, Ted. Snowden. New York: Random House, 2015. 224pp. ISBN-13: 978-1609806354 For those that have watched Citizenfour or read Glenn Greenwald's No place to hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. surveillance state, there's not much new or shocking in Ted Rall's excellent graphic novel, Snowden. But for someone who hasn't had a chance to check out either or those works, this is a fantastic place to start a deeper exploration into the amazing story around Edward Snowden, one of the major figures in the current debate about the way governments try to control and monitor the Internet. It…
For about a year in graduate school, I was a serious Go player. I read a few books and even played in a tournament. It's a beautiful game, no question about it, but after wasting so much time just to become a mediocre chess player, I eventually decided not to repeat the process with Go. One thing I noticed, though, was that Go players were constantly comparing their game to chess. In particular, they were really keen on the idea that Go was more complex than chess. They liked to point out that computers were competitive with the top human chess players (and are now superior to them), but…
A worthy Kickstarter science related project is afoot. Face it. Most science is done on the command line. When it is not, we call it "science by spreadsheet" or name it by some other epithet. Much of that is done on Linux or Linux like computers, but that actually includes Macs, and if you must, it can be done on Windows. Bioinformatics, climate simulations, basic statistics using the r language, fancy math things using the appropriate python library, making graphs with gnuplot, and even producing nice looking results for dissimnation to our geeky peers using LaTex. Science-related…
Minecraft is a gaming world. Or, if you like, a "sandbox." This is a three dimensional world in which characters do things, all sorts of things. The context for the world of Minecraft is very open ended. The player builds things, moves things, gets things, does things, in a way that makes any one gamer's game potentially very different from any other gamer's game. You can buy Minecraft in various forms such as an XBox 360 version. It comes in Lego form (for example, this), and you can get a Minecraft cloud server version at Minecraft.net. If you install Minecraft from Minecraft.net (about…
Of all the slick woo peddlers out there, one of the most famous (and most annoying) is Deepak Chopra. Indeed, he first attracted a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence a mere 10 months after this blog started, when Chopra produced the first of many rants against nasty "skeptics" like me that I've deconstructed over the years. Eventually, the nonsensical nature of his pseudo-profound blatherings inspired me to coin a term to describe it: Choprawoo. Unfortunately, far too many people find Deepak Chopra's combination of mystical sounding pseudo-profundity, his invocation of "cosmic consciousness"…
As much time and effort as I spend deconstructing, refuting, and otherwise demolishing the misinformation that is routinely promulgated about vaccines by the antivaccine movement, it's important never just to reflexly dismiss a claim or news story that gains traction among antivaccinationists. After all, it is always possible that the story is as the antivaccinationists represent it; possible, but not likely. Still, one must be careful not to be so close-minded that one leaps to dismiss a story just because of its source. That is skepticism, and it's a big difference—or at least should be—…
There's kind of two theories of the web. The first theory is that it's the best thing ever, the culmination of human civilization, incapable of being anything negative in anyone's lives. Proponents of this theory can't stand it when anyone says anything mean about the web (or usually any technology) in public or especially online. The other theory is the chicken little theory. According to this theory, the web (and usually any technology) is the reason the world is going to hell in a hand basket. All the bad things in the world are because the web is disrupting science and art and culture.…
“The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.” -William Hurt There was so much that happened this past week on Starts With A Bang, from eruptions to bad science reporting to black holes and more, that we couldn't help but share so much with you! Just in the last seven days, we've taken on the following: Why are all the planets in the same plane? (for Ask Ethan), An unforgettable time-lapse volcano, Reverse-pointillist art (for our Weekend Diversion), The largest star in the Universe (for Mostly Mute Monday), The LHC made simple, The…