Physical Sciences
drorzel | January 7, 2010A number of people have commented on this LA Times op-ed by Steve Giddings about what physicists expect to come out of the Large Hadron Collider. It includes a nice list of possible particle physics discoveries plus a few things that will annoy Peter Woit, and also includes the obligatory note about spin-offs:
All this may seem like impractical and esoteric knowledge. But modern society would be unrecognizable without discoveries in fundamental physics. Radio and TV, X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, PCs, iPhones, the GPS system, the Web and beyond -- much that we take for granted would not exist…
drorzel | January 7, 2010
slacktivist: Genie in a bottle
"Saudi Arabia's laws against sorcery, it seems to me, are incompatible with its laws against heresy. The heresy laws are based on the idea that there is one and only one true religion. The sorcery laws are based on the idea that other religious beliefs may be powerfully true, but yet forbidden. The state cannot condemn a person for sorcery without thereby taking the official position that sorcery is true and real and powerful. And thus the state cannot enforce its own anti-sorcery law without itself violating its own anti-heresy law."
(tags: religion…
oracknows | January 6, 2010One of the key claims of the "autism biomedical" movement is that something about autism derives from or is exacerbated by the gut; i.e., that there is some sort of link between GI problems, particularly inflammatory diseases of the GI tract, and autism. Although I may not be as versed in the history of this claim as I could be, as far as I can tell, even if this idea didn't originate with Andrew Wakefield, he certainly did a lot to popularize it. Indeed, a common misconception about his misbegotten 1998 Lancet paper that launched the anti-MMR anti-vaccine movement in the U.K. is that it…
sastyk | January 4, 2010Note: This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food - what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time.
A quick, Jay Leno style quiz for the man and woman on the street.
Who will grow your food in the coming decades?
A. My friendly neighborhood agribusinessman will grow my food on a plantation the size of Wyoming using nearly enslaved non-white folks who are deported minutes after harvest. Or maybe…
clock | January 2, 2010
The year that just ended, 2009, was a year that saw huge changes in the world of media and the world of journalism. Science journalism has also been greatly affected, with many media outlets firing their science journalists first, then firing all the others afterwards. Much virtual ink has been spilled on the topics of "death of newspapers" and "bloggers vs. journalists is over" and "future of journalism", etc.
If you checked out everyone who's registered for the ScienceOnline2010 conference, or followed my posts introducing everyone, you have probably noticed that this, fourth meeting is…
sa smith | January 2, 2010[rant on]
There are holes in SciBlogs*.
I usually dont notice them until I have a question that SciBlogs cant answer. I mean, we have a ton of super smart, super skeptical people here on just about every topic.
What I love about 'our people' is that we dont have to be experts on everything. I know a lot about viruses. I dont have to know a lot about global warming. Other people have that base covered. I dont have to know everything about developmental biology. I dont have to know everything about astronomy. The concept of 'I dunno, I dont study ___' totally baffles Creationists.
The…
rallain | January 2, 2010I have been meaning to write about this for quite some time. Really, I wanted to reply to Chad's article on science at Uncertain Principles, but you know how things go. So, here are my key and interesting points about science in random order.
Science is all about models (not ball bearings)
Science is about making models. What is a model? A model can be lots of things. It can be a mathematical relationship, a conceptual model, or even a physical model. One model I like to use is static friction. For many cases, the frictional force can be modeled as:
This model says the frictional…
drorzel | January 1, 2010
Giro.org » Grace, Internets. Internets, Grace.
"Grace is snoozing away in Anne's arms while our lunch (rice and dumplings) and dinner (roast chicken with pesto) cook away. This will be the first non-hospital food we've had in two days, though I recall us sneaking in a patty melt and milkshake from Izzy's the night she was born. Really, this is all a blur of plastic bassinets, rotating nurses, and a tiny, tiny person with a mighty grip."
(tags: kid-stuff blogs)
Tell me what to agree with, and I'll agree § Unqualified Offerings
"Indeed, even if we restrict ourselves to hypothesizing that…
oracknows | December 31, 2009NOTE: Orac is on semi-vacation this week, trying very hard to recharge his Tarial cells. Actually, although he is at home, he is spending much of his time in his Sanctum Sanctorum (i.e., his home office) working on an R01 for the February submission cycle. Given that the week between Christmas and New Years Day tends to be pretty boring, both from a blogging and blog traffic standpoint, he's scaling back the new, original stuff and mixing in some "best of" reruns, as well as some more recent stuff that appeared in a different form elsewhere, modified a bit to be more appropriate to this blog…
bioephemera | December 29, 2009There are two contradictory headlines today on Google News, both regarding someone I couldn't care less about. However, they nicely illustrate one of my key concerns about the internet: the pervasive illusion that the "wisdom of crowds" is in fact wisdom, or in fact fact.
Both stories involve the heinous Jon Gosselin, who as far as I'm concerned is a waste of attention. You may have heard that the former reality TV star had his apartment trashed over the holidays, and that no one knows who's responsible. But if one turns to Google News, one can see that People Magazine appears to have an…
oracknows | December 23, 2009It's a really tough competition, but if I had to choose the most ridiculous form of quackery out there, I'd have to choose homeopathy. Although it's common for so-called "alternative" medicines to be so utterly implausible from a scientific standpoint that it is not unreasonable, barring very compelling positive evidence, to provisionally reject them as impossible, homeopathy goes one further than most forms of alt-med. In fact, it goes many further than nearly any form of alt-med. First, it combines the principle of "like cures like," a principle based far more on ancient concepts of…
ddobbs | December 21, 2009
Note: The version below is altered from the original, which was near-gibberish in a few spots. Why? Because I mistakenly posted a pre-edit version that contained the raw 'transcription' from voice-recognition software I've been trying out. (I suppose it could have been a lot worse.)
Here, more or less as I meant it to appear:
Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things -- how they fail and succeed. In the early 1990s, he began an unprecedented research project: observing four biochemistry labs at Stanford University. Philosophers have long theorized about how…
drorzel | December 11, 2009One of the things I forgot to mention in yesterday's post about why I like AMO physics is that AMO systems have proven to be outstanding tools for solving problems from other fields of physics. In particular, ultra-cold atoms have proven to be a fantastic venue for studying problems from condensed matter physics. There's a comprehensive review of the subject in this Reviews of Modern Physics paper, which is also freely available on the arxiv. I say "comprehensive review," but, of course, it's almost certainly already out of date, given how much work is going on in this area.
To understand why…
cortex | December 10, 2009The latest McSweeney's production is a marvel. It's in the form of a daily newspaper - The San Francisco Panorama - and is yet another reminder that the newspaper remains an essential literary form, a potent mixture of breaking news and obscure stories. (If your local indie bookstore stocks the Panorama, be sure to buy a copy.) I was fortunate enough to write for the Panorama Magazine on the cognitive benefits of travel, which I've pasted in below.
It's 4:15 in the morning, and my alarm clock has just stolen away a lovely dream. My eyes are open but my pupils are still closed, so all I see…
cpikas | December 6, 2009In "common parlance" we throw around chemistry, biology, physics, and all, sort of throwing off the diversity within these disciplines. Gosh, in my comps I answered (or attempted to answer) a question about how useful it was to talk about "scientists" and non-scientists. Going the other way, I'll frequently discuss "research areas" or "invisible colleges" (Price [a] and of course Crane[b]*) or even some of the other groupings of scientists:
lab/university/organization
social circle [c]
paradigm (Kuhn) [d]
epistemic culture (Knorr Cetina)[e]
thought collective (Fleck)[f]
core set (Collins…
drorzel | December 5, 2009
All Of You Industrial Scientists: Out Of the Room. In the Pipeline:
"It looks as if the accreditation groups decided that they were faced with a choice: commit themselves to judging what sorts of presentations should count for CE credit (which you might think was their job), or just toss out anything that has any connection with industry. That way you can look virtuous and save time, too. My apologies if I'm descending into ridicule here, but as an industrial scientist I find myself resenting the implication that my hands (and those of every single one of my colleagues) are automatically…
drorzel | December 2, 2009
AMC - Blogs - SciFi Scanner - A Cinematic Voyage Through Hollywood's SciFi Solar System
Our solar system is a wondrous and frightful venue, and from the magmatic center of the sun to the ghost ships orbiting Neptune, Hollywood has explored it all. Join us for a cinematic voyage through the scifi solar system, which features if not the most well-known movies about our sister planets, then at least the ones that tell us something interesting about the way we think of other worlds.
(tags: sf movies blogs planets astronomy)
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: If the Manhattan Project Worked Like…
stoat | November 28, 2009This from off in the comments at Slashdot, brought to my attention by planet3.0 (thanks VM). Yes, I know I'm a layperson now myself, but some shreds of the old knowledge still cling. Related thought: just about everyone knows they aren't able to understand, or make a meaningful contribution to, general relativity or quantum mechanics or number theory (except Cantors diagonal proof, of course, which every wacko knows is wrong). Somehow, however, people imagine that they understand climate science :-(.
Being a scientist but not of the climate variety, I've got to say 'No'. In a lot of cases,…
cpikas | November 28, 2009With well known and respected open science projects coming out of chemistry as well as cool tools like pubchem and emolecules... it seems a bit unfair of me to ask if chemists are grinches. But there has been and there continues to be a lot of study of data/information/knowledge sharing in chemistry - or, really, the lack thereof. In general, pre-prints are not passed around or self-archived, there is very little data sharing (there are counter examples in crystallography), and details are withheld from conference presentations or the conference slides are not made available (Milo used to…
drorzel | November 24, 2009
CHART ATTACK!: 11/20/76 | Popdose
"I keep trying to figure out what this song is really trying to say in its subtext -- but no, I'm pretty sure it's actually about two muskrats courting. I know I said this a few songs ago, but WHY? Why did we need a song about two muskrats on a date? And even more importantly, why were Captain & Tennille the third artists to record the song? Originally titled "Mukstrat Candlelight" -- and let's just pause a second to think about the meeting where the artistic merits of this title were debated -- the song was written and recorded by Willis Alan Ramsey in…