Physical Sciences
rallain | May 19, 2009Some of the other blog sites have talked about physics vs. chemistry. It seems this started with The experimental Error blog. Tom at Swans on Tea added a very excellent point to the discussion and the discussion continues at Uncertain Principles.
So, here is my take on the subject. Physics essentially deals with the fundamental stuff. You know, Maxwell's equations, the four forces, the particles, quantum mechanics. Chemistry is the study of substances and their interactions. First, let me attack chemistry. Here are some things I don't like:
Photo electron. What is a photo electron?…
clock | May 18, 2009Fossil Of 'Giant' Shrew Nearly One Million Years Old Found In Spain:
Morphometric and phylogenetic analyses of the fossilised remains of the jaws and teeth of a shrew discovered in a deposit in Gran Dolina de Atapuerca, in Burgos, have shown this to be a new species (Dolinasorex glyphodon) that has not previously been described. The extinct animal had red teeth, was large in size compared with mammals of the same family, and was more closely related to Asian than European shrews.
Komodo Dragons Even More Deadly Than Thought: Combined Tooth-venom Arsenal Key To Hunting Strategy:
A new study…
drorzel | May 18, 2009Thoreau offers without qualification some observations about the different approach to books taken by sciences vs. humanities. Specifically, he notes that despite frequent claims that it is the Most Important Book Ever, nobody actually reads Newton's Principia Mathematica
This is totally different from humanities. In humanities, people make a point of reading the original thinkers. They don't just say "Well, philosopher so-and-so influenced lots of other people and got the ideas rolling, so let's read somebody influenced by him and maybe a Cliff's Notes version of the original." They…
drorzel | May 17, 2009The Experimental Error blog considers the difference between disciplines (via Tom):
I often contemplate the differences between these two areas of study. Also, I hear fellow undergrads argue for one or the other, usually divided along the lines of their respective major. Anymore, I think they're so interrelated that I find it hard to find a difference between the two, except for the phases of matter that they most often deal with.
Back in the days when science was new, Physics dealt with understanding the fundamental laws of the universe, and it was Chemistry that was making the attempt at…
nisbetmc | May 13, 2009On the road giving talks this spring and in several forthcoming articles, I recommend that one way to widen the net in terms of public engagement is to hook science around entertainment media. A leading initiative I spotlight is the National Academies' Science & Entertainment Exchange which pairs scientists with TV and film producers. A recent success was the incidental news coverage generated by scientific consultation on the movie-version of The Watchmen.
This week comes another great strategy for "going broad" with science communication. As the NSF spotlights, more than 45 lectures are…
razib | May 13, 2009Physics, Tolkien, and the Bomb
Obesity - A new study and what it means to be a "healthy weight"
Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?
The Social Ramifications of Volcanism
Why don't we finish the human genome first?
drorzel | May 9, 2009
The winners of Slate's "Define Baseball in 150 Words" contest. - By John Dickerson - Slate Magazine
"Seven guys wait for these other two guys to play catch but this other guy is jealous because he wants to play and so he's trying to stop them with a stick." should've won.
(tags: silly sports slate)
Manny being woman-y. - By Juliet Lapidos - Slate Magazine
"Major League Baseball suspended Manny Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday, after investigators turned up documents suggesting that the slugger was using human chorionic gonadotropin. Typically a fertility drug for women, HCG…
oracknows | May 8, 2009After having blogged about cancer quackery for more than four years and having spent at least five years before that on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative seeing virtually all manner of quackery, cancer and otherwise, I thought I had seen it all. Indeed, I thought that there was no form of cancer quackery that I hadn't head about at some point before.
I was wrong.
Perusing the Skepchick blog the other day I saw a wonderful story related by Masala Skeptic about how a group of skeptics in Mississippi attended a talk by a cancer quack named Robert Dowling, who apparently claims that…
drorzel | May 5, 2009
Why Canât You? « Easily Distracted
"I had a fun conversation with a student this week who had a number of challenging questions about issues to pose to me. The question Iâm still knocking around: if academic cultural critics understand expressive culture so expertly, why canât they create it? Wouldnât it be better to always have experience in creating the cultural forms that you study?
I noted that this is an old and familiar (if legitimate) challenge. It popped up recently in Ratatouille, for example, but this is an old battle littered with bon mots and bitter denunciations. Thinking…
cwilcox | May 5, 2009The air felt thick and heavy in my lungs. As I drove further down the narrow strip of beach, my throat closed and my eyes burned. It wasn't normal sea air - it was toxic. Red tide was hitting the area in full force, killing off thousands of marine animals and filling the air with the neurotoxic compounds the algae Karenia brevis is known for. As the waves crash on shore, they break open the delicate algal cells, aerosolizing the odorless but noxious brevatoxins.
Many people have heard of red tide, but if you haven't experienced it, you should consider yourself lucky. A few years ago I was…
esiegel | May 5, 2009In 1862, an under-manned, under-equipped Mexican army defeated the French at the battle of Puebla on May 5th. Cinco de Mayo, started because of this event, has now become a widespread holiday in the US, where awareness and appreciation of Mexico and Mexican culture are of paramount importance.
So before you go out to Chi-Chi's or On the Border or whatever lousy, tasteless, watered-down margarita-hole you plan on going to, I'd like to share with you something real. This is personal, political, and particularly topical in the current economic crisis: this is about labor issues. Know who this…
rallain | May 4, 2009I got a great question (several actually) from the students participating in the Adopt a Physicist program. The question went something like this (not a direct quote):
Why is it that the stuff we study in physics class is 100 year old stuff?
I am sure the students phrased this better than that, but you get the idea. The first response is that most of the most of the topics covered in introductory physics is more like 300 years old (Newton). Needless, why do most course cover old topics?
First, to answer this question I would ask the following:
What is the purpose (goal) of the introductory…
drorzel | May 1, 2009
slacktivist: TF: Bruce's Big Plan
"Bruce, like Tim LaHaye, has a way of running off the rails when he gets into the details of his prophecy scheme. One can, in fact, open the book of Revelation and find mentioned there seven "seals" of divine judgment. By mentioning that fact first, Bruce casts a kind of biblical halo over whatever non-sequitur nonsense he says next -- "Remember the seven Seal Judgments Revelation talks about? Well, then Godzilla, lamb chop, munchkin, glockenspiel gumdrop." And everyone nods along as though he was somehow citing chapter and verse with authority."
(tags:…
drorzel | April 29, 2009A wonderfully incoherent press release came across my EurekAlert feeds yesterday, with the headline "Particle physics study finds new data for extra Z-bosons and potential fifth force of nature." You can tell it's going to make no sense at all from the very first sentence:
The Large Hadron Collider is an enormous particle accelerator whose 17-mile tunnel straddles the borders of France and Switzerland. A group of physicists at the University of Nevada, Reno has analyzed data from the accelerator that could ultimately prove or disprove the possibility of a fifth force of nature.
As the largest…
tlambert | April 23, 2009I agree with Barry Brook that Ian Plimer's approach to climate science in Heaven Earth is unscientific. He starts with his conclusion that there is no "evidential basis" that humans have caused recent warming and that the theory that humans can create global warming
is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archeology and geology.
He accepts any factoid that supports his conclusion and rejects any evidence that contradicts his conclusion. For example, he blindly accepts EG Beck's CO2 graph. And remember Khilyuk and Chilingar? The guys who compared human…
oracknows | April 20, 2009About a week and a half ago, something happened that makes me realize that the Jenny and Jim antivaccine propaganda tour that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago was clearly only phase I of Generation Rescue's April public relations offensive. About ten days ago, courtesy of J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, who in order to have a couple of famous faces fronting his organization has allowed himself to be displaced, so that Generation Rescue has now been "reborn" as Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's Autism Organization (the better to capitalize on her D-list celebrity yoked to Jim…
oracknows | April 17, 2009I've complained about it time and time again because it's annoyed me time and time again. Specifically, I'm talking about how various news outlets report scientific studies involving so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), sometimes called "integrative medicine" (IM), the latter of which I like to refer to adding a bit of woo to make the scientific medicine go down. In general, because the press likes stories that buck the establishment, it tends to favor studies that seem to show that CAM modalities work. Even worse, it tends to misinterpret negative studies in the most…
rallain | April 16, 2009I 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…
cortex | April 13, 2009In the Boston Globe Ideas section, Drake Bennett has a typically excellent article on the logical fallacies underlying best-selling business books, such as In Search of Excellence or Good to Great :
While the particulars vary, the basic idea underlying the literature is the same: that the secrets of success can be divined by careful study of the institutional habits of the world's business all-stars - companies that set the standard for their industries, that thrive in tough times, companies that win the war for talent, companies that are built to last. In the imperturbable focus on core…
scientificactivist | April 11, 2009The gold standard for measuring the impact of a scientific paper is counting the number of other papers that cite that paper. However, due to the drawn-out nature of the scientific publication process, there is a lag of at least a year or so after a paper is published before citations to it even begin to appear in the literature, and at least a few years are generally needed to get an accurate measure of how heavily cited an article will actually be. It's reasonable to ask, then, if there exists a mechanism to judge the impact of a paper much earlier in its lifetime.
Several analyses now…