Physical Sciences
drorzel | April 1, 2009
Hold Steady rocks for the lucky few -- Page 1 -- Times Union - Albany NY
"The Hold Steady's Tuesday night performance at Valentine's was sold-out weeks in advance of the show, which left a lot of mopers without a ticket or a hope of getting in.
Those who'd jumped on the chance early on, though, were treated to a walloping dose of Craig Finn and crew, the likes of which a venue the size of Valentine's probably won't see until the band is making the reunion rounds 20 years from now."
(tags: news music review)
When are fake forces awesome? | Dot Physics
"A fake force is one of those forces…
oracknows | March 30, 2009Indiana Jones had a saying: "Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?" This line was most famously delivered in Raiders of the Lost Ark after he and his friend Sallah had opened the Well of Souls and were staring down into it. Sallah noticed that the ground appeared to be moving within; so Indy shined a light down the entrance, only to see thousands of snakes waiting for him at the bottom.
Sallah then drily observed, "Asps. Very dangerous. You go first."
As we knew from earlier in the movie, Indiana Jones hated snakes and was afraid of them; so it was only natural that later in the movie he would…
drorzel | March 28, 2009
Optics basics: Youngâs double slit experiment « Skulls in the Stars
"As Iâve so far been restricting my âoptics basicsâ posts to discussions of fundamental concepts related to optics, it might seem strange at first glance to dedicate a post to a single optical experiment. What will hopefully become clear, however, is that Youngâs double slit experiment is connected to so many basic concepts in optical physics (and still provides surprising new results to this day) that one post is hardly enough to describe all the interesting insights that can be gained by studying the experiment and its…
oracknows | March 27, 2009Since its very inception, the Huffington Post has been a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. Shortly after that, antivaccine woo-meisters like David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kimg Stagliano, and, apparently, one of the editors (Special Projects Editor Rachel Sklar) were joined by all-purpose woo-meisters like Deepak Chopra. True, for a brief period of time there appeared to be an occasional voice for vaccines on HuffPo, but they never lasted. After all, RFK, Jr.'s been there nearly four years now and David Kirby almost as long, while pro-vaccine commentary pops up briefly, gets shouted down by…
pontiff | March 26, 2009Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to a question that I'm nearly constantly asked: "So...[long pause]...are you a physicist...[long pause]...or are you a computer scientist?" Like many theorists in quantum computing, a field perched between the two proud disciplines of physics and computer science (and spilling its largess across an even broader swath of fields), I struggle with answering this question. Only today, after a long and torturous half year (where by torture, I mean interviewing for jobs, not the eerily contemporaneous fall of the world's finances) in which I have been…
palmd | March 25, 2009Whatever you think of its political reporting, no other mainstream media outlet can bring the stupid like the Huffington Post, especially with regards to medical reporting. Its most famous contributors include antivaccinationists like David Kirby and Robert Kennedy, Jr., and kumbaya therapy wackaloon Deepak Chopra.
Now they bring us an article by some dude I've never heard of with a title that should have him laughed out of any legitimate scientific institution: "The Science of Distant Healing". This is one stupid article.
First of all, who the hell is this guy? According to his bio:
Dr.…
bioephemera | March 24, 2009
It's Ada Lovelace Day!
Ada Lovelace (1815 - 1852) is often referred to as the world's first computer programmer. The daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, and the admired intellect, Annabella Milbanke, Ada Lovelace represented the meeting of two alternative worlds: the romanticism and art of her father versus the rationality and science of her mother. In her attempt to draw together these polar opposites and create a 'poetical science' during the Victorian age, Ada collaborated with the renowned mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage. (source)
I'm betting famous names like Marie Curie…
terrasig | March 18, 2009I just had a chance to check in on a triad of posts by Prof Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science (1, 2, 3) on the ethical issues of the conduct of studies, particularly clinical trials, supported by the US NIH's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).
For background, NCCAM was originally established for political, not scientific reasons, as the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine in October 1991. It received a token budget of $2 million at the time. They still only get $120-ish million; modest by NIH standards as compared, say, with the 2007 NCI…
gregladen | March 18, 2009According to this film, lifted from ABATC
I made a list using whatever gender cues were given of what was seemingly suggesed for boys vs. girls to aspire to. No great surprizes. Well, actually, there are few slightly surprising items on the girls' list. 1
For Boys:
astro-scientist/Astronaut
chemist
biology
physics
sports star who knows about science
musician who knows about science
medicine
security
destruction/evil scientist
Nobel peace prize
cure world hunger
civil engineer
professor
agricultural science
electrochemical engineer
astronomy
pharmacology
philosophy
statesmen
minister…
oracknows | March 18, 2009It's probably an understatement to say that I've been critical of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Indeed, I consider it not only to be a boondoggle that wastes the taxpayers' money funding pseudoscience, but a key promoter of quackery. Worse, its promotion of highly implausible (one might even say magical) modalities gives these modalities a patina of scientific respectability that they do not deserve, especially given that, even under the most favorable conditions possible, they routinely fail to demonstrate any efficacy above and beyond that of a…
khannula | March 16, 2009Callan Bentley has declared a meme:
What are ten things that every geology major ought to know about? The only restriction is you're not allowed to list anything that has already been listed by a previous geoblogger. You don't have to list everything, just ten important things.
Before I add to the list (which has already gotten quite long): Callan, I hope you're not planning to bring back the geology subject GREs or something. I took them. I swear I got maybe half of the questions right, and still ended up with a score in the 90-somethingth percentile. I'm glad they're gone. (And if we did…
clock | March 11, 2009Les Lang at the UNC Medical Center News Office now writes a blog - Hard Science. One recent post immediately caught my eye - Clocking Cancer:
You might say that Dr. Aziz Sancar is trying to clock cancer.
In a nifty double play involving a pair of recent publications in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the Sarah Graham Kenan professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UNC found in one study that tinkering with the circadian clock can suppress cancer growth, and in the other he and his lab team presented molecular data suggesting why timing just might be everything…
bioephemera | March 10, 2009So I observed Pi day by baking a pie. But Representative Bart Gordon of Tennessee, Chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, has a much grander idea: let's pass a resolution!
Witness H.Res.224, introduced yesterday:
Supporting the designation of Pi Day, and for other purposes.
Whereas the Greek letter (Pi) is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter;Whereas the ratio Pi is an irrational number, which will continue infinitely without repeating, and has been calculated to over one trillion digits;Whereas Pi is a recurring constant that has…
razib | March 8, 2009Evolution is a fact. Lineages change over time, and respond to selection pressures as well as being buffeted by stochastic processes. The arguments about the particular details of the process of evolution can be very vociferous. Scientists are human too, and great evolutionary biologists such as R. A. Fisher stooped to venomous insult when backed into a corner (see his disputes with Sewall Wright during the 1930s). But the superstructure of human foibles and follies rests upon a foundation of genuine scientific dispute, and attempts to refine models which map onto reality.
For example…
sciencepunk | March 6, 2009
The BBC has a bit of a patchy track record when it comes to promoting pseudoscience. On the one hand, they've featured investigations into homeopaths and Brain Gym, on the other, various charlatans still manage to slip the editorial net and promote their particular flavour of quackery on air. This is one of the latter occasions.
Last Wednesday, life coach Janet Thompson managed to bag herself a good chunk of air time on the Chris Evans Drive Time show on BBC Radio 2 to promote herself and make bizarre false claims about how the human body works. You can listen to the show here, the…
oracknows | March 5, 2009I realize I've said it before, but I still can't believe as many people read what I like to lay down on a daily basis right here on this blog. Believe me, it has nothing to do with an sort of false sense of modesty. After four years at this, I know I'm good at blogging. Real good. But good isn't always enough to make much of a difference or even to garner an audience. Whether I've done the first, I don't know. I like to think that I have. As for the second, I've done pretty well for myself. Indeed, after a year of stagnant traffic, January and February were the best months, traffic-wise, in…
clock | February 28, 2009Actually, Journalists do take some of the blame for the death of newspapers:
But why is the business model dying?
Competition is a factor, and blogs are obviously part of that mix. But again, if I'd started a business and someone else opened up down the street and offered a more appealing product, and I lost customers, would it be fair to blame the other guy alone for my problems?
In a free market, we have competition. Yes, it can suck when you're not on the winning side. But there's nothing saying that you can't start a new business, or reform your existing one to compete.
Newspapers remain…
goodmath | February 26, 2009 An alert reader sent me a link to a really dreadful piece of drek. In some ways, it's a
rehash of the "Nullity" nonsense from a couple of years ago, but with a new spin.
If you don't remember nullity, it was the attempt of one idiot to define division by zero.
He claimed to have "solved" the great problem of dividing by zero, and by doing so, to be able
to do all manner of amazing things, such as to build better computers that would be less prone
to bugs.
Today's garbage is in the
same vein: another guy, this one named Jeff Cook, who claims to have "solved" the problem of
division by zero.…
drorzel | February 25, 2009Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is taking another whack at photons. If you recall, the last time he did this wasn't too successful, and this round fares no better:
So back to the photon. In my original post I made the claim that the photoelectric effect is not a great experiment to show photons. Maybe that is not how it came off, but that is what I meant. The photoelectric effect can be explained quite well with the classical electromagnetic waves model and a quantum nature of matter. Of course there is a quantum nature to light as well.
I think the biggest problem with the photon is that the…
oracknows | February 18, 2009Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging, and even if I did my wife needs me more. Because I foresaw this coming, however, I do have a series of "Best of" reposts lined up. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don't know when I'll be back, other than maybe a brief update or two…