Physical Sciences
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…
razib | February 17, 2009Dan the man's post on Race & IQ generated a lot of feedback. A lot. Those of you who are familiar with my weblog oeuvre know I used to be more interested in psychometrics. No more. Rather, if you don't want to believe in IQ or general intelligence, fine. My own experience is that very intelligent people (e.g, Mark, PhD physiology, now getting his MD, undergraduate background in physics) often are the most robust and cogent objectors to IQ or psychometric testing as a relatively useful reflection of intelligence. Dumb people know very well they're dumb, and they're not too coherent or…
purepedantry | February 17, 2009Submarines collide:
In a freak accident, two submarines carrying nuclear missiles, one French and the other British, collided while submerged on operational patrols in the Atlantic early this month, the British and French defense ministries said Monday.
Both vessels returned damaged but otherwise safe to their home ports, with the 250 crew members aboard uninjured and with "no compromise to nuclear safety," the defense ministries said in terse statements that appeared to have been agreed upon by the nations. The reference appeared to cover the nuclear reactors that power the submarines and…
drorzel | February 16, 2009
immlass: You have no privacy. Get over it.
"Facebook may be sleazy and selling more of your information than you like to advertisers, but the idea it wants to steal your IP and do something with it seems vanishingly unlikely. I suspect the change in TOS has something to do with protecting their asses against overzealous privacy claims or their right to hang on to data under some jurisdiction's stringent laws instead. If I really wanted to know, I'd ask Facebook, which nobody, including the authors of the article above, seems to have bothered doing.
"Treat Facebook with some caution, people…
purepedantry | February 12, 2009SEA (again) has the details of the result of the House and Senate conference bill for economic stimulus. Here are the parts related to science:
Provides $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, for basic research in fundamental science and engineering - which spurs discovery and innovation.
Provides $1.6 billion for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, which funds research in such areas as climate science, biofuels, high-energy physics, nuclear physics and fusion energy sciences - areas crucial to our energy future.
Provides $400 million for the Advanced Research Project…
mikethemadbiologist | February 12, 2009From Speaker Pelosi's office:
Transform our Economy with Science and Technology: To secure America's role as a world leader in a competitive global economy, we are renewing America's investments in basic research and development, in training students for an innovation economy, and in deploying new technologies into the marketplace. This will help businesses in every community succeed in a global economy.
Investing in Scientific Research (More than $15 Billion)
Provides $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, for basic research in fundamental science and engineering - which spurs…
drorzel | February 12, 2009
Different Cliffs, Different Bottoms, Different Parachutes « Easily Distracted
"If one of the goals of stimulus is to get American consumers shopping again, then I think itâs going to take some substantial changes to the entire retail landscape for that to be more than a momentary upward blip in a relentlessly downward spiral. And at least some of those changes will involve rethinking the size, scale and ubiquity of retailing."
(tags: blogs economics society culture internet business)
Are College Athletes Psyching Themselves Out? :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News,…
pontiff | February 12, 2009The Computing Research Policy Blog is reporting possible good news for science funding:
Speaker Pelosi's office just released a fact sheet on the conference agreement for the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act and, wow, it looks good for science agencies in the bill. Here's the relevant bit:
Transform our Economy with Science and Technology: To secure America's role as a world leader in a competitive global economy, we are renewing America's investments in basic research and development, in training students for an innovation economy, and in deploying new technologies into the…
drorzel | February 10, 2009Like a lot of physics departments, we offer an upper-level lab class, aimed at juniors and seniors. There are a lot of ways to approach this sort of course, but one sensible way to think about it is in terms of giving students essential skills and experiences. That is, i's a course in which they learn to do the things that no physics major should graduate without doing.
I'm sure that other disciplines do something similar, so I thought I might throw this out there as a general question:
What are the essential skills and experiences a student ought to have before graduating with a degree in…
razib | February 9, 2009Chad is complaining that The Best American Science Writing 2008 is too focused on biomedical science. He finds it especially lame that there's no physics when this was the year of the LHC. Here's what I found in the contents....
Amy Harmon, Facing Life with a Lethal Gene
Richard Preston, An Error in the Code
Thomas Goetz, 23anMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics
Carl Zimmer, Evolved for Cancer
Tara Parker-Pope, How NIH Misread Hormone Study in 2002
Gardiner Harris, Benedict Carey, and Janet Roberts, Psychiatrists, Children and Drug Industry's Role
Daniel Carlat…
cmooney | February 9, 2009So...it is not exactly easy to find history of science classics at your average--or even your well above average--bookstore.
The class I'm officially taking here at Princeton, History 293, focuses heavily on a course packet and so doesn't have many officially assigned books. It does have a few; they are Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species--which I already own and have read, although right now they're somewhere in the middle of the country in transit--and Michael Adas's Machines As the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell Studies in…
clock | February 9, 2009Census Of Modern Organisms Reveals Echo Of Ancient Mass Extinction:
Paleontologists can still hear the echo of the death knell that drove the dinosaurs and many other organisms to extinction following an asteroid collision at the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago.
New Bird Species: New Species Of Babbler Discovered In China:
A new species of babbler has been described from Guangxi province in south-west China close to the border with Vietnam. Named Nonggang Babbler Stachyris nonggangensis, after the reserve at which it was discovered, this new species is closely related to…
clock | February 7, 2009Science coverage in New York Times is good because they can afford a whole stable of people, each expert in one field only. If Carl Zimmer was forced to cover, on a daily basis and without time to research, everything from astronomy and physics to archaeology and materials science, he would do a bad job, too. But he is given time to pick his own area - evolution - to study it for years, and to write whatever the heck he wants on any given week. So Carl is an expert on what he is writing.
A small paper with one science beat reporter will have to cover everything and that reporter will thus…
drorzel | February 4, 2009In the last report from my modern physics course, we wrapped up Relativity, and started into quantum mechanics, talking about black-body radiation and Planck's quantum hypothesis. The next few classes continue the historical theme
Class 10: I make a point of noting that Planck himself never liked the idea of quantization of light, and in fact never applied the idea to light directly. His quantum model for black-body radiation was based on the idea of having "oscillators" in the object emitting the radiation. Einstein was the first to apply the idea of quantization to light directly, and take…
mspringer | February 3, 2009As a graduate student, you're an adult on your own. You have to find a place to live, food to eat, and a way to get around. Like most of the necessities of life, these things cost money. Where to get it?
There's three major options.
1. Teaching Assistantships. You are hired by the department in which you study to teach classes to the undergraduates. This is what I do now. In my case it requires about 9 hours of blackboard time a week, and another three or so grading and lesson planning. It's a lot of trouble and it doesn't pay all that well, but for a 12-14 hour/week job of fairly low…
evolvingthoughts | January 30, 2009There is an extensive literature on essentialism in the natural sciences, including recent work by Brian Ellis, Joseph Laporte and others arguing that it is time to reintroduce the notion of essentialism. This follows the raising of essentialism in the philosophy of language by Hilary Putnam in the 1970s. Just recently, in an essay in Philosophy of Science (whose bastard editors will not even acknowledge that they have received my submissions after 12 months, ahem), Michael Devitt published a paper in which he wants to establish what he calls "intrinsic biological essentialism".
I will have…
evolvingthoughts | January 30, 2009Ron Amundson is a philosopher and historian of biology at the University of Hawai'i - Hilo who has done some great work in my field. So I was greatly amused and more than a little sympathetic to see this disclaimer linked to from Leiter's blog:
Metaphysics DISCLAIMER
Phil 310, Metaphysics, is a course in some core topics in Western Philosophy, including the Free Will Problem, the Mind-Body Problem, related problems in Philosophy of Mind, and the Problem of Personal Identity. If you’re interested in what these involve, you can find long discussions online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of…
drorzel | January 29, 2009
US LHC Blog » Can We âPointâ the LHC, Too?
"[C]ould we put up some kind of page where people could vote on what kind of physics we would study over the course of some particular week? Maybe a choice between searching for Supersymmetry, or a high-mass Higgs boson, or a low-mass Higgs boson? "
(tags: science physics silly internet particles)
Abstruse Goose » The Secret Lives of Photons
Life for photons can be harsh.
(tags: physics comics silly optics relativity)
The Little Professor: Just add zombies and stir
"The LibraryThing Blog kindly--or unkindly, take your pick--points us in the…
crowdfavorite | January 27, 2009Our Benevolent Seed Overlords ask "What is science's rightful place?" which refers to a line from Obama's inaugural address where he vowed to "restore science to its rightful place."
Since ScienceBlogling Jake discussed the importance of basing policy on evidence--as well as correctly recognizing that the method we use to solve problems does not shed much light on whether we should address those problems in the first place--I want to bring up one problem that science faces: it is, to a great extent, elitist.
Before all of the TEH SCIENTISMZ R EVUL!!! crowd gets all hot and bothered, what I…
sb admin | January 27, 2009Our Benevolent Seed Overlords ask "What is science's rightful place?" which refers to a line from Obama's inaugural address where he vowed to "restore science to its rightful place."
Since ScienceBlogling Jake discussed the importance of basing policy on evidence--as well as correctly recognizing that the method we use to solve problems does not shed much light on whether we should address those problems in the first place--I want to bring up one problem that science faces: it is, to a great extent, elitist.
Before all of the TEH SCIENTISMZ R EVUL!!! crowd gets all hot and bothered, what I…