Physical Sciences
mspringer | September 17, 2008No, I'm not dead or anything. There was no post this morning because I was absolutely bushed and bone tired. Homework, classes, teaching, and research over the last two days were ridiculous. The rest of the week looks not to be so bad. Funny how the whole "work" part of school never makes it into those films in the college-frat-party genre. I mean come on, I did my undergrad at LSU. They're a legendary party school. If those films have any relation to reality I think I'd have seen it. Now there was no shortage of parties and booze, but if there was anyone who tried to relive Animal…
tlambert | September 15, 2008The saga of Monckton's Physics and Society article continues (previous posts: 1 2 3 4
5). Via Eli Rabett, here is Arthur Smith's list of 125 errors in Monckton's piece.
Also, a few more snippets on how Monckton's article ended up in Physics and Society. Lawrence Krauss (outgoing chair of the American Physical Society's Forum on Physics and Society (FPS)) wrote:
Earlier this year, the editors ran a piece submitted by Gerald Marsh, a frequent contributor to FPS, in which he questioned the accuracy of climate change predictions and estimations of anthropogenic contributions to it. The article…
drorzel | September 13, 2008Back in March, I noted that I had inadvertently done an experiment to see what kinds of posts bring the most hits. That week, I posted one peer-reviewed post every day, along with a bunch of other articles, and I looked at the traffic stats to back up my contention that hard-core science blogging is not what racks up the page views.
The question came up again at the conference this past week, which reminded me that at the time, some people argued that the science posts weren't a big immediate draw, but would build up more posts over the long term. I thought it would be interesting to go back…
sb admin | September 10, 2008In this post: the large versions of the Education & Careers and Politics channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.
Education and Careers. From Flickr, by david_terrar
Politics. Protesters scuffle with police outside the Republican National Convention in St. Paul From Flickr, by Ligadier Truffaut
Reader comments of the week:
In Barack Obama: A pro-vaccine pharma shill who doesn't care about autistic children? Orac takes on the touchy subject of vaccines and autism by looking at Senator Obama's stance on the issue, and the reaction from around the…
stoat | September 5, 2008The story so far... IPCC sez sea-level rise (SLR) by 2100 (0.18 to 0.6 m), but this excluded dynamic effects on the grounds that present understanding of the relevant processes is too limited for reliable model estimates. It even said so fairly explicitly in the SPM table heading (Model-based range excluding future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow) but naturally enough this caveat gets ignored as not providing any useful numbers. RC noticed, of course. It does become obvious, however, that you can't really get any very exciting numbers out without some rapid ice sheet response.
But saying…
revere | September 2, 2008You might think it is an arcane subject, but a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), "Quantitative visualization of passive transport across bilayer lipid membranes" by Grime et al., is quite a stunner. This paper is about a century old formula called the Overton Rule (or Meyer - Overton Rule), used extensively to predict how fast chemicals get into cells and which ones do so most easily. It has been used to predict which anesthetics would work best and how fast and which toxic chemicals would get into which cells and how fast. For those of us who…
rallain | August 29, 2008I teach classes. I ask questions in class. I wait for answers. All faculty do this, so who cares. If you are in a class or teaching a class, how long do you wait for someone to answer your question? Well, I asked two questions of my class this week.
1. Estimate how long I wait when I ask you questions.
2. How long should you (ideally) wait in a class for someone to answer?
Here is the data I gathered: (and I will tell you how long I actually wait)
This is a class of about 30 students. Below is a histogram of how long they estimate I wait for an answer. To make things work out, I…
drorzel | August 29, 2008As anybody who has studied Quantum Optics knows, correlation functions play a very large role in our understanding of the behavior of light. Roughly speaking, the correlation function tells you how likely you are to detect a second photon some short time after detecting one photon from some source. This shows up in the famous Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment, and definitive proof of the existence of photons was provided in 1977 when Kimble, Dagenais and Mandel demonstrated photon anti-bunching, where the correlation function goes to zero for short times.
Correlation functions are a powerful…
oracknows | August 29, 2008The single most necessary task for a physician practicing science- and evidence-based medicine is the evaluation of the biomedical literature to extract from it just what science and the evidence support as the best medical therapy for a given situation. It is rare for the literature to be so clear on a topic that different physicians won't come to at least somewhat different conclusions. Far more common is the situation where the studies are conflicting, although usually with a preponderance of studies tending to support one or two interventions more than others, or where there are few or…
dmunger | August 21, 2008As a child (and like most children, I imagine) I used to think conducting an orchestra entailed something like what Bugs Bunny does in this video:
Waving the hands, as conductors frequently do, seemed largely for show. The conductor appeared to me to be more dancing along with the music than actually leading the musicians in any meaningful way. It wasn't until I married an amateur musician that I actually learned that the conductor could have an important influence on the way an orchestra sounds. But as Greta and I moved from place to place and she joined a variety of different ensembles, I…
drorzel | August 20, 2008The Mad Biologist points to and agrees with a post by Jonathan Eisen with the dramatic title "Why I Am Ashamed to Have a Paper in Science. Eisen's gripe is mostly about Science not being Open Access, but he throws in a complaint about length restrictions, which is what the Mad Biologist latches on to and amplifies. Eisen writes:
Science with its page length obsession forced Irene to turn her enormous body of work on this genome into a single page paper with most of the detail cut out. I do not think a one page paper does justice to the interesting biology or to her work. A four page paper…
illconsidered | August 20, 2008I poke into Jennifer Marohasy's blog from time to time, though I am no longer a regular commenter. I gave that up a couple of years ago but still take any special cases as opportunities to chime in again. She's one of those standard types of sceptics, the "scientist" from another discipline just "honestly" investigating an important issue about which she has no preconceptions.
Well, a recent post prompted Deltoid's Tim Lambert to shake his head in consternation as Jennifer gives a soapbox to yet another crackpot pseudo-science post where we are told that the concept of radiative equilibrium…
oracknows | August 18, 2008In complaining about the infiltration of pseudoscience in the form of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) into academic medicine, as I have many times, I've made the observation that three common modalities appear to function as "gateway woo, if you will, in that they are the tip of the wedge (not unlike the wedge strategy for "intelligent design" creationism, actually) that slip into any defect or crack it can find and widen it, allowing entrance of more hard core woo like homeopathy behind them.
All of these modalities fall under the rubric of "energy healing" in that the…
drorzel | August 16, 2008
nanoscale views: Cryptophysicists
"I think that we need to coin an official term, "cryptophysicist", to describe people who do physics research outside the mainstream." Hey to "Uncle Al."
(tags: science physics stupid blogs)
Built on Facts : Temperature of a Microwave
What is the temperature when you nuke food? Does the question even make sense?
(tags: physics science food blogs)
Study examines the psychology behind students who don't cheat
"The study of students at one Ohio university found that students who scored high on measures of courage, empathy and honesty were less likely than…
ejohnson | August 13, 2008
When you want to know how much energy is emitted into space by radiation from a given object—say, a star—and the answer resembles this:
it's good to have someone like Matt Springer around to explain it to you. Matt, ScienceBlogs' newest blogger, writes Built on Facts, and his posts are suitably laden with all kinds of interesting physics facts—and theories, quirks of the universe, and scientific ponderings. Matt's a grad student studying—you guessed it—physics at Texas A&M and eventually hopes to earn his Ph.D., a goal in which his "most marked characteristic" will certainly come in…
drorzel | August 12, 2008In the comments to yesterday's post about science in popular media, ZapperZ responds with a comment that illustrates the problem:
I am not saying that the media shouldn't report ABOUT science, as accurately as they can. I am saying that DOING science isn't done in popular media. Science isn't done that way, especially when "research" is done haphazardly with little regards for proper scientific methodology. The popular media simply does not know how to do that.
Now, one can argue that they should. But till they actually get to that stage, science has only been properly done in various…
ejohnson | August 6, 2008In this post: the large versions of the Environment, Humanities & Social Science and Education & Careers channel photos and comments from readers.
Environment. From Flickr, by *clairity*
Humanities & Social Science. One of Olafur Eliasson's New York City Waterfalls cascades off the Brooklyn Bridge. From Flickr, by epicharmus
Education & Careers. Traffic lights at dusk in Portland, Oregon. From Flickr, by Mannequin-
Reader comments of the week:
In Forget the planet, save the humans!, Coby of A Few Things Ill Considered shares a video created by a 10 year old boy which…
goodmath | August 6, 2008 Someone sent me another stupid Jewish article. It's still not the
wonderful relativity denial that I lost, but it's pretty delicious as
stupidity goes. This time it comes from Chabad. For those who aren't
familiar with it, Chabad is a Chasidic organization, which originally
formed around people following a very famous Rabbi from the town of
Lubav after he emigrated to the US. Chabad grew into a very large
fundamentalist organization that is very devoted to what they call
outreach. (I call it proselytization.)
Anyway - on to the article: "Are Science and Religion a Contradiction?". Large…
clock | August 4, 2008My SciBling John Lynch recently published a very interesting paper, on a topic close to my heart: Does Science Education Need the History of Science? by Graeme Gooday, John M. Lynch, Kenneth G. Wilson, and Constance K. Barsky. Isis, 2008, 99:322-330
This is a part of a broader focus issue of Isis on the topic of History of Science. I got the paper two weeks ago, but only now found some time to sit down and read it. And I was not disappointed! Fortunately for all of us, the entire paper is available online for free (yeah!), so you can read it in its entirety.
While using the fight against…
drorzel | August 4, 2008I've been slacking a bit, lately, in terms of putting science-related content on the blog. Up until last week, most of my physics-explaining energy was going into working on the book, and on top of that, I've been a little preoccupied with planning for the arrival of FutureBaby.
I'd like to push things back in the direction of actual science blogging, so I'm going to implement an idea I had a while back: I'm going to go back through the papers in my CV, and write them up for ResearchBlogging.org.
This offers a couple of nice benefits from my perspective. First of all, I already know what's in…