Physical Sciences
drorzel | May 2, 2008I'm going to be busy all day (more or less) at the Steinmetz Symposium, listening to talks about the fantastic things our students have been doing with their research projects. So it's going to be a "talk among yourselves" day here at Uncertain Principles, for the most part.
It's been a little while since I ran a Dorky Poll thread, mostly because I'm running low on topics. Here's one that may be a little too esoteric, inspired by looking at the diploma on my wall:
Chemical Physics, or Physical Chemistry?
For bonus points, what's the difference between them?
Also, are there other pairs of…
drorzel | May 1, 2008
The Voltage Gate : Why Jurassic Park Is Not a Pro-Science Movie
Because Michael Crichton is a writer of Luddite Fiction
(tags: books literature movies society culture)
A consistent, worldwide association between short sleep duration and obesity
'"[The study] raises the unanswered question yet of whether this is a cause-effect association. Only prospective longitudinal studies will be able to address the outstanding question," said Dr. Cappuccio.'
(tags: medicine science news)
Biologists are from Mars, chemists are from Venus?
"But how do scientists from different disciplines and…
dmunger | May 1, 2008One of the amazing things about learning language is that children rarely hear language sounds in ideal acoustic environments. Maybe other people are talking in the background, or the dishwasher is running, or the TV is on. Yet somehow children they learn words just the same. By the time we're adults, we've become experts at filtering out irrelevant sounds and patching together meaning out of the cacophony of everyday life.
As one example, listen to this short clip of me saying the word "dinosaur" three times.
I edited the "s" sound out of the first "dinosaur," so you can clearly hear me…
clock | April 28, 2008
Chad wrote a neat history of (or should we say 'evolution of') clocks, as in "timekeeping instruments". He points out the biological clocks are "...sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics..." and he is right - for us biologists, messier the better. We wallow in mess, cherish ambiguity and relish in complexity. Anyway, he is talking about real clocks - things made by people to keep time. And he starts with a simple definition of what a clock is:
In order to really discuss the physics of timekeeping, you need to strip the idea of a clock down to the absolute bare…
drorzel | April 25, 2008Given the amount of time I've spent writing about academic issues this week, it's only fitting that the science story getting the most play is about math education. Ed Yong provides a detailed explanation, and Kenneth Chang summarizes the work in the New York Times. Here's Ed's introduction:
Except they don't really work. A new study shows that far from easily grasping mathematical concepts, students who are fed a diet of real-world problems fail to apply their knowledge to new situations. Instead, and against all expectations, they were much more likely to transfer their skills if they were…
gregladen | April 23, 2008Despite the fact that the producers of Expelled! have the most nefarious of motives in mind, and that we can expect more from them (we are waiting for the other shoe to drop), it is interesting to note how many conversations this documentary about Intelligent Design Creationism has sparked. Ultimately, the intended purpose of Expelled! is to silence real scientists and set back scientific research that is on the verge of filling one of the most important "gaps" in which the Christian God of the theistic evolutionist currently lives. In the long run, conversations that arise from movies like…
thusspakezuska | April 17, 2008UPDATE: After posting this entry, I found out that the paper I discussed here is not actually slated at this time to be published in a peer-reviewed journal; it is merely available as a preprint. Nevertheless, I hear that the folks at Nature have picked up on this and have interviewed the author; we may see something next week there about it.
Remember that famous line about how women need to be twice as good as men to be considered half as good? A new statistical study by Sherry Towers available on ArXiv.org shows just how true this is in the world of particle physics.
Here's the scoop…
mixingmemory | April 17, 2008Last month, a paper was published in Nature, in which Kay et al(1) were able to guess which of their stimuli a person was seeing by looking at their fMRI scans. The model looked something like this (from Kay et al's Figure 1, p. 352):
The image the participant is seeing is on the left, the numbers in the middle represent receptive fields, and the predicted brain activity is on the right. Just compare the predicted brain activity for each image to actual brain activity, and whichever matches the best is the image the person was viewing when they produced that brain activity. Simple, right?…
gregladen | April 16, 2008He was 90 and worked at MIT. From the MIT press release:
Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90.
A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere--or a model of the atmosphere--could trigger vast and often…
drorzel | April 15, 2008
Meeting Announcment HTML Email
Including the classic anti-quack essay "DRIVE THE PSEUDOS OUT OF THE WORKSHOP OF SCIENCE," by the late J. A. Wheeler, albeit in a nearly unreadable format.
(tags: science stupid medicine psychology physics quantum)
Fighting Gossip With Graphics :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs
Princeton accentuates the positive.
(tags: academia education society culture internet)
Large Hadron Collider - Risk of a Black Hole - Dennis Overbye - Physics - New York Times
People who aren't crazy think about the odds.
(tags: physics…
gregladen | April 15, 2008That elephants have an aquatic ancestry has been suspected for some time now. Moreover, the idea of elephant aquatic origins and elephant origins in general is part of a growing realization that many of the world's aquatic mammals originated in a couple of regions of Africa that were for a very long time enormous inland seas (but that is another story I won't cover here).
The earlier evidence came from observation of the ontogeny of the kidneys in elephants, during which the kidneys take on the characteristics that are found in aquatic mammals generally. That research was published in 1999…
pontiff | April 15, 2008It was an unassuming blue-grey volume tucked away in the popular science section of the Siskiyou County Library. "Spacetime Physics" it announced proudly in gold letters across the front of the book. Published in 1965, the book looked as if it hadn't been touched in the decades since 1965. A quick opening of the book revealed diagrams of dogs floating beside rocket ships, infinite cubic lattices, and buses orbiting the Earth, all interspaced with a mathematical equations containing symbols the likes of which I'd never seen before. What was this strange book, and what, exactly, did those…
sciencewoman | April 8, 2008Before I even arrived at Mystery U, I was contacted by a student already in our PhD program. The student was about to start his third year in the program, and wanted to know whether I would be willing to advise him. The problem, he said, was that there was no faculty member who had his research specialty. When he told me what he was working on, I was aghast. I couldn't possibly advise him! I know nothing about his specialty either! But after meeting with him and learning more specifics about his situation, I agreed to be his advisor.
Now I just needed to advise him well enough to for him to…
gregladen | April 5, 2008There is an updated version of this post here: "Is Blood Ever Blue, Science Teachers Want To Know!"
According to one of the leading experts on the human circulatory system, blood flowing through veins is blue.
I'm not going to mention any names. All I'll say is this: A person I know visited a major research center last year and saw a demonstration of organ removal and some other experimental stuff. A person also visiting asked the famous high-level researcher doing this work if blood was ever blue. What he said was not recorded in detail, but it was very much like this statement I found…
jane | April 3, 2008In this next part of the strangely popular series "Is Computer Science a Science?", I'll look at whether Computer Science fits the definition of "science". (see parts 1 and 1a for the inaugural posts in the series)
Most people seem to apply a certain litmus test of sorts to determine if something is a science. Something is a science if
(1) it uses the scientific method (i.e., empirical research and observation)
(2) it involves studying "fundamental principles" of the natural or physical world
(1) is, I think, a bit easier to address. I use the scientific method all the time in my work: I…
drorzel | April 3, 2008I really had intended for Tuesday's dog pictures to be my only comment on the recent framing debacle (well, Monday's expertise post was an oblique commentary on it, but nobody got that, which you can tell because the comments were civil and intelligent and interesting to read). But Chris Mooney is making a good-faith effort to clear things up with his current series, including an effort to define common ground, and he's getting absolutely pounded, for no good reason.
I think Chris and Matt Nisbet have made some tactical errors in making their case to ScienceBlogs, chief among them forgetting…
laelaps | April 2, 2008Although the initial flurry of posts about framing has died down, the debate about what framing is, is not, or should be continues. In an effort to go back to square 1, Chris has posted up a basic rundown of why framing is important, item #6 on the list getting to the heart of why this issue is so controversial;
Rather, you have to pare down these highly complex issues--or "frame" them--selectively highlighting just those aspects of the issue that will resonate with the core values of the particular audience (and there are different audiences, of course, and different frames will work for…
omnibrain | March 31, 2008Welcome to the most recent installation of the neuroscience blog carnival, Encephelon, here at Of Two Minds! Steve and I thought we would mix things up a little bit and let a guest blogger summarize the best brain blogging (submitted to us (this week)). That guest is none other that famed socialite Paris Hilton, who wished to take this opportunity to attempt to change her image from fashionista to neuronista. Please welcome Paris!
Hi neurokids, Paris here. While I'm sure that you have already formed an opinion of me due to the massive media coverage of my escapades and foibles, hopefully…
oracknows | March 31, 2008I've never been able to figure out how anyone who claims to be devoted to science and scientific medicine can take homeopathy the least bit seriously. None of it makes any sense scientifically. Its basic principal of the "Law of Similars" has far more basis in the concepts of sympathetic magic than anything that science has to say, while its concept that diluting a substance (with shaking--a homeopath will always tell you that the shaking is absolutely necessary!) far beyond the point where there is likely to be even a single molecule of the remedy left actually makes it more potent has no…
drorzel | March 31, 2008Academics of all sorts are highly protective of their scholarly territory. It's an unavoidable consequence of the process of becoming an academic-- I've often joked that getting a Ph.D. requires you to become the World's Leading Expert in something that nobody else cares about. To make it through grad school, no matter what discipline you're in, you need to really like what you're doing, and that produces a tendency to angrily attack anyone who trespasses on "your" turf.
There's an interesting difference, though, in the way that scholars from the humanities and socials sciences approach the…