Physical Sciences
oracknows | January 23, 2008I'm a little late on this, but Avery Comarow, the reporter who wrote the big story three weeks ago in U.S. News & World Report about the infiltration of woo into academic medicine, has responded to criticisms of his column in his blog.
His response, I'm afraid, is underwhelming.
First, he starts out with the claim that he is an "evidence" guy:
A few words about that story and how it evolved. Regular readers (scratch "regular"--anybody who's read a single post) can tell I'm an evidence kind of guy. Claims without backup data give me the urge to turn the page, click on another link, get off…
mikethemadbiologist | January 23, 2008If creationists are going to be stupid, couldn't they at least be creative about it? Once again, they misunderstand the potential and limits of experimentation. By way of ScienceBlogling Greg Laden comes this summary by Texan Citizens for Science of the new creationistChristian perspective of origins* offensive against biology:
Here, briefly, is the distinction: ICR believes that there are two types of science: (1) physical science, including physics and chemistry, that Creationists term "experimental, empirical, or operation science" because one can perform experiments (i.e. operations) on…
drorzel | January 22, 2008
In the Fatosphere, Big Is in, or at Least Accepted - New York Times
Tune in to the denialism blog for an explosion in 5... 4... 3...
(tags: medicine food society blogs)
Flagging economy needs science investments
The head of Intel blasts Congress over the science funding debacle.
(tags: education science economics politics)
This Week in Milford
There really is a blog for everything...
(tags: comics blogs silly)
Most Diversity Training Ineffective, Study Finds
"When attendance is voluntary, diversity training is followed by an increase in managerial diversity, ... Most employers,…
drorzel | January 16, 2008
Quantum Hoops
We're still not sure whether they won or lost.
(tags: basketball academia sports physics movies)
slacktivist: King and Huck
The difference between the religious language of Martin Luther King and Mike Huckabee.
(tags: religion politics US society culture)
Coping With the Crunch :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
A good summary of the physics funding problems created by the recent spending bill.
(tags: physics economics politics news academia US)
SF Signal: MIND MELD: Today's SF Authors Define Science Fiction (Part 2)
The ever-popular…
chaoticutopia | January 14, 2008A new concern arose around the turn of the 21st century, among the advancements in technology and science: what is the future of our planet's climate? This is a bold question, considering traditional problems with predicting the future. We have no evidence of future events, due to the asymmetry of time. It is difficult even to reconcile different interpretations of present conditions, because of epistemological flaws in our methods of observation. In the face of such uncertainties, and with fortunetelling abandoned along with magical thinking many years before, can science provide useful…
tlambert | January 9, 2008Back in November 2001 Neil Munro was an advocate of war with Iraq and predicted:
The painful images of starving Iraqi children will be replaced by alluring Baghdad city lights, smiling wages-earners and Palestinian job seekers.
Iraq war advocates like Munro don't like the results of the Lancet study that suggest that about 600,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war they championed. So Munro has written a piece that throws every piece of mud he can find at the study, and to their discredit, the National Journal has published it. And if you think I'm being unfair by stressing Munro's…
drorzel | January 8, 2008
PHD Comics: Research Diagram/Research Reality
No schematic survives its first encounter with the apparatus.
(tags: silly comics science experiment)
Teens find the benefits of not having sex decline with age
"The greatest change in attitudes was among teens who became sexually experienced during the study period. For those teens, the percentage who said that not having sex resulted in only positive experiences dropped from 40 percent to 6 percent."
(tags: sex news science psychology society)
New nanostructured thin film shows promise for efficient solar energy conversion
"When compared…
drorzel | January 7, 2008
Economists Say Movie Violence Might Temper the Real Thing - New York Times
"From 6 p.m. to midnight on weekends -- when the largest numbers of people are in theaters -- violent crimes decreased 1.3 percent for every million people watching a strongly violent movie, the study found. Violent crimes dropped 1.1 percent for every
(tags: economics movies society psychology)
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe
Ron Paul shot before Greedo.
(tags: comics politics SF silly movies)
Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: ABC…
gregladen | January 3, 2008It is common knowledge that most Americans are creationists, and prefer creationist stories of human origins and evolution in general over the findings of evolutionary biology. But this is only true if you ask the questions a certain way, and a new study shows very different results.
This is a new survey of 1,000 likely voters across the U.S. reported in an editorial in the journal of The Federation of the American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). The survey, reported here, found that most respondents "accepted that life evolved, many accepted that it evolved through natural…
developingintelligence | January 3, 2008Over New Year's I had a brief discussion with a condensed-matter physicist who proclaimed that 1) "some developmental research is amazingly bad" and that 2) "they think they can tell what a baby has learned from what direction it looks," topping it all off with 3) "you guys don't even know what learning is!"
I won't argue with the first point (there are bad researchers in every field, even condensed matter physics), and I'm too lazy to bother with the third (although the 2000 Nobel prize committee might disagree), but the second point - on the technique of preferential looking - I just can't…
drorzel | January 2, 2008
A Wily Road Warrior's Airport Tips
Frank Luntz on how to survive modern air travel.
(tags: travel society US)
Drivers on cell phones clog traffic
I am shocked-- shocked!-- to learn that talking on the phone impairs drivers.
(tags: psychology US stupid science news)
Jon Swift: Best Blog Posts of 2007 (Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves)
A rather lengthy list, in case you find yourself with time to kill
(tags: blogs politics writing science culture society journalism)
io9. Strung out on science fiction.
SF gets the Gawker treatment
(tags: blogs culture news SF literature movies society…
jrice | December 28, 2007
This week, ScienceBlogs gets entangled with Dave Bacon of The Quantum Pontiff as part of our ongoing ScienceBlogger interview series.
What's your name?
Dave M. Bacon. Yep, those initial spell a sound like "dumb."
What do you do when you're not blogging?
I'm a research assistant professor at the University of Washington where I study quantum computing. My main appointment is in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering and I have an adjunct appointment in the Department of Physics. Also while I'm not blogging, I like to ski, hike, make wine, carve stones, and daydream.
More…
jrosenhouse | December 26, 2007If I say that X has probability p, what does that mean? What sort of thing is X, and what does the number p represent?
Philosophers have spilled a lot of ink on this question, with no clear answer emerging. Instead there are a handful of major schools of thought on the issue. Each school captures an important aspect of what we mean when we talk about probability, but none seems to provide a comprehensive account.
One possibility is the so-called classical interpretation. It is classical because it shows up in the earliest formal treatments of probability, for example in the work of…
denialism | December 20, 2007Recently, it seems there has been a backlash against medicine and the current knowledge of the relationship between diet, weight and overall health. I don't actually believe this is directly the fault of scientists or doctors, who react to the trashy mainstream reporting of science with little more than the occasional raised eyebrow. However, many people in response to all these silly health pronouncements, which seemingly come from on high but really are from press coverage of often minor reports in the medical literature, have lost their trust in what science has to offer as a solution to…
drorzel | December 19, 2007
The Year In Film 2007 | The A.V. Club
I don't see enough movies to do a sensible "Year's Best" list any more, but the AV Club is one of the most reliable review sites out there.
(tags: movies)
Are We Not Men?
Jon Zobenicaoverthinks Playboy and Maxim
(tags: culture gender journalism sex society)
Ampere could be defined one electron at a time - physicsworld.com
A new scheme for a single-electron transistor might make it possible to do a better definition of a current standard.
(tags: precision-measurement physics news materials)
Physicists make ripples with their 'magic carpet' : Nature…
razib | December 19, 2007Ed, Greg & PZ have commented on the strange reaction of the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary toward Richard Dawkins' enthusiasm for Christmas traditions. So "why would an atheist want to sing Christmas carols?"
The same reason that the study and reading of literature has not been reduced to physics. We humans appreciate great stories, and we can conceive in our mind's eye ideas which may not be true, but we enjoy the play of those ideas nonetheless. One does not have to be a Greek pagan to appreciate the beauty and power of the Iliad, and in fact for centuries…
drorzel | December 18, 20072006 Was Just This Year, You Know: I lost a lot of weight, read a lot of books, taught a lot of classes, did a bit of research, and oh, yeah, I got tenure.
Dorky Poll: Favorite Tool: In the comments to the post where I noted how many more people had least favorite textbooks than favorite ones, dr. dave writes: "Textbooks... particularly SCIENCE textbooks, are not really written to be ENJOYED by anyone."
Maryland vs. Duke: One-sentence review of this game: I don't think I've ever seen so many two-foot shots missed in a Division I game.
On the Superiority of String Theory: As we look at…
drorzel | December 18, 2007Today's ornament from the Tree of SCIENCE!!! is in honor of the cold water dripping into our kitchen cabinet yesterday:
That's a glass icicle, with bonus dramatic shadows. If you're a homeowner, you might think that this stands for ice damming, but this is about SCIENCE!!! not property mishaps. This ornament stands for phase transitions.
Phase transitions are a big part of physics and chemistry. Exactly what constitutes a "phase of matter" is a little murky, and seems to proceed on a sort of Damon Knight/ Potter Stewart rule, but transitions between phases are a rich area of study. Solid to…
grrlscientist | December 17, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, blue tits, Cyanistes caeruleus, Parus caeruleus, sexual selection, mate choice, ornithology, female coloration, reproduction, maternal quality, evolution, birds, ornithology
In many bird species, the females are brightly colored, just as the males are, but the evolutionary reasons for brightly colored females is unclear. According to one hypothesis, because males and females share the same genome, their traits are similar. However, according to another hypothesis, there may also be selective pressures on females, just as there are on males, to develop brightly…
drorzel | December 17, 2007Chris Mooney posted a couple of things last week-- one article at ScienceProgress and one blog post-- talking about the supposed shortage of scientists in the "pipeline." Following an Urban Insitute study, he says that there's really no shortage of scientists being trained, but rather a shortage of jobs for those scientists. Coming as he does from the policy/ journalism side of things, he brings the article to a ringing conclusion:
The numbers presented by the Urban Institute lead to an uncontestable conclusion: Some young scientists aren't going to be working in purely scientific positions.…