Physical Sciences
gregladen | November 16, 2007Hot off the presses:
When some of the world's leading religious scholars gather in San Diego this weekend, pasta will be on the intellectual menu. They'll be talking about a satirical pseudo-deity called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose growing pop culture fame gets laughs but also raises serious questions about the essence of religion....
The appearance of the Flying Spaghetti Monster on the agenda of the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting gives a kind of scholarly imprimatur to a phenomenon that first emerged in 2005, during the debate in Kansas over whether intelligent design…
drorzel | November 15, 2007
Environment plays key role in children's readiness for school
"Genetic factors played a significant role in the children's core abilities underlying the four components of school readiness, but the environment shared by twins of the same family remained the most important factor overall."
(tags: education science news)
White children more positive toward blacks after learning about racism, study shows
It's amazing how many education research results seem to come from the "Journal of Well, Duh!"
(tags: education science news)
phishhook.com :: View topic - Charts and graphs of rap song…
tfk | November 12, 2007One of the frustrating things about reading creationist claptrap for a living is that they get so very much wrong. They get their facts wrong, they draw conclusions from those erroneous claims which would not be valid even if their factual claims were correct, and then they weave it all together by citing people in support of their factual claims or inferences who actually refute both. It gets tiring
Our pals at denialism did an admirable job disassembling the abstract layers of Ben Stein's half-baked attempt to tar evolution with the sins of imperial Britain. Stein is pimping his…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2007
Following on from my previous post "Are species theoretical objects", I want now to discuss what the status of species as phenomenal objects is.
Some recent papers by Ingo Brigandt and Paul Griffiths (see refs), a view has been developed for some core concepts of biology - gene and homology - in which the theoretical status of these ideas is challenged. This view treats the concepts as referring to either obervational or operational objects or properties, just as I have suggested that species does. Brigandt has suggested that these objects or concepts are "units of explanation", and he and…
dmunger | November 6, 2007Well, we didn't quite reach our goal of raising $6,000 for Donors Choose. However, we were able to raise over $2,000 for students in underfunded schools. Greta and I matched ten percent of the donations, contributing $203 in addition to the funds you donated.
Five of the projects we chose are now fully funded: Roller Coaster Physics, Leaping Into Math and Science, What do you see?--A Spatial Visualization Study, Where Did the Playground Go?, Psych for Seniors Part I, and Math Manipulatives To Teach Students Concepts With. There are still a couple projects that are partially funded -- and just…
purepedantry | November 5, 2007Last week, the Washington Post took Rudy Giuliani to task for an ad where he claims that his chances of surviving prostate cancer -- which he had about 6 years ago -- were much higher in the US than in the UK. The ad is meant to indict those who wish to modify the health care system.
He says:
"I had prostate cancer, five, six years ago. My chances of surviving prostate cancer and thank God I was cured of it, in the United States, 82 percent. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England, only 44 percent under socialized medicine."
Here is the ad itself:
Since the ad, a flurry of…
drorzel | November 5, 2007I'm suffering muscle twinges in my neck and shoulder that are usually linked to excessive typing. As I have a grant proposal to review, a senior thesis to help whip into shape, and a book under contract, this means that blogging will be substantially reduced while I ration my typing to those things that pay the bills. You'll get more linking and less thinking, at least until my shoulder calms down a bit.
I don't want to pass up a set of links-- two press releases and a news story-- on some new results regarding friction:
If you want to reduce the friction between tiny objects, just increase…
drorzel | November 4, 2007
Recommendations of SFWA Copyright Exploratory Committee
How... distressingly sensible. Where's the train wreck I've come to expect from SFWA?
(tags: SF books)
Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Unparadox Contest
"[T]he Birthday Unparadox: 'If you put three people in a room, chances are no two of them will have the same birthday.'"
(tags: physics math silly computing)
Teamwork increases student learning and career success
"A two-year study of college students at The Pennsylvania State University (PSU) proves that students learn better and develop higher-level skills by participating in…
evolvingthoughts | November 4, 2007
[A guest post by palentologist and geologist Chris Nedin]
It's taken the best part of 50 years but it's finally here! 50 years after the International Geophysical Year (1957-8) that took a global geophysical view of the globe, one of the outcomes of that global geophysical view has just been published – the Digital Magnetic Anomaly Map (Korhonen et.al. 2007) (the BBC has the story and an annotated copy of the map here).
The map shows magnetic intensity readings of crustal rocks from around the world, combined on a single map for the first time.
Magnetic intensity is what's left after…
apalazzo | November 2, 2007For those in the Boston metro area.
First up, next Friday, November 9th, there will be a conference being held here at the Medical Campus entitled Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences. Not only is fellow blogger Anna Kushnir part of the organizing committee, but Bora Zivkovic (from A Blog Around the Clock) is one of the invited panelists.
Here is the program:
"Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences"
Friday, November 9, 1:00 - 6:00 pm
TMEC Walter Amphitheater, Harvard Medical School
260 Longwood Ave, Boston, MA 02115…
worldsfair | October 24, 2007
Well how cool is that? Looks like one of the starting pitchers tonight is our very own Jeff Francis. What makes it especially interesting to me, is that Jeff was once a student at my home institution, the University of British Columbia, and doubly so, because he was also a Physics graduate.
This kind of led me to wonder whether he's ever thinking "Physics" when he's throwing those baseballs.
Anyway, I'm not the first to think such things. In fact, there was even a movie I once rented with my kids, where a physics student used her knowledge to get "good" at Figure Skating (a Disney…
oracknows | October 19, 2007DNA is an amazing molecule. How evolution could have, over eons, fashioned such an amazingly simple yet complex method of storing biological information and coding the proteins that carry out the functions of life is one of the great wonders of biology. Harnessing the power of DNA, through genetic engineering, the study of the genome, and epigenetics, has allowed scientists a deeper insight than ever before possible into diseases as diverse as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and inherited metabolic disorders, to name a few. I manipulate DNA in my laboratory, in order to make it do my bidding…
pharyngula | October 18, 2007Physicists, do you feel left out? Some nobody biologist from the Middle-of-Nowhere, Minnesota gets featured in a crackpot movie, but all you get is incoherent dumpster-diving schizophrenics making tirades about your work, and never anybody who has heard of venture capital? Rejoice! Your loons are getting more professional, too!
Feature Length Doc "Einstein Wrong" Looking for Executive Producer
Two Oscar Winning Distributors Wanting a Rough Cut
LONG BEACH, Calif, October 16, 2007 - Bootstrap Productions is currently
looking for an executive producer for it's feature-length documentary
"…
tlambert | October 18, 2007Several climate scientists have now examined the alleged errors in An Inconvenient Truth. At RealClimate Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) and Michael Mann (director Penn State Earth System Science Center) write:
First of all, "An Inconvenient Truth" was a movie and people expecting the same depth from a movie as from a scientific paper are setting an impossible standard. Secondly, the judge's characterisation of the 9 points is substantially flawed. He appears to have put words in Gore's mouth that would indeed have been wrong had they been said (but they weren't).…
hrynyshyn | October 18, 2007Sooner or later, it would seem even the most brilliant and accomplished scientist says something stupid. James Watson's disappointing pronouncement on race and intelligence is in no way excusable, but it may be explainable. Would that it were not so, but I fear the law of inevitable stupidity will only become more apparent thanks to human longevity and the ever-expanding volume of the blogosphere.
Watson is far from being alone when it comes to that subset of distinguished and accomplished elder statesmen and women of academia who have stepped over the line of reason. Consider these other…
ksharpe | October 15, 2007Have a look at the left-hand column of the ScienceBlogs homepage. You may notice that the list of channels there has changed. You may also notice that the home pages for the individual channels have been redesigned, with more color and new features. (Check out the new Life Science homepage, here.) Over the coming days we'll be adding even more features, including a science news feed on each channel homepage.
Why the changes? We re-jiggered the channels in response to feedback from our bloggers and readers. We think the new channels are more user-friendly and intutive, in name and content.…
pharyngula | October 15, 2007The godless seem to be making some people desperate and angry and worried — the stupid arguments have just been flooding in, and I've had to exercise some restraint, or every day would be a day for yet another long "religiots are nuts" post. So I've saved them up and will throw them out with fairly short commentary here. You'll see what I mean: bad arguments and pious indignation seem to be the only fuel they're running on right now.
First up, let's pick on a University of Chicago student. He's very upset that scholars (oh, excuse me: "scholars") dare to point out the follies of religion.
The…
revere | October 9, 2007The good news in 1995 was that American students performed better than Austrian students in advanced mathematics among students finishing highschool. The bad news was that Austria as the only on eof 16 countries American students finished ahead of, and in physics they didn't even do that. They were dead last. A couple of weeks ago Science magazine reported that the Bush administration wasn't going to let that happen again:
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), says it is bowing out of 2008 TIMSSA…
pharyngula | October 7, 2007As promised, I attended Tom DeRosa's creationism talk this evening, and as expected, it wasn't very informative but it was mildly entertaining. He's a good, enthusiastic speaker — he's just unbelievably wrong. We might have a recording later on; Skatje was taping it, but it was just with our little home digital video recorder, and we don't have any idea what the quality will be like, yet. I'm letting her handle the A/V stuff on this one.
Anyway, it wasn't quite what I expected. I was thinking it might be based on his recent book, Evolution's Fatal Fruit, which blames every social ill of the…
evolvingthoughts | October 5, 2007
On Monday night last, Jason Grossman, a philosopher form the Australian National University rang me with an idea. He was coming to my university to give a talk entitled "How to Feyerabend", arguing that Feyerabend was a dadaist rather than an anarchist. I'd tell you more about his talk, but I can't, for reasons that will become obvious.
He wanted to do the talk as a dadaist performance. How can I help? I enquired. That was my mistake.
Well, he said, I want us to give a simultaneous presentation. What, in turn? I asked. No, at the same time. With music. And Allison (his partner) folding…