Physical Sciences
tfk | February 5, 2007A few days back I criticized two posts at Cato's blog, one about vouchers, the other an argument by Andrew Coulson about how we could end the wars over creationism. Coulson replied. In response to my observation that he tended to treat evolution as anti-religious, Coulson replies:
Evolution isn’t so much anti-religious as un-religious. While it is possible (indeed common) to simultaneously understand evolution and be religious, it is not necessary to be religious once you understand evolution. The existence of humanity can be explained by purely natural causes, so “God the Creator” becomes…
oracknows | February 2, 2007
You know, I really wish I could have made it to The Amazing Meeting this year. It would have been really cool to have a chance to hear in person such skeptical luminaries, such as The Amazing Randi, Penn and Teller (although I do concede that Penn's Libertarianism does occasionally border on credulity for some dubious propositions), and Phil Plait. And who wouldn't want to meet the purveyors of what's become my favorite skeptical podcast, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, such as Steve Novella and The Skepchick? And, of course, it's been a long time since I've had the opportunity to visit…
drorzel | January 26, 2007Via Eurekalert, a Florida State press release touting a paper in Science studying techniques used to teach reading. The conclusion won't surprise anyone who has worked in education:
The researchers found that "the efficacy of any particular instructional practice may depend on the skill level of the student. Instructional strategies that help one student may be ineffective when applied to another student with different skills." The trick, then, is to more precisely determine the reading skill level of each child and then find a way to cater the curriculum to each student's individual needs.…
jstemwedel | January 25, 2007Abi at nanopolitan nudged me to have a look at Nature's recent article on what has become of targets of recent scientific fraud investigations. He notes that, interspersed with a whole bunch of poster boys for how not to do science, there are at least a couple folks who were cleared of wrongdoing (or whose investigations are still ongoing) which seems, to put it mildly, not the nicest way for Nature to package their stories.
So, I'm going to repackage them slightly and add my own comments. (All direct quotations are from the Nature article.)
Scientist: Jon Subdo, researcher at Oslo's…
tlambert | January 25, 2007Paul Hamer sends me an email about Khilyuk and Chilingar: (my emphasis)
I had a quick poke around on the ISI database to see if anyone had cited
their original study that you've covered. I found that their is a single
citation - a self citation. It turns out Khilyuk and Chilingar have writtenanother article with the help of one O. G Sorokhtin.
I can't be 100% certain but seems like they're making a very dodgy claim
here:
"The main factor determining climate's temperature parameters is the
atmospheric pressure."
They then proceed to breeze over geological history and suggest two
mechanisms…
drorzel | January 23, 2007It's going to be a very busy day, in ways that will keep me away from the Internet for most of the day, so you'll need to entertain yourselves. Here's a question for the science-minded:
What's your favorite science textbook of all time?
It could be your favorite book from when you were a student, or it could be your favorite book to teach out of, but if you've got a favorite textbook, leave the name in the comments. Obviously, my expertise in dealing with textbooks is mostly in physics, but I'll throw this open to all sciences, so go ahead and nominate that biology book you can't get enough…
oracknows | January 16, 2007One of the consistent themes of this blog since the very beginning has been that alternative medicine treatments, before being accepted, should be subject to the same standards of evidence as "conventional" medical therapies. When advocates of evidence-based medicine (EBM) like myself say this, we are frequently treated with excuses from advocates of alternative medicine as to why their favored treatments cannot be subjected to the scientific method in the same way that medicine has increasingly applied it to its own treatments over the last few decades, in the process weeding out treatments…
bushwells | January 10, 2007Here's a belated follow-up on my previous yammering about the SciFi Network's series Eureka. As I expected, the show blends the quirkiness of Northern Exposure with the Big Science of the Manhattan Project. I watched most of the episodes and would rank it in the "OK, I guess" category of marginal TV. Keep in mind that my pop culture entertainment bar is set low.
Colin Ferguson and Joe Morton are the saving graces of the show, and both are highly watchable. Ferguson's role is Jack Carter, the US marshal who, along with his quasi-Goth teener daughter, stumbles into Eureka where he is…
bcohen | January 5, 2007Robert Crease, a philosopher at SUNY-Stony Brook, has a brief commentary on metaphors and science over at Physics Web. Although Pharyngula and the atheists won't want to hear it, early modern science was born of those who thought that "God reveals himself to humanity in two books - nature and scripture." That was, at least, the metaphor Galileo deployed in his "Letter to Grand Duchess Christina" in the 1610s, trying to distinguish between his study of the heavens and the Church's.
Crease writes:
But the image of the book of nature can haunt us today. One reason is that it implies the…
sporte | January 4, 2007I'm tempted to joke and say "Recruit hotter guys?" but that would be just as wrong as Razib's charming notion of what cute women read for fun or our uncertain physicist's misconception that there's nothing that he can do to improve the situation for female students at his small college. Of course our physicist friend has tenure, now, so perhaps he'll study up on Zuska's suggestions. Besides, I don't really think there's a shortage of hot geeky guys, Zuska and I both found them, so I know they're out there.
Making a real difference requires a climate change. Life science enrollment is…
developingintelligence | December 28, 2006"Working memory" refers to the cognitive processes involved in temporarily storing & manipulating information. Unsurprisingly, this capacity is correlated with many measures of intelligence, but (somewhat more surprisingly) is also impaired in a variety of neurological disorders, including schizophrenia.
In a recent Psychopharmacology article, Deanna Barch reviewed studies demonstrating drug-induced improvements in working memory with a focus on possible applications for future schizophrenia treatments. What follows is a summary of this excellent article.
To a large extent, the effects…
evolgen | December 26, 2006John Wilkins has replied to Larry Moran on the role of "chance" in evolution (incidentally, Moran replies to Wilkins on the same topic, but a different post by Wilkins). Here's what Larry wrote:
Nobody denies the power of natural selection and nobody claims that natural selection is random or accidental. However, the idea that everything is due to natural selection is the peculiar belief of a relatively small number of people, of whom Richard Dawkins is the most outspoken.
A great deal of evolution is the result of chance or accident, as is a great deal of the rest of the universe. It's…
revere | December 24, 2006[This is a very long post, a reply to Orac's (my respected SciBling at Respectful Insolence) equally long response to my also long original post that invited him to tell us what he thought separated his brand of medicine from the "alties" he frequently posts about. Probably most of you won't have the patience to wade through this. But a challenge is a challenge and must be met. Anyway, its Christmas Eve. Who's reading, anyway?]
I had to smile at Orac's response to my "bit of a pot shot" across his bow with my chicken soup provocation, because that's what it was, a deliberate provocation. And…
clock | December 22, 2006You may have seen (or even bought and read) those annual collections of science-related articles that were published in print press over a course of a year, e.g., The Best American Science Writing 2006 or The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006. Wonderful stuff, written by real pros.
But we are bloggers - the TIME persons of the year! We think differently. We want amateurs, not pros. We want best in the world, not just American.
The idea about an anthology of best science writing came from Lulu.com, a local online publishing company, which has initially offered to print a…
oracknows | December 22, 2006Another week in the can.
It's been an eventful one, with prizes won, memories revived, and a couple of pesky Holocaust deniers descending to spew their bile. Hard as it is to believe, the year's almost over and the holidays are upon us. You're probably like me, tired of the Christmas carols, commercials urging you to buy, buy, buy since late October, coupled with the frenzy of preparing for the season. After all that, Christmas is only four days away. Perhaps, like me, you would like to take a little break. And, as always, I know just the thing.
It's time once again for a little bit of tasty…
chaoticutopia | December 19, 2006I get strange searches from google or yahoo all the time, from queries about facial hair to blowing things up. It isn't too unusual for a search engine to come up with sites unrelated to the original query, so I usually give these searches little more than a cursory glance. One search from yahoo last week, however, caught my eye:
disorder to describe ability to find meaning in random information wikipedia
For once, I thought, "kid, you've come to the right place." Not that they stayed... the link (#6 in the search list) led to my story, "Illusions in Lavender", which describes the world as…
clock | December 13, 2006Let me state up front that this is not a topic I know anything about, but I have always had a curiosity for it, so let me just throw some thoughts out into the Internets and see if commenters or other bloggers can enlighten me or point me to the most informative sources on the topic. This is really a smorgarsbord of seemingly disparate topics that I always felt had more in common with each other than just the fact that they have something or other to do with traffic. I am trying to put those things together and I hope you can help me (under the fold).
1. Models of Traffic Flow
There are two…
drorzel | December 13, 2006As threatened in passing yesterday, I dug up some old posts on space policy, and will re-post them here. This first one dates from January of 2004, around the time that Bush first floated the idea of the new Moon-and-Mars plan that's re-shaping NASA.
The original post has a ton of links in it, and given that this is lazy-blogging, I haven't checked that they still work. There are also a handful of comments over at the original site, if you'd like to see what people said back then.
Anyway, here's the first installment, on the relative worth of manned and unmanned space missions:
The Mars…
oracknows | December 11, 2006Over a week ago, fellow ScienceBlogger revere fired a bit of a pot shot across my bow regarding my bow regarding a study regarding, of all things, chicken soup. Initially, it was at a bad time, when I had other things to do, having just labored mightily to produce the latest Hitler Zombie extravaganza, after which I had to lay low blogging for a while because of obligations midweek. When those obligations were over, then blogging about the Tripoli Six took precedence, as did this week's Your Friday Dose of Woo (which, by the way, is still overrun by the tinfoil hat brigade). And then I just…
clock | December 9, 2006P is a popular letter so the list is longish. As always, check it out: bad links? Let me know. A super-find you are very happy to discover? I'd like to know. A grave omission? Tell me in the comments...
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