Technology
esiegel | December 23, 2009089:32:50 Mattingly: Apollo 8, Houston. [No answer.]
089:33:38 Mattingly: Apollo 8, Houston.
089:34:16 Lovell: Houston, Apollo 8, over.
089:34:19 Mattingly: Hello, Apollo 8. Loud and clear.
089:34:25 Lovell: Roger. Please be informed there is a Santa Claus.
089:34:31 Mattingly: That's affirmative. You're the best ones to know. -NASA
The world is an awfully big place now. Santa's job has to be tougher than its ever been before. And yet, across the world, every year without fail at this time, children delight with joy at the presents brought to them by Santa Claus. So, how does he do it?
Santa…
goodmath | December 23, 2009 One thing that continually amazes me is the amount of email I get from
readers of this blog asking for career advice. I usually try to just politely
decline; I don't think I'm particularly qualified to give personal
advice to people that I don't know personally.
But one thing that I have done before is shared a bit about my own
experience, and what I've learned about the different career paths that you
can follow as a computer science researher. About six months after I started
this blog, I wrote a post about working in academia versus working in
industry. I've been meaning to update it,…
oracknows | December 22, 2009(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer.)
If there's been one theme running through this blog every since the very beginning, it's the unreliability of testimonials as "evidence" for the success of a cancer treatment. Indeed, if you go back to one of the very first "Orac-length" posts was about that very topic. Indeed, almost exactly five years ago, I analyzed a common type of testimonial for "alternative" cancer therapies and explained why it sounds so convincing to lay people who don't understand cancer biology and treatment. It's a…
milhayser | December 18, 2009
On Casaubon's Book, Sharon Astyk raises her hackles at the sight of Monsanto, a company which over the last century has churned out artificial sweeteners, sulfuric acid, myriad plastics, herbicides such as DDT, the pernicious defoliant Agent Orange, bovine growth hormone, PCBs, and other chemical wonders. Since their first genetic modification of a plant cell in 1982, Monsanto has shifted increasingly to biotechnology, and now control 90% of the world's seed genetics. Balking against this growing monopoly on our food crops, Astyk advises "Seeds are powerful. Get some good ones, save them…
clock | December 18, 2009The December 2009 edition of the Journal of Science Communication is now online with some intriguing articles - all Open Access so you can download all the PDFs and read:
Control societies and the crisis of science journalism:
In a brief text written in 1990, Gilles Deleuze took his friend Michel Foucault's work as a starting point and spoke of new forces at work in society. The great systems masterfully described by Foucault as being related to "discipline" (family, factory, psychiatric hospital, prison, school), were all going through a crisis. On the other hand, the reforms advocated by…
terrasig | December 15, 2009The Preamble
Four years ago today, I wrote my first post in the blogosphere over at the old Blogger version of Terra Sigillata. The post, entitled, "A Humble PharmBoy Begins to Sow," set out my mission to be an objective source for information on natural health remedies and drugs that come from nature, whether used as single agent prescription drugs or as botanical mixtures and supplements.
I read blogs for about six months before setting off on my own, primarily because I wanted to be sure my efforts were not redundant with others. Because I am academic and paid by a combination of federal…
pharyngula | December 14, 2009Keep that recent xkcd in mind when you read this one. This is from a creationist who is convinced all those biologists have it completely wrong, because Clovis points are beautiful artifacts.
Im digging in Ancient mans kitchen
Why is it that the deeper I Dig , the more brilliant the artifacts become… Isn't that opposite of the Darwin view? Clovis, First view, Plainview,… these guys were far advanced when it came to the quality of life.. I always was taught the older man was the dumber he was.. That's not accurate in my pea brain view of what I am personally researching… My digging buds…
apalazzo | December 13, 2009There's a battle going on out there. A battle for trust. Do you get the H1N1 vaccine? Is global warming true? Will you go to hell? Is the free market the best way to run an economy?
How to answer these questions? The conventional wisdom is that all members of our society should get informed. Many here at ScienceBlogs would like to convince you that the problem is anti-intellectualism. These evolution-disbelieving folk have been called deniers and the anti-science movement has been rebranded as denialism. But I think that this view of the world is not really representative of what is really…
bcohen | December 9, 2009The Onion reports on the market-definition of technological progress. Like the new technological breakthrough that fixed the problems of the previous breakthrough, this new device promises to make everything better.
Said one customer: "Its higher price indicates to me that it is superior, and that not everyone will be able to afford it, which only makes me want to possess it more"
More below the fold.
"New Device Desirable, Old Device Undesirable"
December 3, 2009 | Issue 45â¢49
SEATTLE--With the holiday shopping season officially under way, millions of consumers proceeded to their nearest…
oracknows | December 7, 2009The new UPSTF recommended guidelines for screening mammography of healthy women have opened up a can of worms whose consequences have not played out yet, indeed, likely will not play out for a long time. Coming in rapid succession after the announcement of the UPSTF guidelines was a study that suggested that low dose radiation from mammography may put young women with breast cancer-predisposing BRCA mutations at a higher risk for breast cancer. A consequence of the USPSTF recommendations is that politicians have pounced on it as "proof" that President Obama really is preparing death panels…
nisbetmc | December 6, 2009A week from today, at their annual meetings in San Francisco, the American Geophysical Union will be sponsoring a workshop I co-organized on research related to climate change communication and public engagement. In the context of debates over Copenhagen and the stolen climate change emails, the session is particularly timely and relevant. Details are below and advance registration is at this page. So far, roughly 100 attendees have registered.
Re-Starting the Conversation on Climate Change:
The Media, Dialogue, and Public Engagement Workshop
Sunday, 13 December (1:00 PM -5:00 PM)
Inter…
pharyngula | December 4, 2009We atheists are done for now. Behold, the God Equation, which I received in email and proves that a deity created us all:
Scientists working in the UK have discovered robust evidence that the creation of the earth and moon was a deliberate act. The researchers found that the earth, moon, and beyond were engineered according to a specific equation. They have dubbed it the God Equation. The equation, which looks like this:
shows a constant, unchanging relationship between the speed of light, the ratio between the circumference and diameter of a circle, and the radio frequency of hydrogen in…
mspringer | November 25, 2009A quick and simple way to roughly check the calibration of a spectrometer is to point it at the ceiling. Fluorescent lights put out a particular spectrum, and by comparing the colors the spectrometer senses to the colors you know the light emits, you can see if your spectrometer is accurate to a first approximation. I did this very thing yesterday, with the following result:
This is about what we expect to see. Fluorescent lighting consists of a relatively discrete set of colors compared to the broad Planck's law emission of a hot incandescent bulb. The central peak in the florescent…
pontiff | November 19, 2009Too often in life I am sending out a check to some charitable organization, or to resubscribe to Bacon magazine, and I think "damn this would be a lot better with Bacon." And now via the honest one, I find out that there is a solution to this vexing problem: Bacon flavored envelopes! From the "learn more" section of the webstie:
Technology has given us a lot lately. The car. TV. X-rays. The refrigerator. The Internet. Heck, we even cured polio. But what have our envelopes tasted like for the last 4,000 years? Armpit, that's what.
Really, people? If we can't overcome this kind of minor…
gregladen | November 17, 2009The first part of this documentary, including the preface and the first several minutes of the main body of the work, should be deleted. The writers and producers who put that part together should be captured, gutted, eviscerated, and their dried and salted remains staked to the front entrance of the Public Broadcasting System as a reminder for other writers and producers. Why? Here's why:
What was said was pure teleology. At some point, sixty million years ago, the path that human evolution would follow was set. Some of the ancestral forms stayed on the path to us, others did not and…
dgmacarthur | November 16, 2009I was just sent this email by a deCODEme customer:
As a valued subscriber to deCODEme, we wanted to write to you directly to
let you know about some important developments in the company and how we
believe these will underpin our ability to continue to keep you in the
forefront of understanding what the latest advances in genetics mean to you.
For the past several months, deCODE has been working on restructuring its
operations. One of the principal goals of this effort has been to enable us to
find new investment that will continue our work in human genetics and to offer
to our customers…
pharyngula | November 11, 2009Why is it always 10 questions? Couldn't they just ask one really good question? I'd prefer that to these flibbertigibbet deluges of piddling pointlessnesses that the creationists want to fling at us. I think it's because they want to make sure no one spends too much time showing how silly each individual question is.
A few years ago, Jonathan Wells came up with his 10 questions to ask your biology teacher — they were largely drawn from his book, Icons of Evolution, and they were awful — they were only difficult to answer if you knew nothing of the science and accepted the dishonest…
oracknows | November 10, 2009Here we go again.
I see that the kerfuffle over screening for cancer has erupted again to the point where it's found its way out of the rarified air of specialty journals to general medical journals and hence into the mainstream press. This is something that seems to pop up every so often, much to the consternation of lay people and primary care doctors alike, often trumpeted with breathless headlines along the lines of "What if everything you knew about screening was wrong?
It isn't, but some of it may be. The problem is the shaking out process. I'll try to explain.
Over the last couple of…
revere | November 10, 2009Nursing homes (Long Term Care Facilities, LTCFs) are a favorite hunting ground for respiratory viruses, including flu. They are open to the general community, where visitors and employees mingle freely with the residents. The residents are usually of an advanced age, have other sicknesses that make them vulnerable and often have less active immune defenses. So when the swine flu pandemic began at the end of April, the Public Health Laboratory at Ontario's Agency for Health Protection and Promotion ramped up their respiratory infection outbreak registration system with the prospect that LCTFs…
ejohnson | November 5, 2009
In the past five years, technology has played a major part in influencing the way we functions, even in the least mechanical of human behaviors--like socializing. Today, ScienceBloggers are taking a close look at how the social media explosion is affecting the world. On The Primate Diaries, Eric Michael Johnson reports on anthropologist Stefana Broadbent's surprising theory suggesting that social media is "promoting greater intimacy between people." Abel Pharmboy of Terra Sigillata shares with readers a flattering e-card he received marketing a pharmaceutical, sent only a week before the FDA…