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More trouble at NIEHS

A political pundit recently likened the Bush administration to the refrigerator that was never cleaned under the Republican rubber stamp congress. Now that new housekeepers have moved in they are finding lots of gross and moldy half eaten meals in the back. The latest to stink the place up is Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the most public health oriented of all the NIH institutes. Or it used to be, as we noted in an earlier post. Under Director David Schwartz it was on its way to being the kind of harmless agency most congenial to the Bush…

Lesson for Labor Dept about Open Access

The Labor Department's 30-day public comment period on its risk assessment proposed rule closed 14 days ago.  There are 117 items appearing in the on-line docket at Regulations.gov, including my own 9-page letter of opposition.  What I didn't expect to see was notice saying that one of my attachments was not being posted in the electronic docket because it is "subject to copyright protections" and it "cannot be reproduced." I guess Asst. Secretary of Labor Sequeira needs a little lesson about "Open Access."  The document that I submitted (and of which I am a co-author) was an…

Student guest post: The Fallacious Fad of Foregoing Vaccinations

It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. First one this year is by Dana Lowry. Humans have a long history of illness and death from infectious diseases. It wasn’t until the 1790s that we had a solution. Edward Jenner recognized that milkmaids never contracted smallpox but suffered from a more mild disease, cowpox. Jenner took pus from a cowpox lesion on a milkmaid’s hand and placed it in an incision he made in an eight year-old boy’s arm. He then exposed the boy to smallpox; the boy didn’t contract the disease,…

"Around here we call it Iraqibacter"

I've previously mentioned a bacterial pathogen called Acinetobacter baumannii (a bit more information here), and Mike has discussed it rather frequently. A. baumannii is ordinarilly a commensal bacterium--one that may live on the skin of healthy people for many years without ever causing disease. It becomes a problem when one is immunocompromised in some manner, and unable to keep growth of the bacterium in check. Once this happens, it's difficult to reverse, as the bacterium brings new meaning to the term "antibiotic resistant." As Mike blogged previously, a genomic analysis revealed…

Will OSHA Meet its Deadlines?

With summer vacation over and school back in session, my thoughts naturally turn to homework, term papers and due dates.  Perhaps if Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao and OSHA's Asst. Secretary Edwin Foulke viewed their responsibilities to the nation's workers like students with homework assignments, they'd take more responsibility for completely their assignments well and on time.  Right now, OSHA (and the Secretary) seem to treat deadlines like those students who never show up for class, and then expect the teacher to give them an extension. A few months ago, Mrs. Chao and…

An "Informed Decision" on Ground-Level Ozone

By Liz Borkowski When EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson announced last week that the agency would lower the limit for ground-level ozone pollution, he acknowledged that the current standard of 0.08 parts per million was insufficiently protective of public health. This was an appropriate rationale for changing the limit, since the EPA is required to establish air quality standards exclusively on the basis of health consideration. The proposal of 0.07 â 0.075 ppm isnât as low as the 0.06 â 0.07 ppm that the agencyâs Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee recommended (PDF), but at least itâs…

A Brief Diversion: Sequent Calculus

*(This post has been modified to correct some errors and add some clarifications in response to comments from alert readers. Thanks for the corrections!)* Today, we're going to take a brief diversion from category theory to play with some logic. There are some really neat connections between variant logics and category theory. I'm planning on showing a bit about the connections between category theory and one of those, called *linear logic* . But the easiest way to present things like linear logic is using a mechanism based on sequent calculus. Sequent calculus is a deduction system for…

Has the word "gene" outlived its usefulness?

When Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word "gene" back in 1909 (hmmm, less than two years until the Centennial), the word was quite unambiguous - it meant "a unit of heredity". Its material basis, while widely speculated on, was immaterial for its usefulness as a concept. It could have been tiny little Martians inside the cells, it would have been OK, as they could have been plugged into the growing body of mathematics describing the changes and properties of genes in populations. In other words, gene referred to a concept that can be mathematically and experimentally studied without a…

Sorry Charlie: Bluefin Tuna Ready to Become Dodos of the Sea

tags: researchblogging.org, bluefin tuna, Thunnus thynnus, fishing, fishery, overfishing, sushi Bluefin Tuna, Thunnus thynnus. Orphaned image [larger image]. The western Atlantic Bluefin Tuna fishery in the Gulf of Maine is in danger of collapse, according to University of New Hampshire (UNH) researchers. Further, the team found that the number and quality of the captured fish has declined markedly in recent years. Using notes collected by veteran tuna grader Robert Campbell from the Yankee Fisherman's Co-op in Seakbrook, New Hampshire, Walter Golet led a team of marine biologists that…

Crackers, Cartoons, and Teddy Bears -- OH MY!

tags: atheism, crackergate, religion, religious zealotry, fundamentalism, freedom of speech, eucharist hosts, transubstantiation, cultural observation Not so very long ago, Americans mocked muslim nations for rioting and issuing death threats over the publication of a few cartoons in Danish newspapers. A little over one month ago, Americans once again sat back in a cloud of smug judgmentalism as they laughed at the uproar caused by a teddy bear that was named "Mohammad" by a classroom full of kids. American christians aren't so backward and superstitious as all those muslims, the religious…

Bombed Box on the Euphrates

the mystery of the "box" in Syria that was bombed by the Israelis was claimed to be a North Korean design nuclear reactor the LA Times originally leaked the news of the briefing, claiming there was video evidence showing the interior and the top of a Yongbyon type reactor, and presence of "Korean looking" scientists... There's a lot of rubbish being written about this. The Yongbyon reactor is a Plutonium production reactor. It runs at ~ 5 MW(e), but is not very efficient. It is a Magnox type reactor - ripoff of the old Calder Hall UK reactor. The Magnox design works with natural uranium - no…

Death of a salesman

A somewhat unfair title; the person in question is Marcel Leroux and the "death" is the deletion of his wiki page. The "sales" is his wacko views on GW. I don't think ML is particularly interesting - wiki certainly thought not - but perhaps the way wiki deals with minor characters is. Background: anyone is free to create a new page on wikipedia (there is probably a brief qualification period, but this is a trivial barrier), but there are various mechanisms for getting rid of pages that are junk, just offensive, or for some reason better not present. Any admin can delete a page; there is a…

At the end of their lives, stars glow hotter than ever!

"A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth." -Ernst Mach Our Sun, like all Sun-like stars, will come to the end of its life someday. All the hydrogen fuel in its core will eventually burn up, and when this happens, the core itself will begin to contract. When temperatures are finally high enough, the end product of hydrogen fusion -- Helium-4 -- will begin to fuse in the contracted core, and the Sun will expand into a Red Giant. Image credit: Northwestern…

Evidence of high climate sensitivity

I'm not going to say anything about this research because I've not read the paper, but it looks important. If someone out there writes something up I'll put a link here. Here's the deal. Climate sensitivity is, very oversimplified, how much the surface of the planet heats up as we add CO2 and other greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. More specifically, equilibrium climate sensitivity is the number of degrees C the atmosphere at face height and the sea surface heat up with a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels. If our atmosphere had just nitrogen and CO2 and that's it, the number…

Van Gogh's Cowboy Boys Shakespeare's Pot

Although one can not be certain, all the evidence points to the fact that William Shakespeare smoked pot. This is not a new story. My good friend and colleague, Dr. Francis Thackeray, who has never smoked pot in his life but who has acted in Shakespeare's plays numerous times, led a research team that put 2 and 2 together and came up with narcotic literary munchies. In Shakespeare's time, land owners were required to grow pot in order to provide fibers for making the rope needed hoist the sails and flags over the increasingly powerful British Navy and merchant vessels. One of the better…

Our double standard

I'm sorry, Josh, but while you introduce the issue well… There's been a minor thing brewing in the last week or so between PZ Myers, Chris Mooney, and originally Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett (and by now the rest of the blogosphere) about "hiding atheists away" in discussions of evolution, the framing issues involved in calling atheists "brights" and other tangentially related topics. It taps into the deeper issues of the connection between evolution and atheism, how that impacts the Great Creationism Wars, and on and on. …you then go on to perpetuate the usual misrepresentation of…

Simple Answers to Stupid Rhetorical Devices

Over at Scientific American, John Horgan has a blog post titled In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain't Easy, which opens with an anecdote any scientist will recognize: A couple of decades ago, I made the mistake of faxing an ironic response to what I thought was an ironic faxed letter. The writer--let's call him Tachyon Tad--had "discovered" a new physics, one that allowed for faster-than-light travel. In my reply, I told Tad that if he built a warp-drive spaceship, I'd love to hitch a ride. Dumb joke. For months, my fax machine churned out sheets covered with Tad's dense elaborations…

One Person's Golden Age Is Another Person's Catastrophic Crash

One of the interesting things about reading David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics was that it paints a very different picture of physics in the mid-1970's than what you usually see. Kaiser describes it as a very dark time for young physicists, career-wise. He doesn't go all that deeply into the facts and figures in the book, but there's plenty of quantitative evidence for this. The claim of the book is that this created a situation in which many younger physicists were pushed to the margins, and thus began to work on marginal topics like quantum foundations, which thus began be be…

The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney

This has been out for a little while now, and Chris has been promoting it very heavily, and it's sort of interesting to see the reactions. It's really something of a Rorschach blot of a book, with a lot of what's been written about it telling you more about what the writer wants to be in the book than what's actually in it. A lot of conservative responses to it are basically case studies in the sort of motivated reasoning Chris is writing about, but I've even seen some liberals jumping on it as completely confirming their own pre-existing biases, for example, claiming that this means Chris…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 88

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 87 Table of Contents Chapter 89 Chapter 88 Going North, June 15, 2060 I was worried about going North and leaving Edie alone while she was pregnant. She had another opinion. "Don't be silly. I'm a big girl, Luc." She took my hand and held it to her barely showing stomach. "I can take care of myself, besides I have Anna and my friends to protect me. You go and do what you have to do." She had that look about her. I knew it would be no use arguing. We compromised by arranging for Mark, the share-crop gardener, to check in when he did the garden…

Giant Comics Round-Up

I stopped by the library the other day, just to see if they had anything new, and I happened across the graphic novel section, which actually had a fairly decent selection of collected comics. As I've said before, I balk at paying $20 for soemthing that will take me an hour to read, particularly if I don't know whetehr I'll like it. You can't beat free, though, so I checked a bunch of stuff out of the library to see what it's like. I'll collect them together here so as not to swamp the blog with separate comic posts. 100 Bullets I originally picked up just the first volume of this, and then…

The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck by Marcus Chown

I should note up front that I'm kind of jealous of Marcus Chown regarding this book. Subtitled "What Everyday Things Tell Us About the Universe," The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck is a book that uses trivial everyday observations-- the fact that you don't fall through the floor, the fact that the sky is dark at night-- as a jumping-off point for discussions about deep and fundamental scientific ideas like Pauli exclusion and inflationary cosmology. It's a fantastic idea for a pop-science book, and I wish I'd thought of it first. The range of topics here is pretty big, covering most of…

Judith Curry advocates for a climate change "Team B"

Still back at Keith Kloor's place, Judith Curry seems determined to dig in to her position that governments and the IPCC and consensus minded science bloggers need to take the climate skeptics more seriously. Personally I think she completely misses the boat, because most of these folks have in fact been soundly debunked, or at the very least thouroughly addressed in purely scientific manners. We are talking about Climate Audit and Watts Up With That, these are her candidates. As well as having had their more serious contentions seriously looked at, these sites bury any potentially…

Donors Choice vs. Hobson's Choice

I had planned to participate in the DonorsChoose blogger's challenge, to help raise money "for the kids" and teachers. This effort, in which many Scienceblogs.com bloggers are involved, is a worthy one, as far as I can see. And I have given this careful consideration. But I have decided, instead, to do something different. I am asking you to help me with this. I want to say that I am very much in support of the bloggers challenge, and I urge you to go to your favorite blog and consider donating. I'm remembering back to the 1992 presidential election. That is the year I got…

Arguments for God

Remember a few posts back, when we saw Michael Ruse lecturing Richard Dawkins as follows: More seriously, Dawkins is entirely ignorant of the fact that no believer-with the possible exception of some English clerics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-has ever thought that arguments are the best support for belief. Saint Augustine, one of the greatest thinkers of Western civilization, devoted but one paragraph in the City of God to the proofs. Saint Thomas was categorical that the proofs are second to faith. In light of that it is with some amusement that I direct you to the current…

A Rock the Size of Jupiter?

For some reason, the topic of really big rocks came up at dinner the other night, and SteelyKid declared that she wanted to find "A rock as big as the solar system." We pointed out that that was pretty much impossible, more or less by definition, rocks being sub-parts of the solar system. "OK, how about a rock as big as Jupiter?" That's a much harder question to answer, and required a trip to the Internet. Not during dinner, of course-- it's hard enough to get her to eat when we're all sitting at the table-- but a day or so later, which led to this blog post. So, there are a couple of…

Finding Patterns in Data: Fourier Series

Over at Faraday's Cage, Cherish has a very nice post on Fourier series, following on an earlier post on Fourier transforms in the Transformers movie. She gives a nice definition of the process in the earlier post: A Fourier Transform takes a signal and looks at the waves and then shows us the frequencies of all the waves. If we only have a single sine wave, like above, we will have a frequency that is zero everywhere except for the frequency of that sine wave. More complicated signals will be made up of several of these different frequencies and thus will have several peaks. The idea is that…

Chimps call during sex to confuse fathers, recruit defenders and avoid competitors

In my last post, I wrote about how chimpanzees console one another to reduce the stress of violent confrontations. Conflict and competition are clearly important parts of chimp life and never more so than when sex is involved. The second study this week on the social lives of chimps demonstrates one of the strategies that female chimps use to avoid competition in some cases, and stir it up in others. It comes down to sex calls - distinctive calls that female chimps make while mating. New research shows that they do this to advertise their availability to other males and garner both sperm and…

Woo-fully ignorant

I've written quite a bit of the need for good health reporting, and I've had the good fortune to talk to some terrific reporters. But bad reporters are easy to come by, which is kind of sad, especially since jobs are getting scarce. When this article came across my browser, something looked familiar. The Stamford (CT) Advocate has shown up on my blog before. The last time, it was an article about a naturopath preying on immigrants. When I saw a new story pop up, I was sure it would be the same reporter. The article is locked in the archives, so it took some searching, but I eventually…

For my first trick, I'm going to make Jack Nicholson... disappear!!!

I'm going to try to review a movie without discussing the plot much. Last night we trudged out to the theater at midnight for the first screening of the new Batman flick The Dark Knight. I went in with high expectations given the stellar cast, but a bit nervous about Heath Ledger in his role as the Joker. Heath's acting has always been a mite bit unpredictable for me; he was amazingly good in Brokeback Mountain, for example, but bored me to tears in Ned Kelly. Turns out that very unpredictability makes him perfect for a "reimagined" darker, grittier, noncampy version of the Joker. In…

Female-Friendly Physics Departments

Sooooo beautiful. You must read what Pat has to say about APS's CSWP compiling a list of female-friendly physics departments. And follow the links therein. Here's how my various alma maters responded to this survey question: Please describe why someone applying to graduate school who is interested in a female-friendly department should choose your department. Duke University The physics department at Duke University has quite a few females. Interaction among the women of this department is encouraged by having lunch together a few times a year among and other social events. I am told by…

Dan Ariely and rational versus irrational decision-making

Yesterday Dan Ariely came to Davidson to give a few lectures and meet with faculty in the Economics, Philosophy, and Psychology departments. Greta attended two of the lectures and had dinner with him (along with the rest of the Davidson Psychology faculty). I went to his public lecture last night. If you're not familiar with Ariely's work, you should consider reading his book Predictably Irrational, or at the minimum check out his blog, which is full of fascinating research and anecdotes about how we make (un)informed decisions. At his talk last night, Ariely offered a several fascinating…

Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Update

Jonah posted an href="http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/05/tms.php">interesting video of  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation" rel="tag">Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) on The Frontal Cortex.  That got me to wondering if there was anything new.   In January 2007, the US FDA href="http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/07/briefing/2007-4273b1_00-index.htm">concluded that rTMS was safe, but they were unconvinced of its effectiveness.  Their conclusion href="http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jan07/comments/1697">was arguable, but the…

Templeton gets an invigorating massage, with a little deep pressure and an occasional gentle thump

The Nation has published an extremely generous profile of the Templeton Foundation. I'm trying to be charitable about it, but there's little here that the Templeton itself will find objectionable — it's one more swoop of the brush in an effort to always whitewash the foundation as sober, sensible, and serious, instead of the nest of delusional religious apologists that it actually is…apologists with astounding quantities of money and a willingness to spend it freely to promote its superstitious agenda. For instance, it describes the founder, John Templeton, in terms that make him sound like a…

'Chronic' Lyme disease article in Journal of Medical Ethics called unethical.

You may recall my examination earlier this month of a paper by Johnson and Stricker published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. In my view, it was not a terribly well-argued or coherent example of a paper on medical ethics. Now, judging from an eLetter to the journal from Anne Gershon, the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), there is reason to question the factual accuracy of that paper, too. The Johnson and Stricker paper promised an exploration of ethical issues around an antitrust investigation launched by the Connecticut Attorney General examining the IDSA's…

What is the most important human adaptation?

Human infants require more care than they should, if we form our expectations based on closely related species (apes, and more generally, Old World simian primates). It has been said that humans are born three months early. This is not accurate. It was thought that our body size predicted a 12 month gestation, and some suggested that Neanderthals would have had such, but this research conclusion has been set aside based on new analysis. But it is still true that developmentally, human children do not reach a stage of development that allows some degree of self care for a very long time…

Democrats will be Democrats

The Party's rules committee has met, deliberated, and decided to seat Florida and Michigan, but with only half a vote each. This is an odd compromise that serves to preserve and ruin democracy at the same time. it is a nineteenth century compromise that may be viewed as an anti-Clinton move, but in the end may serve to save Clinton face. In the short term Obama may gain (indirectly) but in the longer term there will be a cost for him. And, the Democratic Party leadership of Florida and Michigan need to be ashamed of themselves. They have served their citizens very, very poorly. But first…

Never let the facts get in the way of damning Dawkins

Ed Brayton and Mike Gene have gone over the top in accusing Richard Dawkins of wanting to coerce the religious into giving up their beliefs; as is usual for Ed, he has no problem immediately comparing an atheist to R.J. Rushdooney and calling him a totalitarian, on the basis of a rather poorly written petition that Dawkins signed. I must say, though, that this petition is certainly strange, and I don't quite see how it could have gotten over a 1000 signatories. I sure don't approve of it, although I can understand the motivation behind it. In order to encourage free thinking, children should…

Pet psychic finds blown away Chihuahua?

Well, the weird news just keeps coming in from my hometown. This time around, consider the case of Tinker Bell. Tinker Bell is a tiny Chihuahua weighing all of five pounds. This poor little creature met nature in a most unfortunate way on Saturday, when some rather heavy storms swept through southeast Michigan. It turns out that storms and Chihuahuas don't mix very well (as you might expect), and poor Tinker Bell discovered that in a most harsh way: Tinkerbelle was with her owners, Lavern and Dorothy Utley of Rochester, when a powerful storm swept into the Dixie Land Flea Market in…

John Wilkins on eugenics and Darwin

John Wilkins over at Evolving Thoughts has posted an excellent brief summary of the history of the eugenics movement. In the process, he makes a strong argument that it was genetics far more than evolution that influenced eugenecists and that the entire eugenics movement was based on the concept that evolution was being thwarted by human society and thus needed "help" (a process that is far more like "intelligent design" than natural evolution). Moreover, he gives examples of scientists who pointed out that, for example, weeding out eugenics through selective sterilization was totally…

Underwhelming response from Superfreakonomics authors

If you haven't got enough Superfreakonomics blogging Brian D has collected links to, well, everything. The response from the authors to the criticism has been underwhelming. Dubner ignores most of the criticism and blames Caldeira for the fact that they misrepresented him. Your must read story on this comes from Eric Pooley, who says that Dubner is an old friend, but none the less reports: One of the injured parties is Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at Stanford University who is quoted (accurately) as saying that "we are being incredibly foolish emitting carbon dioxide." Then Dubner and…

Sexism is derailing mathematicians from an early age

A study of students in Israel by Victor Lavy and Edith Sand has discovered a surprising result…or maybe not so surprising to you, but I was rather shocked. Math teachers score girls' performance lower when they know their identities. In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names. The effect was not the same for tests on other subjects, like English and Hebrew. The researchers concluded that in math and science, the teachers overestimated the boys’ abilities and underestimated the girls’, and…

Estrogen-Depleted Geese, Meet Androgen-Compromised Ganders

Speaking, or rather screeching, as a menopausally-crazed, cognitively-impaired winged harpy, I feel it is my duty to swoop in and squawk about the recent hormone replacement therapy free-for-all that's goin' down at Science Blogs. Links are hardly necessary given that this is front page news but those of you who have wandered into this mess of bonobo scat and banana peels called the Chimp Refuge can scurry off to Neurotopia v.2 where another insidious primate provides extensive and authoritative reviews in three parts. I'd just like to point out a couple of things. I may have missed these…

Is it ok to get paid to promote Open Access?

The title of this post might be a bit misleading. I don't really think it's much of a question. Of course it's ok to get paid to promote open access. My university pays me to be a librarian. I have faculty status. I can decide what I think are the most important issues in my field. I can advocate for solutions to those issues. I have decided that one of the most important issues in my field of science librarianship is the broken scholarly communications system. I have come to the conclusion that a system of open access to the scholarly literature is much fairer and probably ultimately much…

Update on Antibiotics at FDA

by Susan F. Wood  After the recent post here on KETEK, both the Wall Street Journal and Senator Grassley are on the move.  The WSJ reports today on another antibiotic Cubicin which has been seeking approval for use in endocarditis and discusses the competing issues of data quality and high standards, with the push for more antibiotics, particularly in the case of serious infections without effective treatment.  The case of Cubicin in some respects serves as an example of this, however Ketek does not.  They both illustrate problems identified by the recent Institute of Medicine Report on…

XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome: *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*

The big XMRV news last week was that the NIH had confirmed the original WPI paper regarding XMRV and CFS. Or, as sue so eloquently put it: http://www.mmdnewswire.com/xmrv-9040.html HA read it and weep you stupid cunt Unfortunately for the oh-so-civil sue, I wasnt entirely surprised at someone else in the US finding the XMRV-CFS connection (see my October 23, 2009 post on the topic). I am completely open to the idea that XMRV is endemic in the US, and is better able to infect certain immunocompromised citizens, which may or may not cause or perpetuate diseases of some kind. However,…

How not to save the whales

It's that time of year, when the International Whaling Commission gets together and pretends its decisions will be based on the best available science. In addition to poorly serving the planet's cetaceans, these annual gatherings are embarrassments for both the pro-whaling members and the animal-rights gang. It's also a case study in the politicization and abuse of the scientific method. For those familiar with the IWC, it's the recognized world authority on whaling. Formed about 60 years ago after it became bleedingly obvious that the industry required regulation -- the near extinction of…

What's Wrong With the Nobel?

Shane asked the following: So Zuska, just to be clear, did your post mean to suggest: 1. The structure of science is hostile to or biased against women, leading to an under-representation of women at its highest level. Eliminate this bias and more women would be awarded the Nobel Prize *in the future*. OR 2. Women currently at science's highest level are being discriminated against. Were it not for this bias, more women would have won Nobel Prizes *this year*. OR other? Shane, I like the way you phrased 1 and 2, with the exception that in #2, "more" should be "some". Why limit…

Beyond Victory: What 2006 Means for the Democrats and for Science

With the election results almost completely finalized, it's time to reflect on what they mean. Make no mistake about it, Tuesday demonstrated a true mandate for the Democrats. The Democrats achieved a majority in both the Senate and the House, picking up 6 seats and 29 seats, respectively. The Democrats did not lose any seats in either house. In total votes, the Democrats had a 13.4% advantage over the Republicans in Senate races and 5.6% advantage in House races (this shows that, in the Senate in particular, the 2 seat advantage that the Democrats hold hardly does them justice). The main…

Programs are Proofs: Models and Types in Lambda Calculus

Lambda calculus started off with the simple, untyped lambda calculus that we've been talking about so far. But one of the great open questions about lambda calculus was: was it sound? Did it have a valid model? Church found that it was easy to produce some strange and non-sensical expressions using the simple lambda calculus. In order to try to work around those problems, and end up with a consistent system, Church introduced the concept of *types*, producing the *simply typed lambda calculus*. Once types hit the scene, things really went wild; the type systems for lambda calculi have never…