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The First Globular Cluster Outside of Our Galaxy

"This nebula had such a resemblance to a comet in its form and brightness that I endeavored to find others, so that astronomers would not confuse these same nebulae with comets just beginning to shine." -Charles Messier Astronomers have been scouring the skies for new discoveries since long before the invention of the telescope. Why, just with the naked eye and some dark skies, anyone can discover about 6,000 stars, five major planets, the Milky Way, and the occasional very faint nebula. Image credit: Miloslav Druckmuller. And of course, if you're very fortunate and very diligent, you could…

Know, know know, kno-know, know your brightest stars!

Well, don't you know I'm gonna skate right through Ain't nobody do it but me Nobody but me -The Human Beinz If you're only a casual watcher of the night sky, you might have no idea what the brightest stars are. Sure, if you're in the northern hemisphere, you probably recognize the Big Dipper, the bright stars in the constellation Orion (particularly the "belt"), the Pleiades, otherwise known as the Seven Sisters, and Cassiopeia, the giant "W". And if you're farther south, you probably know the extraordinarily bright Canis Major (big dog), as well as the Southern Cross and the two Pointer…

The Story of the Neutrino

"Neutrinos, they are very small. They have no charge and have no mass And do not interact at all. The earth is just a silly ball To them, through which they simply pass, Like dustmaids down a drafty hall Or photons through a piece of glass." -John Updike It was so much fun talking about neutrinos that I thought I'd take the time to tell you what all the fuss is about. Let's go back -- way back -- to the late 1920s. Not only did we know that everything on Earth was made out of atoms, we knew that atoms were made out of atomic nuclei, which were positively charged, massive, and tiny, and…

It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press. Called “a message to thinking Americans” by the…

A Call For A Presidential Debate On Science!

Several dozen nonpartisan organizations have joined together to ask for a Science Debate in the current campaign. The debate would address major issues in science, engineering, health and the environment This is part of an effort that has been going on for several election cycles, with a certain degree of success. More than 10 million scientists and engineers are represented by the organizations that have joined in this effort. They have provided a list of twenty major issues, and are encouraging journalists and voters to press the candidates on them during the 2016 U.S. Presidential…

Q & A: Where does Matter Come From?

I love The Straight Dope. For 35 years, people have written in and asked some of the most difficult-to-answer questions on any topic you can think of; the staffers, writing under the pseudonym Cecil Adams, do their best to get to the bottom of their questions. Well, they also have a message board, and I saw one of the most difficult questions I've ever seen there: Where does all the matter in the universe come from? I'm no[t an] astrophysicist but I understand a little about the Big Bang Theory and also that there's lots of stuff we don't know or probably ever will know about it. But the…

Faster-than-light travel: is it possible?

Apparently, this is becoming a good place for people to get their questions answered! My friend Brian, recently wanted to know what the possibilities were for faster-than-light travel. Specifically, he was interested in it because he wants humans to do it. Brian: but otherwise how will we ever have a civilization like that in Star Trek? Presumably, Brian's goal is to be able to travel nearly instantaneously between any two points in the galaxy. The problem is that there are physical laws we have to obey; we don't have a choice. One of them is special relativity, which tells us that the…

1776: A man, his war, and their year

1776 by David McCullough is not a new book -- it was published in 2006 -- but I just got around to reading it, enjoyed it, and wanted to say a few words about it. But first my David McCullough story. You probably don't know Scotty MacNeish (aka Richard Stockton MacNeish), but you should. He ended his illustrious career in a car accident in the field (in Belize, if I recall correctly) about 15 years ago, but many years before that he started out his career by discovering the origin of Maize, identifying its site of domestication and the timing of that important moment in Native American…

Science: What is it really all about?

In the wake of the release of Unscientific America, a lot of discussion has ensued as to how scientifically literate we are, how scientifically literate we need to be, and what to do about science education in America. There are a lot of interesting perspectives out there, and I'd like to synthesize a few of the most important ones for you. 1. Journalists: There are some excellent science writers and journalists out there. (Miles O'Brien was one of my favorites.) There are also some horrendous ones, as Jessica Palmer helped reveal, who I would go as far as to call sensationalistic, lying…

How high can the sea level rise if all the glacial ice melted?

NOTE: I've rewritten this post and redone the graphic. The original map on which I based the reconstruction, provided by the USGS, is distinctly different than the one the USGS provides today. The difference is, in fact, rather dramatic. In comparing the older and newer versions of the maps, I have decided to assume the later, more recent, version is more correct. I admit to being a little annoyed at the USGS providing a truly bogus map on their web site, but that is water under the bridge, as it were. So, the following post is edited a bit and a new graphic is provided. Thanks to…

My Sister Died Yesterday

Elizabeth J. Laden, a few years ago. Some of my earliest memories are of my sister, BJ, who later preferred to be called Elizabeth. Each of my three siblings, all older than me, had a measurable influence on my life, influences that happened when I was little when they, much older, were mostly ignoring me (I'm not saying that is a bad thing). In the case of Elizabeth, the influence was mainly socio-political. She was the girl that the Catholic school probably regretted admitting because she was trouble, or at least, that's the sense I got. She was a hippie when being a hippie was the…

Remembering 9/11? No thank you, not at this cost.

A young woman was driving along the road, at night, and needed to focus her attention on a cell phone call, so she pulled into an open parking lot of a closed restaurant along side the road and visible to passing motorists. She pulled her car into a parking space, switched it off, and made the call. A passing police officer noticed the young woman alone in her car talking on the cell phone. He pulled into the parking lot and switched on his emergency lights, got out of his police cruiser and approached her. He started asking her questions about what she was doing, who she was talking to,…

Critiquing the critique of the critique of the critique of the critique of Bill Nye's video

This is a response to Critiquing the “Critique” and the “Critique of the Critique” of Bill Nye’s Video at UrbanAstro.org. In that post, FURYGuitar addresses both Critiquing the Critique of Bill Nye’s Video by me and Bill Nye’s “Don’t Teach Creationism…” Video Dissected by Business Communication Expert in which scientist and marketing expert Marc Kuchner writes in a guest blog for Scientific American Blogs an interview with communication expert Patrick Donadio. The background is that Bill Nye made a video called Creationism is Not Appropriate for Children that some viewed as controversial…

The problem with our system of science education is ...

Teachers teach facts instead of concepts. Teachers teach from the textbooks and barely understand what is in the book anyway. There is not enough hands-on learning. All teachers really do anyway is to show videos most of the time. What should really happen is that a teacher should learn how to do science, intensively, with one project and that way, really understand how to teach it. And so on and so forth. If you find yourself agreeing with everything I just said, then I have one more thing to add: Get a brain, moran! OK, maybe I'm being a little hard on you, but you were asking for it…

The Fall Olympics #Sochi2014

Remember the Fall Olympics in Vancouver? That was the year that skaters ... not the racing ones but the dancing ones ... were falling all the time as if they had some kind of special extra slippery ice on the skating rink. Well, this year, at Sochi II, we are witnessing the Fall Olympics mainly on the snow slopes and half pipe, where lousy snow conditions, caused by warm conditions with some rain, have messed everything up. But there is an interesting twist this year. According to a piece in the New York Times, women are being affected more than men: ...most of the injuries have been…

Harry Potter: Books cf Movies

Everyone knows that the number of pages per book in the famous series by J.K. Rowlings increased over time, but was this increase steady? Was it consistent? The answer seems to be no. Looking at this graph, is is probably more accurate to say that the early books were a certain length, around 400 pages or less, and the later books (4 through 7) were longer, around 700 pages. This may seem like a trivial observation, and it probably is. But it is important to understand the basic pattern of page length over time in this series before we explore the more important and deeper meanings of…

Nonferrous Mineral Mining in Minnesota: An Issue of Science Policy

This is mainly about copper mining in a part of Minnesota that has previously seen extensive iron mining. Most mineral rights across Minnesota are owned by the state, which then may lease rights to miners. Recently, 31 nonferrous mineral leases were approved by the Minnesota Executive Council, which consists of Governor Dayton, Secretary of State Ritchie, State Auditor Otto, Attorney General Swanson, and Lt. Governor Prettner-Solon. It was a four to one vote with Otto voting no. The reason that Rebecca Otto voted no is that she felt the science based policy justifying these leases was not…

Greenhouse Physics and Car Shades

I got a new comment on an old post asking an interesting question about thermodynamics: I have a question that bears somewhat on this issue of keeping cars parked in the sun, cooler. You all know those accordion folded/aluminized shades you can put up inside the windshield and back window. Seems to me putting them INSIDE is the wrong approach. They should be on the OUTside of the window acting as real shades and reflecting away the sun before it gets into the inside of the car. This involves some of the same physics involved in the ever-popular issue of climate change, so it's worth talking…

In Which I Struggle With Popular Music

The kids are off at Grandma and Grandpa's, so Kate and I went out for a nice dinner Thursday night, and I found myself with a bit of time to blog... but no particular substantive ideas. The whole "publishers behaving badly" theme of last week seems to have run its course, between Random House re-thinking its awful ebook contracts and the whole wrestling-with-pigs argument over paying people to write stuff for the web has kind of exhausted itself. And I don't have the time or energy to write up serious science in detail (it's the last week of classes, and between grading and end-of-term…

The Higgs Boson in Context

I ran across this recently while looking for something else, and was reminded of it by this discussion of jargon. It's an attempt to explain the general historical context of the whole Higgs Boson thing, and why it's important. I improvised this in response to somebody's question about how I would explain that, drawing mostly on my recollection of a couple of history-of-field-theory books. I kept it in case I needed to bust it out when they discovered the Higgs, but that fell during the time when I wasn't able to blog, so I never used it. I'm never going to use it for anything else, though,…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 24

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 23 Table of Contents Chapter 25 Chapter 24 The Anvil Breaks, November 20, 2055 As the train approached Centre City, I called Olivia on her personal number. A computerized voice told me the number was discontinued and dumped me into voicemail hell. I hung up and called the house. Edie answered. "Hi, Edie. Can I talk to Olivia?" "She's not here." "Where is she?" "I don't know." She paused. "She didn't tell me where she was going." A rising panic momentarily engulfed me. "Ww...What do you mean?" "I mean, she took all her stuff and left." "I'll…

Musgrave and McDaniel on American Foreign Policy

A fascinating exchange has gone on between two of my favorite bloggers, Caleb McDaniel and Paul Musgrave, about how the two sides tend to look at American foreign policy in a far too simplistic manner. Caleb began by responding to a recent column by David Brooks crowing that the recent movement to get the Syrians out of Lebanon was a direct result of Bush's policy in Iraq. Paul then wrote this reply to Caleb, which is not so much a rebuttal as an extension of the same sort of reasoning. He agrees with Caleb that Brooks' American triumphalism is far too simplistic, but he points out that there…

Persecution Complex?

This is just odd. When I spent a month writing for the Detroit News blog, one of the other bloggers there was a woman named Libby Spencer. She has a blog called Last One Speaks. When I hosted the Carnival of the Vanities a few weeks ago, she left the following post on her blog: Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars is hosting the COTV this week. I thought the name sounded familiar, it turns out Ed was a fellow guest blogger at the Detroit News last month. We never really connected. I'm sure this will come as a shock to all of who know and love me dearly, but not everyone likes me…

Pair-rule genes

The general pattern of developing positional information in Drosophila starts out relatively simply and gets increasingly complicated as time goes by. Initially, there is a very broad distribution of a gradient of a maternal morphogen. That morphogen then triggers the expression of narrower (but still fairly broad) bands of aperiodic gap genes. The next step in this process is to turn on sets of genes in narrow, periodic bands that correspond to body segments. This next set of genes are called the pair-rule genes, because they do something surprising and rather neat: they are turned on in…

History, Food and Great Teaching

One of the most influential people in my life was a teacher, Louis Johnson. He was my French teacher my junior and senior years of high school, but I knew him from conversations before I decided to take the class. He was exactly what a teacher should be - learned, passionate, consumed with the subject he taught but with an incredibly broad mind and education that allowed him to integrate his teaching with the real world. He understood, for example, that teaching French well required not only teaching how to conjugate verbs, but that we also had to learn about the history, literature, religion…

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., Wellspring of Chaos [Library of Babel]

Wellspring of Chaos is the umpteenth book in the Recluce saga by L.E. Modesitt (who, amusingly, turns out to be a Williams alumn), and even more than the Hodgell book, is not something I would ordinarily give a high priority to in catching up on the book log. If you've read pretty much any of the previous books, you know what you're going to get here, and you either like it enough to be keeping up with the series, or you gave up a long time ago. I happen to find these weirdly comforting reads, which is why I'm still reading them. It's sort of strange, because they're very repetitive: A…

Alex Rodriguez and the Death of American Labor

The inescapable sports story of the week has been Alex Rodriguez's decision to opt out of his contract with the Yankees and pursue more money on the free-agent market. While it amuses me to see an off-season story about the Yankees eclipsing the Red Sox winning the World Series, I find this incredibly tedious. It's tedious not just because it's about baseball, but because the discussion is so ridiculously overheated. To listen to your average sports radio jackass tell it, Rodriguez's decision is emblematic of everything that's wrong with American culture. It's a greedy "me-first" move that's…

Links for 2010-07-25

Why tenure won't disappear, just shrink § Unqualified Offerings "1) Did you notice the part where I said I'd want a higher salary to compensate for having less security? Yeah. See, lots of people are willing to slave away in grad school and postdoc positions and adjunct positions in exchange for a shot at the tenure lottery. Dilute the value of the prize, and suddenly people start wanting more money in return. A lot of smart, highly-educated people will start looking at other white collar career paths if academia doesn't provide a shot at life-long security, or at least higher pay…

Hugo Reading: Unpleasant Short Fiction

I have now finished all of the short fiction on this year's Hugo Award ballot (links to most nominees are available here), and I have to say, the pickings here are pretty slim. The stories that aren't forgettable or preachy are deeply unpleasant, leaving me wanting to put a lot of stuff below "No Award." And there's one story that makes me want to bleach my frontal cortex. More detailed comments, category-by-category, below the fold: Best Novella “Act One”, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s 3/09) The God Engines, John Scalzi (Subterranean) “Palimpsest”, Charles Stross (Wireless; Ace, Orbit) Shambling…

The Modes of Natural Selection

There many ways of dividing up and categorizing Natural Selection. For example, there are the trichotomies of Natural Selection, Sexual Selection and Artificial Selection, and Modes of Selection (Stabilizing, Directional, and Disruptive) trichotomy. We sense that these are good because they are "threes" and "three" is a magic number. Here, I'm focusing on the Mode Trichotomy, and asking that we consider that there are not three, but four modes of Natural Selection. This will cause tremors throughout the Evolutionary Theory community because Four is not a magic number, but so be it. In…

Diatoms Large and Small

Diatoms are algae with hard parts. They make up a major part of the plankton found in fresh and salt water environments. Usually, diatoms exist as single celled free floating organisms, but they can also be colonies of several single cells. Their tiny little 'shells' are made up of silica (these shells are called "fustules"). The fustules have a characteristic shape that goes with each species, and since these are hard (essentially, made of glass) they are often well preserved in sediments. Thus, diatoms actually provide an excellent, even if very tiny, fossil record. In addition, since…

The God report

I've received a few interesting links on the state of religion in America, so I'll just dump a brief hodge-podge below the fold. The quick summary: one clueless twit, one poll, and one philosopher weigh in. Let's get the ugliness over, first. Andrew Sullivan is still an obnoxious fool. He gets some letters from atheists, and quotes a few: I thought this one was nice. I, personally, as an atheist, find meaning in my own possibility and will to act in this world. I have the opportunity to interact with others and to create things. I have the chance to leave this world a bit better than when I…

Coyne and Moran On Teaching ID

Jerry Coyne liked yesterday's post about teaching ID. I do just want to clarify one point, though. Coyne writes: Jason has a good point. And that point is that although it’s illegal (as well as dereliction of duty) to teach intelligent design creationism in public schools and universities, it is okay to criticize it, for you can criticize ID on the grounds of bad science without bashing religion. And I think Jason’s right, especially given the legal rulings so far on what constitutes an incursion of religion into public schools. I certainly do think it's a dereliction of duty to teach…

Non-neutralizing anti-HIV antibodies-- Is the 'chaff' more valuable than the wheat?

Its no secret that Im not a huge fan of the antibody hunter branch of the HIV-1 research world-- they search through thousands and thousands and thousands of B-cells looking for one or two that can perform a neat trick. They are brilliant people working really hard doing things that have limited application in the real world, and give us limited insight into the basics of HIV-1 virology, but boy howdy, theyve got a great PR department, and Science/Nature eat their publications up. Identifying broadly neutralizing antibodies is 'neat', but those antibodies are of limited value. The people…

gen•e•sis

Some fields of science are so wide open, such virgin swamps of unexplored territory, that it takes some radically divergent approaches to make any headway. There will always be opinionated, strong-minded investigators who charge in deeply and narrowly, committed to their pet theories, and there will also be others who consolidate information and try to synthesize the variety of approaches taken. There are dead ends and areas of solid progress, and there is much flailing about until the promising leads are discovered. Origins of life research is such an unsettled frontier. I wouldn't want to…

Three viruses join forces to treat X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy

X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (X-linked ALD) is a demyelination disease in little boys. The kids are usually dead before they hit adolescence. :( The demyelination mechanism is not the same as the demyelination disease you all have heard of, MS. With X-linked ALD, the kids dont have a functional ABCD1 gene. This means they cant break down very-long-chain fatty acids (VLCFAs) and they end up accumulating in the brain and screwing with the cells in charge of keeping up myelination, oligodendrocytes and microglia. Screw those guys up, screw up your myelin, screw up signal transduction in…

How Not to Defend a Tenure Denial

Meanwhile, the Gonzalez case continues. The President of ISU has turned down Gonzalez's appeal: Because the issue of tenure is a personnel matter, I am not able to share the detailed rationale for the decision, although that has been provided to Dr. Gonzalez. But I can outline the areas of focus of my review where I gave special attention to his overall record of scientific accomplishment while an assistant professor at Iowa State, since that gives the best indication of future achievement. I specifically considered refereed publications, his level of success in attracting research funding…

Impossible Thruster Probably Impossible

I've gotten a few queries about this "Impossible space drive" thing that has space enthusiasts all a-twitter. This supposedly generates thrust through the interaction of an RF cavity with a "quantum vacuum virtual plasma," which is certainly a collection of four words that turn up in physics papers. An experiment at a NASA lab has apparently tested a couple of these gadgets, and claimed to see thrust being produced. Which has a lot of people booking tickets on the Mars mission that this supposedly enables. Most physicists I know have reacted to this with some linear combination of "heavy sigh…

Fermi Fallacies

I've seen a bunch of people linking approvingly to this piece about the "Fermi paradox," (the question of why we haven't seen any evidence of other advanced civilizations) and I can't quite understand why. The author expends a good deal of snark taking astronomers and physicists to task for constructing elaborate solutions to Fermi paradox on the basis of shoddy and unjustified assumptions. And then proceeds to offer a different solution for the Fermi paradox based on shoddy and unjustified assumptions. Whee! I mean, there is an element of this that's useful, namely the reminder that "We…

The Mumbling Philosopher

The physics vs. philosophy slow-motion blogfight continues, the latest major contribution being Sean Carroll's "Physicists Should Stop Saying silly Things About Philosophy. I've been mostly trying to stay out of this, but when I read through the comments at Sean's post to see if anybody offered any specific examples of problems that could've been avoided by talking to philosophers, I was kind of surprised to find a lot of people talking up Niels Bohr. (Likewise Ashutosh Jogalekar's Philosophy Begins Where Physics Ends....) If you're trying to talk up the virtues of philosophy over "pure"…

What Is the Resistance of a PASCO 750 Interface Box?

For the latest in our ongoing series of post where I overthink simple questions, I'd like to present the longest single continuous experiment in Uncertain Principles history, which took six and a half hours yesterday. All to answer the question in the post title. This may seem like a waste, given that I could download a spec sheet, but it was a simple extension of yesterday's lab. I'm teaching E&M this term, and we're wrapping up the circuits portion of the class. Yesterday's lab was about the discharging of capacitors. This is one of those concepts that sneaks in largely as a way to…

Picking Silly Fights

Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers, those little scamps, are kvetching about the NCSE again. It seems that the NCSE posted a link to this series of videos defending the compatibility of evolution and Christianity. Here is the NCSE's post: Interested in exploring the issues raised by science and faith? A free webcast series promises to assemble “thirty of today's most inspiring Christian leaders and esteemed scientists for a groundbreaking dialogue on how an evolutionary worldview can enrich your life, deepen your faith, and bless our world.” To be broadcast throughout December 2010 and January…

Why Would God Create Through Evolution?

Before leaving behind Denis Lamoureux's book I Love Jesus and I Accept Evolution, there is one lengthy excerpt I would like to present. If I presented only a small portion of this you would think I was taking it out of context. If I paraphrased it you would not believe me. I will simply have to present the whole thing, as a painful illustration of the sheer depths to which special pleading can aspire. Here is Lamoureux's explanation of why God of love would do his creating through a cruel and wasteful process like evolution. I promise you I am not making this up. This question needs…

Teacher Evaluation and Test Scores, aleph-nought in a series

There's been a lot of energy expended blogging and writing about the LA Times's investigation of teacher performance in Los Angeles, using "Value Added Modeling," which basically looks at how much a student's scores improved during a year with a given teacher. Slate rounds up a lot of reactions, in a slightly snarky form, and Kevin Drum has some reactions of his own, along with links to two posts from Kevin Carey, who blogs about this stuff regularly. Finally, Crooked Timber has a post about a recent study showing that value-added models aren't that great (as CT is one of the few political…

“What evolution predicts…”

No three words are more pregnant with the promise of error in a conversation with a creationist than to hear them say "what evolution predicts…". It's practically a guarantee that you're going to hear something bizarre and fundamentally erroneous — but it is at least a good start on identifying basic misconceptions. Orac has found a doozy, a creationist who goes on at remarkable length, building a house of cards on a few flimsy premises. He's dealt with it thoroughly, so I just want to focus on one piece of Pat Sullivan's deeply flawed understanding of evolution. Imagine an area of town…

Sam Harris seems like a nice fellow, but very confused

Sam Harris responds to the reaction to his speech at the Atheist Alliance meeting. Is it really possible that PZ Myers and Ellen Johnson think I was recommending that we stop publicly criticizing religion or that I am hiding my own atheism out of "shame and fear"? I would not have thought such a misreading was possible, given the contents of my speech and my rather incessant criticism of religion in my books, articles, and lectures. It's puzzling to be accused of misreading Harris when his misreading of PZ Myers is so far off base; perhaps my name was just tossed in as an afterthought, and…

DSM-V Prelude

No, it's not a new concept car from Detroit.  It is a website that is designed to collect suggestions for the next edition of the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual (DSM-V).  It occurred to me to mention it here, after reading a recent article in Seed magazine. href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/06/serenity_now.php">Serenity Now!, written by href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/author-stu-hutson/">Stu Hutson, posted on href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/06/">June 8, 2006 12:14 AM, is in the category href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/brain-behavior…

Deepak Chopra reviews Richard Dawkins

Shorter Deepak: "Richard Dawkins didn't endorse my quantum bullshit, therefore The Magic of Reality sucks!" Deepak Chopra actually sounds quite upset — his review of the book reads more like the indignant squawk of a charlatan furious that the presence of a skeptic might cut into his take. It's largely an exercise in name-dropping and the profession of bleary, vacuous misinterpretations of science on his part, which he then turns around and uses to accuse Dawkins of error because he doesn't share his inoculation of the ideas with pseudoscience. Like this: What is obnoxious about Dawkins'…

ScienceOnline2009: Race in Science, online and offline

Acmegirl and DLee facilitated a ScienceOnline2009 session about race and science, stemming from what happened last year where the session on gender and race really focused on gender and not race. I've finally written up my notes, and what follows is a rough summary of the conversation. For those who attended, please feel free to annotate -- and note again the presence of the new "Diversity in Science" Carnival! More after the jump. DLee started with talking about the image of scientists, and in particular the question of why images persist that scientists are white men. One way is…

Gestures reveal universal word order, regardless of language

If you picture a woman twisting a doorknob, all the elements of this brief event show up in your mind - the woman, the twisting action of her hand and the doorknob. But as I describe this scene and as you read it, the players are mentioned in a very strict order. The subject (the woman) comes first followed by the verb (twisting), and the object (the doorknob) holds up the rear. These word orders are one of the most fundamental aspects of any language and one of the earliest that young children pick up on. The Subject-Verb-Object  order of English (SVO) is typical of many languages including…