Search Content

Displaying results 86651 - 86700 of 87950

Multi-component, schmulti-component

I'm having a light dinner while traveling off to a visit with Humanists of Minnesota, and I thought I'd deal with a little email. I got a request to address a fairly common creationist argument--here's the relevant part of the claim. As a member of the Greater Manchester Humanists I was recently involved in a discussion with the Ahmadi sect of Islam with regards to evolution. They had asked me to look at a couple of chapters in a book entitled 'Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge and Truth by their prophet Mirza Tahir Ahmad. One of those chapters was called 'The Blind Watchmaker who is also…

I always like to know who's been bought

A correspondent asked me an interesting and difficult question about the sponsorship of science. I've been talking a bit lately about the allosaur affair at the Creation "Museum", which can be summarized this way: Michael Peroutka, an odious neo-Confederate nut, donates a valuable allosaur fossil to the Creation "Museum". Now the tricky part. What's the difference in principle between that statement and this next one? David Koch, an odious destroyer of the environment and climate change denialist, donates $35 million for a Smithsonian dinosaur hall redesign. That's a good question, and it…

Synteny -- A Semantic Debate

There's a post up at Pharyngula describing the concept of synteny in comparative genomics (Basics: Synteny). The definition given by PZ Myers will sound pretty familiar to those of you who have read some of the genomics literature. The problem: it's not quite correct. It's actually the definition that I think most comparative genomics folks would give if they were asked to define synteny. But they keep using that word, and I don't think it means what they think it means. What's the definition? Here it is in PZ's own words: Synteny is the conservation of blocks of order within two sets of…

Math for Biologists

Keith Robison, at Omics! Omics!, asks and answers the question, "What math courses should a biologist take in college?" His answer: a good statistics course is a must (one where you learn about experimental design and Bayesian statistics), and a survey course that covers topics like graph theory and matrix math would provide a nice introduction to important topics (that course probably doesn't exist at most colleges). He also advocates taking a programming class and turning math education into something more stimulating rather than rote drilling (easier said than done). This being a blog, I,…

Wikia Search Launches Monday

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will launch the OpenSource search engine on January 7th, according to the Washington Post. You must know that at at any given moment at Google, there are countless technical experts working on tweaking and refining the Google search engine, to the extent that it is a very good search engine, and it is much more than a search engine. It makes sense that if you enter the phrase "hypnotic clam sauce" you will get some kind of result that has to to with clams, perhaps in a hypnotic state, with sauce. That is what a search engine does. With Google, you can also…

South Carolina Board of Education Considers Creationism

Two years ago, the S.C. state school board introduced creationist-friendly language into its science standards, mainly on the urging of Republican State Senator Mike Fair. This was part of the Wedge Strategy, and involved including language to "critically analyze" evolutionary theory. They were highly criticised at the time. In January, the board will consider the use of two textbooks in sate schools. Board Member Charles McKinney is brining into the discussion criticisms brought up by Clemson Universtiy Professor Horace Skipper. One of the books is by Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine.…

Jamie Hyneman's Toolkits

Every year, at least once (for his birthday or for Christmas, depending) I give my father-in-law the same exact presents: A tape measure, a utility knife, and a pencil. This way, when we are working on something like sheet-rocking the kitchen, patching the bullet hole in the roof of the cabin, or installing the invisible surround sound system there will be a tape measure, a utility knife, and a pencil. The tape measure tells you where to cut, the pencil marks where you will cut, and the utility knife cuts it. There are lots of other tools involved in carrying out these tasks, but these…

Retrospective: Why do people read my blog?

It is end of the year retrospective time. This is the time of year those of us who do stuff others read or watch all year run out of good stuff to do and dredge up old stuff to keep the few of you who are not flying to Mexico or baking cookies busy while we get drunk. This is the first in a seemingly interminable set of such retrospectives that I plan to do this year. I'll start my retrospective with a prelude: Early in January I'll be doing a live radio retrospective of the year's science stories with Lynn Fellmann, on Atheist Talk Radio. We are waiting until the end of the year to…

This is your LAST CHANCE for holiday shopping

(If you're mailing your presents and don't want to spend an arm and a leg.) As part of my annual service to my readers who can't think of what to give to those friends and relatives who insist on exchanging gifts this time every year, I present two categories of goodies, cheap and not so cheap. For additional ideas see these posts. Cheap but cool: A tiny tripod. I love my tiny tripod. I've taken it around the world with me, and I keep it in my car at all times, just in case. I don't use it that often, but when I do, it makes me very happy. The one I use is some version of the Pedco…

So, how's the Minnesota recount going?

The recount in the Minnesota Governor's race is almost done. As of yesterday evening, only five counties had counting to do. The state "canvassing board" (in charge of the recount, headed by the Secretary of State), is scheduled to meet on December 8th to resolve the recount. That may get done in one day, but is more likely to take about three days. Because there will be lawyers for both sides there and a state supreme court judge on the board who seems bent on dragging out the process (in my humble opinion). So, how's it going? Well, in order to know how it is going, you have to know…

PZ Myers can see the Dakotas from his Living Room. Which could be a problem.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've written a handful of blog posts that are based primarily on the local news in the Twin Cities or Minnesota. Either we have stranger news than other places (which I think is true), we are going through a strange period (which I think is true) or I've got some sort of strange personal psychotic thing going on so that whenever I see a news story like "Combine runs over, kills black bear" or a web site that says "Help us Decide, Should we Have an Abortion or Not" I think it's odd (which I do). The "Do we have an abortion?" web site, representing the situation…

David Kirby's calling you and me out. Yawn.

Color me unimpressed. As I mentioned last week, that opportunist who has apparently become a paid shill for the hardcore antivaccination movement (namely Generation Rescue, Autism Research Institute, National Autism Association, Coalition for SAFE MINDS, and Talk About Curing Autism, all of whom helped to fund his recent trip to the U.K. and, according to Kirby's announcements and advertisements, appear to be funding his speaking engagements), David Kirby, is making a tour of the Northeast to spew his special brand of credulous idiocy about vaccines and autism hither and yon. I listed his…

Welcome to Common Knowledge

On the Googles, Common Knowledge gets more than 25,000,000 hits. It's a market research company, a scholarship foundation, a non profit fundraising firm, and in its inverse as Uncommon Knowledge part of a conservative group site, and an interview series at the Hoover Institution. We can take the Wikipedia entry: Common knowledge is what "everybody knows", usually with reference to the community in which the term is used. or we can take an anti-plagiarism guide to heart: The two criteria that are most commonly used in deciding whether or not something is common knowledge relate to quantity…

Promoting a comment: "Open and shared format"

Richard Wallis has taken my ribbing in good part, which I appreciate; his response is here and will reward your perusal. He also left a comment here, part of which I will make bold to reproduce: As to RDF underpinning the Linked Data Web - it is only as necessary as HTML was to the growth of the Web itself. Documents were being posted on the Internet in all sorts of formats well before Tim Berners-Lee introduced us to the open and shared HTML format which facilitated the exponential growth of the Web. Some of the above comments are very reminiscent of the "why do I need to use HTML"…

Domestic Goddesses

Having been raised in California - birthplace of est, vegan bacon, and aerobics - I grew up thinking of life less as an "adventure" than as a relentless self-improvement campaign. Oh, don't get me wrong, I got more than my fair share of personal affirmation at home, but no matter how special my parents insisted I was, the prevailing message of the culture around me was that with a little work I could be "specialer"--or at the very least skinnier, healthier, and more well-adjusted. I figured out relatively early on that this was a losing battle, but it has still left me with irrational…

The anatomy of conformity

In the wake of World War II, stunned by the German peoples adoption of Hitler's horrific vision of Aryan purity, psychologists set out to discover the mechanisms of social control. One of the most famous studies to emerge during this period was conducted by Gestalt Therapist Solomon Asch. In the early 1950s, Asch designed a series of studies, which became known as the Asch Conformity Experiments. Asch recruited a group of students to participate in what he called a "vision test." Each participant was seated in a classroom filled with what he presumed to be fellow test subjects. In reality,…

Time well spent

A few years ago I was walking through a local mall with my daughter and saw a kid about her age wearing a backpack and holding hands with a young woman. He was a gorgeous little boy, with black hair and huge black eyes. His eyes reminded me of my daughter's. There was a name tag on the backpack. The last name was unusual but one that I recognized as that of a guy I grew up with---and this little boy looked just like him. So I politely asked the woman if she was D's wife. She laughed and introduced herself as a family friend. My friend D and his wife were in California getting her cancer…

More on narcotic contracts

I recently raised some questions about narcotic therapy contracts and my readers raised even more issues. Some of these questions deserve further discussion. First, despite the examples I gave, when I'm speaking about narcotic contracts I am talking about people chronically on narcotics. I don't normally use contracts for people with self-limited problems. That doesn't mean these patients aren't susceptible to the same problems as long-term users of narcotics, but the thinking is (based on what data, I don't know) that people with a clear, self-limited, anatomic problem, such as a kidney…

An envious fever of pale and bloodless emulation...

Fever is a fascinating phenomenon. The biochemistry and physiology of it is fairly well understood (sort of), but historically and presently, it is endowed with great teleologic power. The nearly magical ability of the body to heat up dramatically was noted by the earliest physicians. In the Hippocratean school, fever was often viewed within the humoral framework as an excess of yellow bile and was seen to be beneficial, although it was also recognized that some fevers were a grave sign. Later in the history of medicine, fever was equated with infection as was thought to be "a bad thing"…

Shamans in the hospital---barbarians at the gate?

As my readers know, I take a very hard line on alternative medicine, not because I just don't like it, but because it harms, both actively with dangerous treatments, and passively by keeping people from effective science-based treatments. So what am I to think about a hospital in California that is now allowing Hmong shamans to perform healing rituals on patients? There is a long history of religious and quasi-religious beliefs interfering with good health care. This interference comes in many forms. "Mainstream" Religions Religion obviously has a strong influence on people's health…

Paul Nelson in Norway

A reader sent along a few notes on Paul Nelson's grand tour of Norway—I've got to say that his strategy and his talk sounds awfully familiar, right down to the vacuous thought-experiments and god-praising screen-saver that conveniently kicked in during the Q&A. Most significantly, the Norwegian audience of scientists had little patience for his nonsensical arguments, just like our audience of students. I really wonder how Nelson gets these travel invitations. Did the Scandinavian creationist groups pay his expenses, or is the Discovery Institute funding his missionary work? I think I need…

The science of antediluvian plushies

One creationist claim that's commonly laughed at is this idea that 8 people could build a great big boat, big enough to hold all the 'kinds' of animals, and that those same 8 people were an adequate work force to maintain all those beasts for a year in a confined space on a storm-tossed ark. So the creationists have created a whole pseudoscientific field called baraminology which tries to survey all of taxonomy and throw 99% of it out, so they can reduce the necessary number of animals packed into the boat. Literally, that's all it's really about: inventing new taxonomies with the specific…

Doc Bushwell's MST 3000: Beowulf

When the word "stinker" was bandied about in reviews, I should have known better. Yet at happy hour last Friday, my two gal-pals and I made a date to see a Sunday matinee of Robert Zemickis' Beowulf. My friends, a biologist and a chemist, had taken medieval literature as undergrad electives so they were curious, and having recently read Seamus Heaney's translation and as a Tolkien aficionado, I thought the flick might be fun. Ay caramba, man. The critics were on to something. The performance-capture animation has improved somewhat, and the scenes in the movie were richly detailed. The…

Holy books for the UK government!

The British government has been getting a bit mother-henish lately, arresting people for cruelty to religious texts, and clearly has it in mind to provide special legal protection for a certain class of books. My first thought would be that that is insane, books are mere objects that are easily replicable, and providing for a special privilege that we don't also grant doorknobs or transistor radios or light bulbs is absurd. But a man named Eugenio has a better idea: we need to leap on the sacred book bandwagon. I am therefore writing to you today to request that legal protection be accorded…

A Rose By Any Other Name...Looks Less Thorny To American Eyes

I recently got the chance to view "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo". This is the best film I have ever seen in my life. It is not an easy film to watch. If you are a survivor of sexual abuse and want to see it, you may want to watch it with a trusted friend or two, with planned time afterward to help you process what you have seen. Terrible things do happen to the heroine, Lisbeth Salander, but the vengeance she exacts upon the evil-doers in the film is so perfect and so delicious and so right that you may be okay. Indeed, if men who so casually perpetrate violence against women had to…

Those who don't know history (or their own Bible) ...

The whining about where the new dollar coins will contain the word "God" is too silly for words. Consider the opening sentences of a letter in today's Journal World: I would like to know whose stupid idea it was to take "In God We Trust" off our new dollar coins. Yes, it is still on there, but why bother? Following those two contradictory statements, the letter proceeds with falsehoods and historical illiteracy: You can no longer see it unless one happens to look on the edge of the coin, which eventually wears off and becomes smooth. Then you won't be able to see it at all. This nation was…

Witless wanker peddles pablum for CFI

It looks like Michael De Dora is calling me out. The wishy-washy, sloppy-thinking director of the NY CFI, whose main claim to fame lately is a series of blog articles notable only for their fuzziness and willingness to accommodate any nonsense from religious BS artists, is now taking me to task for my post arguing that the Tennessee case of a creationist objecting to a textbook calling creationism "the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian god in 7 days" was a) an example of a true twit peddling ignorance, and b) that the textbook phrasing was accurate and…

Am I to be the next enemy of the NCSE?

I'm a little worried. Jason Rosenhouse wrote about this new paper by Peter Hess, the Faith Project Director (I'm already rolling my eyes) of the NCSE, and I learn that the first failing of Intelligent Design creationism is that it is blasphemous. Uh-oh. I am proudly and unapologetically blasphemous, and I encourage other people to join my heretical ranks all the time. If ID is blasphemous, it's the first element of their program that I can approve of — anything that weakens the grip of faith has got something good going for it. It's simply not a problem. It can't even be a problem for a…

Private interest + Government Cheese = for-profit education racket

In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt: At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition exceeding $30,000 a year. ... The Apollo Group -- which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix -- derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year, according to BMO. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent. For-profit schools have proved adept at capturing Pell grants, which are a centerpiece of the Obama…

On being prepared

I am not a boy scout, but I still believe it is a good idea to be prepared. What to prepare for? Well, in Louisiana, it is the time to prepare for hurricanes and the looming budgetpocolypse. Hurricanes First, the hurricanes and tropical storms. Model image from Weather Underground - best place to track storms (in my opinion). This is pretty simple. Here is what I need to do: Make sure my generator works and I have gasoline Fill up the cars with gas (in case we want to leave) Back up data and stuff Pick up all the toys and stuff in the yard Flashligh Beer That should do it. Of course…

MythBusters' energy explanation

I already mentioned the MythBusters' crashing two cars episode where they correctly doubled the speed of a pendulum type object. Overall, this was a very visual (although expensive) demo. There was one part that left a sour taste in my mouth - the final explanation from the narrator. First, they showed this. And then they had an explanation that went something very similar to to this (after restating what the sign above said) "Although the two-car crash doubles the speed, the energy the crash is transferred to twice the mass resulting in a crash that looks like just one car hitting a wall…

Tracker Video: calibration point pairs

I was going to make this as a video tutorial, but it just didn't work out right. So, here it is in blog post form. How do you deal with a video that zoom and pans at the same time? You could keep on adjusting the coordinate axis AND adjust the scale for each frame - but sometimes that is not possible. Tracker Video has a great tool to handle these types of videos - the calibration point pair. The basic idea is that you identify two points in a scene that should be stationary (part of the background) and track those two points. Tracker will then adjust the coordinates and scale to make…

RP 10: Centripetal Force, Centrifugal Force - what's the deal?

A couple of commenters expressed concern over the use of centrifugal force after my rant on the use of the word force. So, what is the deal with these two terms? Are they ok to use? Are they real forces? First, are they real forces? It depends on what you mean by real. What is a force? Here is a quick overview of what a force is. I previously talked about real vs. non-real forces. For me, I say that if the force is essentially one of the 4 fundamental forces then it is "real". With this definition, centripetal force would be real and centrifugal not real. Centripetal Force Centripetal…

Ruff Ruffman and Inertia Makes it Happen

Dear Ruff Ruffman, My kids really like your show. However, there is a problem. You promote it like it is science, but the content keeps having mistakes in it. Previously, I pointed out your mistake about in infrared thermometer (if can't remember, you said the thermometer measures the temperature with a laser. In fact, the laser is just used to aim.) So, you see, I don't just like to randomly attack people. The problem is that you are saying "hey look at science" but your science is wrong. I suggest you either a) stop pretending to be a science show or b) get a science advisor (I am…

NAS cosponsors ScienceDebate2008; joins AAAS and a bajillion bloggers

Chris Mooney, one of the originators of ScienceDebate2008 quotes the press release: The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine are joining the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Carnegie Institution, the Council on Competitiveness, and several other organizations and universities in an effort to co-sponsor a presidential candidate debate on science, technology, health, and the economy. "This would provide a nonpartisan setting to educate voters on the candidates' positions on key science, technology, and health challenges…

Inequality and Neuroscience

My last post on David Brooks, conservatism and neuroscience inspired a spirited debate. I argued that the discoveries of modern neuroscience seem to support liberal public policies focused on reducing levels of inequality: While conservatives tend to regard poverty as primarily a cultural issue, solvable by increasing marriage rates and transitioning people to minimum wage jobs, this research suggests that the symptoms of poverty are not simply states of mind; they actually warp the mind. The truth of the matter is that our neurons are designed to reflect their circumstances, not to rise…

The Certainty Bias

Over at the academic blog Overcoming Bias, Arnold Kling makes a good point: Before the Iraq invasion, President Bush did not say, "I think that there is a 60 percent chance that Saddam has an active WMD program." Al Gore does not say, "I think there is a 2 percent chance that if we do nothing there will be an environmental catastrophe that will end life as we know it." Instead, they speak in the language of certainty. I assume that as political leaders they know a lot better than I do how to speak to the general population. So I infer that, relative to me, the public has a bias toward…

Centripetal Force, Centrifugal Force - what's the deal?

A couple of commenters expressed concern over the use of centrifugal force after my rant on the use of the word force. So, what is the deal with these two terms? Are they ok to use? Are they real forces? First, are they real forces? It depends on what you mean by real. What is a force? Here is a quick overview of what a force is. I previously talked about real vs. non-real forces. For me, I say that if the force is essentially one of the 4 fundamental forces then it is "real". With this definition, centripetal force would be real and centrifugal not real. Centripetal Force Centripetal…

Basics: Forces and the momentum principle

**Pre reqs:** [Free Body Diagrams](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-free-body-diagrams.php), [Force](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-what-is-a-force.php) The time has come to look at things that are NOT in equilibrium. The most basic question to ask yourself is: *"What do forces do to an object"*? Aristotle would say that forces make things move. Constant forces make things move constantly. Actually, Aristotle said there were two types of motion: Natural motions: These motions don't need anything to happen, they just do. Example: a rock falling. You…

Cable News

Cable news is not good for the soul. People make fun of Jersey Shore, but at least those randy kids don't reinforce our deep-seated political biases. A new paper by Shawn Powers of USC and Mohammed el-Nawawy of Queens University of Charlotte looked at the effect of international cable news on the ideology of its viewers. Not surprisingly, they found that people were only interested in "news" that didn't contradict what they already believed: Powers and el-Nawawy show that global media consumers tuned in to international news media that they thought would further substantiate their opinions…

Willpower

Apologies for the light blogging: I'm enjoying a little vacation from my computer. But here is a recent little article about willpower in the WSJ: Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it's an extremely limited mental resource. Given its limitations, New Year's resolutions are exactly the wrong way to change our behavior. It makes no sense to try to quit smoking and lose weight at the same time, or to clean the apartment and give up wine in the same month. Instead, we should respect the feebleness of self-control, and spread our resolutions out over the…

Harold and the Purple Crayon

One of my favorite aspects of the modern cognitive sciences (and a big part of the reason I can't stop writing about them) is the way they shed new light on old rituals. Why, for instance, are so many games for young children centered around impulse control? (Consider "Simon Says" or "Duck-Duck-Goose" - these activities are all about being primed for action but still finding a way to exercise restraint. You have to be ready to be the goose and run quickly around the circle, but chances are you're going to be a duck. If that's the case, then you have to sit still.) As I explained in this…

Television and Loneliness

Over at Mind Matters, there's a cool post by Fionnuala Butler and Cynthia Picketton on the benefits of watching television when lonely, which seems to provide the same sort of emotional relief as spending time with real people: For decades, psychologists have been interested in understanding how individuals achieve and maintain social relationships in order to ward off social isolation and loneliness. The vast majority of this research has focused on relationships between real individuals interacting face-to-face. Recent research has widened this focus from real relationships to faux, "…

Medieval Metaphors

Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan finds a fascinating review of recent books on the history of the senses. He highlights a short section of medieval theories of perception, which hypothesized that the eyes actively sent out "rays" that illuminated what we saw. (This view of visual sensation is what made the "evil eye" possible - people were infecting you with their sight.) In 1492, learned debates also influenced how the world was perceived. As medical historians Nancy Siraisi and James T. McIlwain, also a neuroscientist, point out, medieval scholars would have located sensory perception in the…

What are the real benefits of breastfeeding? Statisticians weigh in.

A few days ago I pondered the ethical dimensions of breastfeeding given a recent article trumpeting its astounding benefits for infants and mothers. Those ethical considerations took as given that the claims trumpeting in the article were more or less true. Today, I want to point you to an examination of those very claims by Rebecca Goldin (Director of Research, Statistical Assessment Service, Assistant Professor, Mathematical Sciences at George Mason University), Emer Smyth (Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at Univ. of Pennsylvania), and Andrea Foulkes (Assistant Professor of…

Medicine, Pregnancy and Empiricism

Are doctors like scientists? Are their practices primarily guided by experiments and empiricism? Or are doctors more like artisans, unwilling or unable to test the effectiveness of many of their treatments? The Washington Post provides an interesting example of the-doctors-as-artisan model, and the results aren't pretty: For the past 30 years or so, doctors have routinely given pregnant women intravenous infusions of magnesium sulfate to halt contractions that can lead to premature labor. Now a prominent physician-researcher is calling on his colleagues to stop using the drug for this…

Competition

Here's an interesting finding, which is summarized by Kevin Lewis in the Boston Globe Ideas section: If you've ever had to take a test in a room with a lot of people, you may be able to relate to this study: The more people you're competing against, it turns out, the less motivated and competitive you are. Psychologists observed this pattern across several different situations. Students taking standardized tests in more crowded venues got lower scores. Students asked to complete a short general-knowledge test as fast as possible to win a prize if they were in the fastest 20 percent completed…

Anchoring and Credit Cards

Another way that credit cards dupe the brain into spending way too much money on interest payments: New research by the University of Warwick reveals that many credit card customers become fixated on the level of minimum payments given on credit card bills. The mere presence of a minimum payment is enough to reduce the actual amount many people choose to pay on their bills, leading to further interest payments. The research, by University of Warwick Psychology researcher Dr Neil Stewart, is to be published in Psychological Science, in a paper entitled "The Cost of Anchoring on Credit Card…

Expertise and Palin

In recent days, there has been a lot of discussion about Sarah Palin's lack of experience in foreign policy. These criticisms all depend on the same assumption: that knowing more about foreign policy is always better. (Experience is typically used as a stand-in for knowledge, so when people say that you're inexperienced what they're really saying is you're ignorant.) But is that true? What is the payoff of expertise when it comes to political judgment? Philip Tetlock has conducted the gold-standard study of political expertise. In the early 1980's, he picked two hundred and eighty-four people…

God is a Corporation?

If William James were alive today, I'm pretty sure that he'd be an experimental philosopher. (He'd also be a cognitive psychologist, a public intellectual in the mold of Richard Rorty and a damn fine essayist, filling the back pages of the New Yorker and New York Review of Books with incisive articles on everything from poetry to public affairs.*) But back to experimental philosophy, or x-phi...Here's how Kwame Anthony Appiah summarized the movement last year in the Times: It's part of a recent movement known as "experimental philosophy," which has rudely challenged the way professional…