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So you got a telescope for Christmas...

Great! So did I! Now the sky is a big place, and telescopes don't often come with an astronomer to explain how to use them. I'm not an astronomer either, but I've been an amateur stargazer on and off for years and I might be able to give you some good advice. First, the telescope itself. There's basically two kinds, assuming your budget was under a couple grand. There's the refractor (which has a lens on the front) and the reflector (which has a mirror at the end). If you have a cheap refractor, trade it in and get a reflector. Essentially the only parameter of interest at the amateur…

Whoa! Too much coffee dude. Maybe just limit yourself to the aroma... (the chemistry of coffee aroma)

So I see Ben has put up a post on the various reviews out there on Dawkins' book, and I noted one comment saying: This is utterly ridiculous. The distilled argument here is that the discussion of religion and god(s) should include only believers. Perhaps you should think about that for 3 or 4 seconds. I won't comment further on the post itself, since I happen to think Ben does a good job in raising a valid point, but I will say to the commenter to maybe lay off the coffee for a while (although I will note that he did weigh in again in a much calmer fashion). Anyway, I bring this up more as…

The Potent Fear of Male Menopause

Three products that profit on male insecurities (Enzyte, Viagra and Tiger Penis Wine) Note: the third image is from a campaign to encourage people to stop, not an actual ad. In my earlier posts I explored why women experience menopause and discussed the Grandmother Hypothesis as a leading explanation. There is accumulating evidence that suggests reproductive senescence in women is an adaptation promoting inclusive fitness. However, there are many claims that menopause also occurs in men. There's even a fancy name for it: andropause. A quick Google search reveals an onslaught of online "…

New Publication: Big Breasts, An Indicator of Dangerous Fat Deposition?

In June of last year, I discussed the results of a large epidemiological study in women that showed that women with larger breasts have an increased risk of developing type-2 diabetes. As soon as Travis and I read this study, we knew we had to do a follow-up study of our own to see if this finding was simply spurious or if there was actually something to large breasts that indicated health risk - beyond that explained by obesity per se. The project that Travis and I began over a year ago has culminated in both a hot-off-the-press publication in the journal Obesity, as well as my…

“Don't politicize this tragedy!”

I'm seeing a lot of email complaining about my response to the Giffords shooting. Here's just a representative sampling. You saw fit to use our pain to win political points. Here is my question to you - What if the killer was not a conservative? At least one report describes him as left-wing. His posted video does show any clear political affiliation, and his reading list was from across the spectrum. The local tea party group has denounced the killings, and leaders from across our state have spoken in one voice. As someone who usually enjoys reading your blog, I was a little dismayed to…

Amazing early psychology research on movies: Hugo Münsterberg's The Photoplay

I'm currently reading Hugo MÃ¼nsterberg's fascinating 1916 book, The Photoplay (I'm reading a paper copy, but the link takes you to the complete online text). It's one of the earliest serious works on film, which was unfortunately not well received at the time it was published due to the start of World War I and MÃ¼nsterberg's strong German nationalism (he was a professor at Harvard at the time). Anyway, I wanted to direct your attention to a couple descriptions of amazing research conducted with the extremely limited tools available at that time: If a flash of light at one point is followed…

Weekend Essay Links: from Fish to fish, it's been a wierd week.

Stanley Fish writes a provocative essay in the NYT on whether curiosity is tantamount to "a mental disorder," or even a sin: Give this indictment of men in love with their own capacities a positive twist and it becomes a description of the scientific project, which includes among its many achievements space travel, a split atom, cloning and the information revolution. It is a project that celebrates the expansion of knowledge's boundaries as an undoubted good, and it is a project that Chairman Leach salutes when he proudly lists the joint efforts by the University of Virginia and the N.E.H…

The baller's brain (and his pinky)

Participation in most sports requires agility, impeccable timing and the planning and execution of complex movements, so that actions such as catching a ball or throwing it into a hoop can be performed. Performing well at sports also requires anticipating and accurately predicting the movements of others. Athletes and sportspersons undergo years of specialized training to hone these abilities, and nobody would sensibly argue that they are not more proficient at them than others. Indeed, numerous behavioural studies show that those who take part in sports have better sensory and motor skills…

The Forester and the Romantic

I had the chance to cover some winter activities for PA state parks last week, which meant I had the fortune of a couple of visits for photos and interviews. As I browsed around online and in the park offices and exhibits for info, I couldn't escape references to either the Civilian Conservation Corps or the Work Progress Administration, which I've read about before, but never realized just how much work they did in the Appalachian region. The history of these organizations opens a whole box of interesting questions for the future, believe it or not, as this was a pivotal moment in…

In Which I Call the "Impeach Obama" Bluff...

I really like plaid. But I am not a hipster. I wish I were because then I would have more photographs of myself and would ride a nice bicycle. I think it is a partial combination of growing up in the Midwest and my love for higher education that has rendered me a mere observer of the hipster movement. People where I am from wear plaid to farm, not skateboard. It doesn't matter. The point is, until today, I watched the hipster movement from the sidelines. Collected a few hipster friends. Read about hipsters in hip magazines, including Douglas Haddow's recent piece in Adbusters. I noticed…

Reclaiming ground

(My apologies; this post inadvertently went up prematurely. If you were wondering where I was going with it, please read on!) I met Steve Koch at Science Online 2010, where he wowed me showing off his students' open-notebook-science work. I love, just love, teachers who do that. I wish the sort of work I typically assign students was appropriate to it. Because of the interactions Steve had with librarians at that conference, he's going back to talk with the digital librarian at his institution to see what they can do for each other. I love that, too, though it makes me nervous. Consider a…

Culture clashes II: PDF, XML and what's in it for me?

When I wrote this post, I left out a whole second "trigger" because of time and energy. That trigger--once again, wondering whether my humanities background (rhetoric major, math minor) leaves me simply unable to cope with the true Scientific Mind--regarded the format used for publication. Or, to put it another way, the widespread and vehemently-expressed view that PDF sucks (to use a polite version). What I saw, in several conversations, was a seeming demand from text-miners that everything must be in HTML (or, better, XML) so it was easy to mine, with a complete disdain for layout and…

A Story and some probability

I am going to tell a story and then calculate the probability of part of it happening. Really, it's just an excuse for me to put this online (since no one got hurt). My parents have this house on a lake, but it is really hilly. There is a dock down there, but it is like a bajillion stairs to get there. Good for exercise, bad for carrying a cooler full of beer (and ice). I don't know where he found about it, but my Dad got these guys from Minnesota to install this tram thingy. Basically it's a little train car with benches that rides down on two rails to the dock below. The thing is…

Science reporting takes a hit

CNN shutters its science/environment/technology unit: [Longtime CNN anchor/reporter Miles] O'Brien's departure comes as the network dismantles its science, space, environment and technology unit in Atlanta. That includes O'Brien as well as six producers. O'Brien has been CNN's chief technology and environment correspondent since being replaced as anchor of American Morning in April 2007. Before, during and after anchoring, O'Brien worked the NASA beat for CNN. He covered John Glenn's return to space in 1998. In 1999 he led CNN's coverage of the failed Mars Orbiter and Polar Lander missions…

Birds in The News 156

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Rainbow Lory, Trichoglossus haematodus moluccanus. This subspecies of rainbow lory is also found in Australia, along the east coast. Image: John Del Rio. [larger view]. Birds in Science One of the most contentious issues among scientists who study the evolution of birds is identifying precisely when the modern birds (Neornithes) first appeared. This is due to conflicts between the fossil record and molecular dating methodologies. For example, fossils support a Tertiary radiation whereas molecular dating methodologies…

Clock Tutorial #14: Interpreting The Phase Response Curve

This is the sixth post in a series about mechanism of entrainment, running all day today on this blog. In order to understand the content of this post, you need to read the previous five installments. The original of this post was first written on April 12, 2005. A Phase Response Curve (PRC) can be made in three ways: One can construct a PRC for a single individual. If you have a reasonably long-lived organism, you can apply a number of light pulses over a period of time. The advantage is that you will always know the freerunning period of your organism, and you will know with absolute…

Clock Tutorial #14: Interpreting The Phase Response Curve

Social Security and Compulsive Centrist Disorder

To avoid possible brain damage, the Surgeon General recommends that Sebastian Mallaby's columns only be read using the StupidVu 9000 Someone needs to tell Bush that when I wrote a post titled "Democrats Crush GOP; Bush Declares 'Mandate'", I was joking. Now that El Jefe Maximo has psychologically disinvested from the Iraqi Occupation, he has decided that the message the American electorate sent in the 2006 elections was "You've done such a great job with foreign policy, FEMA, and the budget deficit, we would really like you to screw up Social Security." Really, Bush is once again, after…

The Bellagio Principles regarding planning for an influenza pandemic

The Rockefeller Foundation's conference center in Bellagio, Italy on Lake Como is a lovely place (digression: so I'm told by people I know who have spent time there. I haven't -- yet. This is a big hint to the Foundation that I am available to take a week there and tell you what I think. Or you can find out for nothing here. But I'd rather tell you in person.). In June Ruth Faden, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins convened a group of experts there to talk about ways to soften the impact of a flu pandemic on the world's most vulnerable: "Within countries rich and poor, the burden will be felt…

Reading Diary: The Boy who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdős by Deborah Heiligman and LeUyen Pham

There are two kinds of children's books: those that are aimed primarily at the kids themselves and those that are aimed at the adults that actually shell out the cash to pay for the books. There's certainly a lot of overlap -- books that kids love but that also catch the eyes, hearts & minds and wallets of the adults doing the shopping. But wander the aisles of your local bookstore and you'll see what I mean. Often beautifully illustrated, with a sophisticated artistic touch and a mature and serious topic, you can tell the books that are aimed at the parents and uncles and cousins and…

From the Archives: Glut: Mastering information through the ages by Alex Wright

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, is from March 25, 2008. ======= This book should have been called Everything is not Miscellaneous. In fact, this book could be imagined as Weinberger's Everything is…

Occupational Health News Roundup

America’s petrochemical industry has spent millions trying to discredit the science on benzene, a known human carcinogen linked to leukemia and other cancers, according to an investigative piece from reporter Kristen Lombardi at the Center for Public Integrity. Lombardi begins her story with the life of John Thompson, who spent much of his life working for the petrochemical industry in Texas. She writes: Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, he often encountered benzene, stored on job sites in 55-gallon drums, which he used as a cleaning solvent. He dipped hammers and cutters into buckets…

National Geographic: The Whole World Is Watching. Something.

Someone just asked on Facebook if humans are naturally carnivores. My response: What is a carnivore? Taxon? A certain percentage of meat in the diet? Some, even if just a few, humans living mostly off meat? What? Then, what is “naturally”? Genetically determined and unavoidable? Required because of our gut, or some nutritional thing? What if we were like cats, genetically driven to be effective hunters but seeming in need of some training from mom. Does that make it not natural? And, finally, of course, define the verb “to be” here. Thank you. So, with that in mind, what about the sentence…

A Risky Educational Experiment

It's that time of year again, when I start thinking about my fall term classes. I would really prefer to put it off for another couple of weeks, and I will put off spending much time on class prep in favor of finishing up some paper-writing and other things, but when the calendar turns to August, I inevitably start thinking about what I'm going to be doing in September, no matter how much I'd like to be thinking about other things instead. This year is worse than most, because I'm planning to really shake things up with regard to the way I teach the intro mechanics course. I've been doing…

Presidential Debates

Someone suggested that I should write something about the upcoming presidential debates that draws on my background as a debate judge, coach and theorist (yes, there is actually such a thing as debate theory and I've actually published on it). It brought to mind 1988, when I was in college and coaching a high school debate team, and the Detroit News asked me and a couple of other coaches to evaluate the Bush the Elder vs. Michael Dukakis debates. I said much the same thing then as I do now, which is that they're really not debates at all. At very best, they are little more than simultaneous…

The Obamamercial Live

Live blogging the Obama Infomercial .... so you don't have to. (see this, this, this) Wheat .... Flags .... Fans in slow motion. Children and uncertainty. Ooops. He's standing in a room thta looks a little too presidential, Kennedy eskqe. Looks good but a little OTT. Please, Barach, don't be OTT. Not now. Rebecca. Rebecca looks like she could take Sarah Palin easy. Rebecca is a White Flightist. That's funny. Husband with surgery. Only seen in a photo. That's not looking too good for the husband. this is like the intro to Whole House make over. She's a football mom who can do…

Metaphor IV: The Reckoning

[First posted on 11/03/04 at the old blog.] In the final installment of Mixing Memory's metaphor series (for now -- at some later date I'll get to novel vs. dead metaphors), I try to use the empirical data to distinguish between the categorization and structure mapping theories of metaphor. Before I start, I should make it clear that there is certainly not a consensus among researchers about which model is the correct one, though my feeling is that most are in the comparison camp, rather than the categorization camp, even if they don't fully buy the structure mapping account. Part of the…

Roberts faces stiff opposition

I haven't written much about Jim Slattery's race to replace Memory Pills Roberts. Not because it isn't an interesting race, just because I haven't had much to say. Slattery knows Kansas and is experienced at winning elections there, Roberts has done a crappy job, and I hope Slattery wins. For more on his biography, check out the MyDD profile. It's been encouraging to see polls come out from the Slattery campaign showing Roberts consistently in poor position. An incumbent polling below 50%, as Roberts does in several successive polls, is in sad shape. But internal polls are iffy, not…

Scale: How Large Quantities of Information Change Everything

Technorati Tags: scale, computation, information Since people know I work for Google, I get lots of mail from folks with odd questions, or with complaints about some Google policy, or questions about the way that Google does some particular thing. Obviously, I can't answer questions about Google. And even if I could, I wouldn't. This isn't a Google blog; this is my blog, which I write as a hobby in my free time. But there are intersections between my work life and my hobby. And one of the ideas that underlies many of the questions that I receive, and which also hits on my work, and my…

Lithium, Circadian Clocks and Bipolar Disorder

You probably realize by now that my expertise is in clocks and calendars of birds, but blogging audience forces me to occasionally look into human clocks from a medical perspective. Reprinted below the fold are three old Circadiana posts about the connection between circadian clocks and the bipolar disorder, the third one being the longest and most involved. Here are the links to the original posts if you want to check the comments (especially the first comment on the third post): January 18, 2005: Clocks and Bipolar Disorder August 16, 2005: Bipolar? Avoid night shift February 19, 2006:…

Lithium, Circadian Clocks and Bipolar Disorder

An Open Letter to Chris Mooney

Dear Chris, I don't think for a moment that you (or for that matter, Matt or Sheril) are creationist apologists. But you are successfully pissing off a lot of evolutionary biologists...like me, even though I should be incredibly receptive to your argument. I've always argued that the creationist controversy is a political, not scientific, controversy. I would go so far as to claim that among the evolutionary biologists I know, I've been one of the staunchest advocates of bare knuckles political responses to creationists (even if those bare knuckles are enclosed in a velvet glove). Likewise…

Pity the Poor Couple Who Make $450,000 Per Year (Yet Another Failure of Our 'Elite' Educational System)

I swear every time I go on vacation, there's an outbreak of stupidity. One symptom is a ridiculous plaint by law professor Todd Henderson, who whines about barely getting by on $450,000 per year. No, really, I'm not kidding. I suppose the rest of us should just eat a bullet or something (and bullets are cheap!). Thankfully, Michael O'Hare and Brad DeLong (aka 'Mr. Deling') tear down this staggering display of narcissism. I would only add that when one has $500,000 of student debt, you probably shouldn't buy a million dollar house. Or maybe, you'll have to forgo part of the $100,000…

Religulous opens tonight

And it's not showing anywhere near me. In fact, I will be very surprised if it opens anywhere in this rural, religious area…I'll probably have to wait for it to come out on DVD. Religulous is the new movie by Bill Maher, an agnostic who thinks religion is a "load of nonsense", which by all reports is going to mock religion mercilessly — if this hysterical review by a devout fundamentalist is any indication, it's going to be great. Maher, though, isn't exactly an unblemished source with a deep dedication to reason, since he's fallen for some embarrassingly silly altie medicine nonsense before…

So You Want To Be An Astrophysicist? Part 1.5: thinking about grad school

So, now you're at university, and you're thinking about heading for grad school ... More re-runs from Ye Olde Blogge The following is horribly UScentric, 'cause that's where I am right now. The general principles are broadly applicable, the actual getting into grad school procedure bit in future post will be both US and THEM centric. Now what? Caveat: these numbers are somewhat dated, but the shift is not large enough yet for me to bother re-searching them. Each cohort in the US is about 4+ million people, about 4000 of those major in physics. Since participation in the further education in…

NASA: wiping the slate clean

IXO and LISA are dead and disbanded as NASA missions. We are looking at a very thin pipeline and few new missions for a while, unless there is drastic new direction from above and strong guidance on funding. NASA is a mission oriented agency. This is especially true of Astrophysics. At any given time, there are operating missions, missions in development, and planned future missions, each at various stages of effort. Each mission successfully launched has a nominal operating lifetime, after which it may be considered for an "extended mission", if possible. NASA tends to have catastrophic…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Family-friendly policies in the workplace are a good thing, but as Claire Cain Miller writes in The New York Times, there’s also a risk that such policies end up hurting the very workers they’re intended to help. Miller starts off her piece with international examples of family-friendly policies, such as a law in Chile that requires employers provide child care for working mothers and a policy in Spain that gives the parents of young children the option of working part time. The unintended results of each example? All women — whether they have children or not — get paid less and face fewer…

November Pieces Of My Mind

Once when I was a kid I read in the paper that Elvis had stolen black people's music and sold it to the whites. What an incredibly racist perspective. Archaeologists have it easy at Hallowe'en parties. No need to dress up: just be a grave robber and come as you are. You know you're not a kid any more when your wife buys Bornholms Rugkiks crackers. Love the scent of bog myrtle and marsh Labrador tea, pors & skvattram. Let's all start pronouncing Asquith "ass queef". Correspondence analysis: Freudian therapy conducted by mail. Students demand that I teach them during the spring term as…

Class and National Service

The Dean Dad posted an interesting article about "national service" programs yesterday. He's against them, for class reasons: The message that national service programs send strikes me as dangerous. The implication seems to be that rich kids can just jump right into higher ed and start moving up the ladder, but the rest of us have to do our time first. It's a sort of penance for not having wealthy parents. I know our society worships money, but there should be some kind of limits. It implicitly defines higher education as a purely private good, which I reject out of hand. (This isn't just the…

Our brains react differently to artificial vs human intelligence

With their latest film WALL-E, Pixar Studios have struck cinematic gold again, with a protagonist who may be the cutest thing to have ever been committed to celluloid. Despite being a blocky chunk of computer-generated metal, it's amazing how real, emotive and characterful WALL-E can be. In fact, the film's second act introduces a entire swarm of intelligent, subservient robots, brimming with personality. Whether or not you buy into Pixar's particular vision of humanity's future, there's no denying that both robotics and artificial intelligence are becoming ever more advanced. Ever since…

Casual Fridays: Is political wishy-washiness a general phenomenon?

Political opinion polls are very tricky. Answers to questions depend on the order they're asked in, and on precisely how they are phrased. If you ask people whether they're in favor of killing unborn children, you'll get a much different response than if you ask if there's any situation where women should be allowed to terminate a pregnancy. What's even more difficult is to assess public opinion on complex pending legislation. Most polls find that most Americans like the idea of requiring everyone to buy health insurance. But it's only a slim margin -- 56 to 41 percent. Kevin Drum cited a…

Do babies like color? If so, which ones?

New parents can come up with a seemingly endless array of vexing questions about their infants, from the best brand of stroller to the ideal song to sing them to sleep. The questions begin well before the child is born: what type of clothing should you purchase? What kind of crib? One question Greta and I dwelled on quite extensively when Jim was an infant was color. We were renting an apartment and couldn't paint the nursery, so we wondered about the color of the toys we bought and the blankets and other bedding for the crib. Would a purple outfit be appreciated? What about a multi-colored…

In response to comments on my last post (traveling to conference with baby)

Wow everyone! Thanks for all your suggestions on my last post. I thought I'd respond here, since my comments are plenty long enough.... I'll probably still miss some things though. Re: pumping and breastfeeding. I am planning to nurse on the plane and during the conference proper. Unfortunately the first day I have an off-site field course for 10(!) hours. Hence the need to bring the frozen milk and pump that day. I'll probably end up tossing what I pump, but if I don't pump at least somewhat I'll be in serious pain. I've got a manual Avent pump for that purpose. Apparently, in addition to a…

Clinton vs. Obama

I am utterly undecided. Feel free to make a suggestion. To me, it is simply not the case that in most regards one candidate has better positions than the other. The main difference I see is in that Clinton has articulated her positions in more detail than Obama. Obama seems to be running more of a hope and charisma campaign. I liked Bill Clinton, and I never had negative feelings towards Hillary Clinton, as many people seem to. I hear Hillary Clinton supporters expressing the thought that she would be a good president and the best possible campaigner against any of the Republicans,…

Temptation

Why are we so dishonest? Why do we bad things, even when we know we're doing something bad? Ever since Adam and Eve ate that apple, we've assumed that there is something inherently tempting about sin. If left to our own devices, we'd all turn into men at a Vegas bachelor party, indulging in sex, drugs and slot machines. We'd loot and pillage and lie. Immorality feels good, which is why it's so hard being moral. Some people, of course, are made of stronger stuff, which is why they stay on the righteous path. Because they're better than us, they don't eat too much cake or cheat on their taxes…

The one news source I can't do without

Hypothetical: If you had to make do with just one source of news, what would it be? I don't mean which medium, either. Let's narrow it down to one outlet, one group of journalists operating under a collectively identity, working with a common set of standards and principles. Twenty years ago, I probably would have chosen a newspaper, likely the New York Times, with its breadth and depth of coverage, one of the best (and now last surviving) sections devoted to science, and a largely intact reputation for honesty and accuracy. Today, I have a different answer. Not because the Times' reputation…

A family practitioner and epidemiologist are prescribing dichloracetate (DCA) in Canada

It never seems to end, does it? I'm talking about the hype and questionable practices revolving around dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent that targets the Warburg effect, in essence normalizing the metabolism of tumor cells and thereby inhibiting their growth. (See here and here for more details.) A report by Evangelos Michelakis at the University of Alberta in Cancer Cell in January reported strong antitumor activity against a wide variety of tumors in rat tumor models resulted in a phenomenon ballooning out of control in a way that he could never have imagined…

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