Ask A ScienceBlogger
drorzel | November 24, 2008The Corporate Masters have decreed a new question Ask a
ScienceBlogger question, and this one's right up my alley:
What do you see as science fiction's role in promoting science, if any?
If you look over in the left sidebar, you'll see a
href="http://scienceblogs.com/principles/sf/">SF category, which
is all about, well, science fiction stuff. I read a lot of SF,
regularly attend Boskone (a Boston-based convention), and we scheduled
our big Japan trip to coincide with the Worldcon in Yokohama. So,
yeah, this is a question I can spend a little time on...
The short version of the answer is…
drorzel | June 16, 2008The Corporate Masters have posted a new Ask a ScienceBlogger question:
The question (submitted by a reader) is this: There are many, many academic bloggers out there feverishly blogging about their areas of interest. Still, there are many, many more academics who don't. So, why do you blog and how does blogging help with your research?
Taking these in the opposite order, how does blogging help with my research? The answer is simple: it doesn't. Not one bit.
I am an experimental physicist, so my research is done in the lab, not
in my office (well, data analysis, when I have data to analyze…
drorzel | April 21, 2008There's a new "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question out:
"A question from a friend's 9-year old son:
What is in the air we breathe? What is it's chemical composition?"
The short answer to this is "a little bit of everything." Pretty much
any substance we have on Earth can be found in the atmosphere
somewhere. The atmosphere is a pretty big place-- roughly
1044 molecules worth of stuff (that's
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, give or
take). In a collection that big, you'll find just about anything you
want.
All we can really do when asked about the composition of the…
drorzel | December 27, 2006I've been kind of bad about responding to the "Ask a ScienceBlogger" questions lately, but they've had a lot of stuff up there that I just don't have a response for. The most recent question is something I probably ought to post about, though:
What's a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back?
This is a question that grew out of back-channel discussions of the adversarial culture of science, which are a major part of the arguments about why there are so few women and minorities in science. Accordingly, most…
drorzel | November 6, 2006I'm officially about three "Ask a ScienceBlogger" questions behind, but I didn't want to pass this one up completely:
What's the most important local political race to you this year (as a citizen, as a scientist)?
It's tough to say, because the answer is either "all of them" or "none of them." I thought about writing a voter guide a la Scalzi, but the truth is, my voting this year is entirely determined by a simple algorithm:
I will not vote for the Republican candidate for any office, so long as the current leadership of the national party holds power.
It's as simple as that. I don't care…
drorzel | September 27, 2006Well, not really. That wouldn't be legal.
But the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 is scheduled to be announced next Tuesday, and this clearly calls for some irresponsible speculation. Who do you think will win? How about a guess as to what field of physics will be honored this year?
If you think it'll help, the last five prizes were:
2005: Quantum optics
2004: Asymptotic freedom
2003: Superconductivity theory
2002: Neutrino and X-ray astronomy
2001: Bose-Einstein Condensation in atomic vapors
I wouldn't bet on anything from the AMO realm this year, as they've got two of the last five.…
drorzel | August 12, 2006This year marks 25 years since the identification of AIDS as a disease, and Seed is going with blanket coverage. The latest print issue is devoted to AIDS coverage, there's a temporary group blog covering the International AIDS conference, and this week's Ask a ScienceBlogger is AIDS-related:
To what extent do you worry about AIDS, either with respect to yourself, your children, or the world at large?
As this is very much outside my area of expertise, I don't expect to have much of anything to say on this topic this week, but I'll give a partial answer to the question below the fold.
On a…
drorzel | August 4, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger is right up my alley:
What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally....
A bunch of my co-bloggers have weighed in already, and it's hard not to duplicate thier choices, so I won't even try. (Unoriginal answers below the fold...)
There are a bunch of different ways to take this question, so I'll suggest a few different movies.
The most fun of any of the science-based movies I can think of would be Real Genius. The actual science…
drorzel | July 21, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question breaks a three-week string of topics I have no real opinion on:
If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?
I have two answers to this question: the true answer, and the answer they're looking for (below the fold).
The true answer to this question is "Right now." There's never been a better time to be a scientist, and I'm not just talking about things like the availability of antibiotics to keep one from dying a miserable death from some sort of plague or another, which would be a real…
drorzel | July 7, 2006This week, Seed asks:
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?
Answer behind the cut:
Dammit, Jim, I'm a physicist, not a developmental biologist. I didn't have any particular expectation of how cloning would develop over the last ten years, so there's nothing to compare to.
If pressed, I probably would've said something like "It's going to turn out to be a lot more complicated than this early success might seem to indicate," which would've been both accurate and unhelpful. Other than that, I…
drorzel | June 26, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question is a total meatball:
What makes a good science teacher?
Teaching science is a big part of what I do, so of course I have an answer for this. Which is basically the same answer as everybody else has already given, so let me try to put a slightly different spin on this, and object to the implicit premise of the question.
Let's be clear on one thing: Science is not special. The qualities that make a good science teacher are exactly the same qualities that make a good English teacher, or a good history teacher, or a good shop teacher, for that matter.…
drorzel | June 22, 2006OK, it's not an official Ask a ScienceBlogger question (that answer will show up next week), but over at the World's Fair, they've raised an important scholarly question via a scene from The Simpsons:
Marge: Homer?
Homer: Yelloh?
Marge: There's a man here who thinks he can help you.
Homer: Batman?
Marge: No, he's a scientist.
Homer: Batman's a scientist.
Obviously, this leads to the question : "What sort of scientist is Batman, anyway?" Some of my colleagues are trying to claim him for psychology or genetics, but the real answer is after the cut:
It's a trick question. Batman isn't a…
drorzel | June 19, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question deals with blogging itself, and not so much with science:
How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?
I have a slightly more serious response to this than many of my co-bloggers, simply because I half expect the issue to come up at my tenure review in the fall.
I don't make any real effort to hide my blog (obviousy), but I also don't advertise it on campus. I know a few of my students are aware of its existence, and a few…
drorzel | June 13, 2006Weirdly, this week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question may be the hardest one to answer yet:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
Most of the responses have taken this as an "If you had it to do over, what sort of scientist would you be?", and that's the source of the problem. It's not that the question itself is all that difficult-- I actually have a stock answer for that. The problem is that I don't really like the premise of the question (he says cryptically, promising to explain…
drorzel | June 7, 2006Over at Gene Expression, Razib responds to my brain drain comments in a way that provokes some twinges of Liberal Guilt:
Second, Chad like many others points to the issue of foreign scientists allowing us (Americans) to be complacent about nourishing home grown talent. I don't totally dismiss this, there are probably many doctors and lawyers out there who could be scientists if the incentives were right (Ph.D. scientists are one of the least compensated groups in relation to how much education they have). But, I would frankly rather focus on tightening labor supply on the low end of the…
drorzel | June 6, 2006Another week, another "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question. This week, the topic is the putative "brain drain" caused by recent US policies:
Do you think there is a brain drain going on (i.e. foreign scientists not coming to work and study in the U.S. like they used to, because of new immigration rules and the general unpopularity of the U.S.) If so, what are its implications? Is there anything we can do about it?
This is really three questions, with a fourth sort of assumed on the way to the third. Answers below the fold.
The first question is "Is there a 'brain drain' going on?" That one, I can…
drorzel | May 31, 2006This week's question from our Corporate Masters has to do with the ever-popular issue of funding:
Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies?
"Justify" is an awfully strong word, here...
The answer to this question is "yes and no," because there are a couple of ways to take this. If you mean "should individual scientists be required to justify their specific research activities to the general public?" then the answer is a clear "no." But if you take it…
drorzel | May 24, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question from On High arrived while I was out of town (see also last week's results), and I've held off answering because I had a huge stack of papers to grade. Of course, time for responding has almost run out, so I guess I ought to say something...
The question of the week is:
"If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?"
Most of the other answers have come in already (and I'm too lazy to link them all), but they divide into two basic categories: answers dealing with the process of science, and answers…
drorzel | May 6, 2006The Powers That Be at Seed/ ScienceBlogs are initiating a new feature, cleverly called "Ask a ScienceBlogger," in which they will pose one question a week to the group of us, and we'll answer (or not) as we choose. The inaugural question was posted last night:
If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?
(Why they've chosen to roll this out on a Friday, when nobody reads blogs over the weekend, I have no idea... I just work here.)
Some thoughts on the question below the fold:
This is the part where I reveal the…