Basic Concepts
thusspakezuska | July 1, 2010BREAK THE CHAINS!!!
UNLEASH THE FURY OF ZOMBIE WOMEN AS A MIGHTY FORCE FOR REVOLUTION!!!!!
Zombie women of the world, I ask you: why are we content to shamble aimlessly along behind our brethren, following them willy-nilly, eating the leftover brains, and cleaning up after they senselessly destroy some village? Would it kill them to take a turn minding the zombikins for a change? No, it would not. Because they are undead.
There I was just last week, shambling along after Nigel on Shakedown Street. Like he knew where he was going! "Would it fucking KILL you to stop and ask for directions…
tqa | January 11, 2010
The big paleontological news of last week was the announcement that fossil footprints have been discovered that predate - by about 20 million years - the previous contender for the earliest fossil evidence of tetrapods. Naturally, this announcement led almost immediately to a new round of "learning anything new about evolution means that Darwinism is totally wrong" claims from the Creationists.
Their complaints don't impress me much. There's very little difference between the Discovery Institute's "if there were tetrapod footprints 20 million years before Tiktaalik, how can something…
jstemwedel | October 30, 2009No, I'm not going to be able to get away with claiming that truth is beauty, and beauty, truth.
The first issue in understanding truth is recognizing that truth is a property of a proposition. (What's a proposition? A proposition is a claim.) A proposition that is true has a certain kind of correspondence with the world about which it is making a claim. A proposition that is false does not have this correspondence.
At the most basic level, what we want from this correspondence seems pretty obvious: what the propositions says about the world matches up with how the world actually is.
So,…
tqa | May 24, 2009
Like my friend Henry, I'm overweight and trying not to be. He is, I think, a couple of "stone" heavier than I am. (Whatever the hell that means - you'd think that dealing in pounds and kilograms alone would be confusing enough for the British, but apparently there's no such thing as excessive conversion confusion in the UK. But I digress.) Anyway, I'm currently 40 or so pounds past where I should be.
My personal weight loss "plan" (for lack of a better word) is not very diet-focused at the moment. I'm losing weight right now through the simple process of burning more calories than I…
jstemwedel | May 11, 2009In light of our recent snail eradication project:
Why does salt "melt" snails and slugs? (And how do people manage to prepare escargot without ending up with a big pot of goo?)
To answer this question, let us consider the snail as seen by the chemist:
The snail is an animal whose sliding-along-the-plants part (the foot) is made up of cells. Animal cells are, roughly, bags of aqueous solution and organelles wrapped in phospholipid bilayers (the cell membranes). For what we're looking at here, the important thing to know is that cell membranes are semipermeable membranes: some stuff travels…
tqa | February 18, 2009
"Children are our hope for the future."
THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE FUTURE, said Death.
"What does it contain, then?"
ME.
"Besides you, I mean!"
Death gave him a puzzled look. I'M SORRY?
Terry Pratchett
"Sourcery"
Bad Astronomy Blogger Phil Plait has written one of the most fantastically, outrageously, manically, humorously depressing books I've ever read, and I'm almost certain I mean that as a compliment. Death From The Skies provides a veritable smorgasbord of potentially deadly astronomical delights, each more exotic than the last. It's like having every Discovery Channel "The Sky Is…
skookumchick | February 16, 2009One of our research projects for ADVANCE involves doing a survey of people at Purdue asking them about their experience of Purdue's "climate." We're working on developing the survey, but one of the things we're finding interesting is that people's definitions of climate vary significantly, and tend to involve using other metaphors to define climate, itself a metaphor.
So I'm curious -- if someone were to ask you what your definition of "climate" was in the context of your work environment, what would you say? Not whether it was good or bad, but what the concept of "climate" means to you?
skookumchick | February 13, 2009A good friend and colleague of mine, Alisha Wallers recently sent me an email about a new company she has founded. She used to be a mainstay of the feminist engineering education group until she "retired" to spend more time focusing on the education of her kids. Since then, she started "Learning with Alisha!" which has recently launched its first product, the Pink Polygons, designed to help kids with geometry. Read more about Alisha's company below the fold.
Dear Friends,
Learning with it Alisha! is an LLC that I formed with my dad, David Weathers. Our goal is to find the gaps in what is…
tqa | January 16, 2009
When we talk about the role of fossil fuels in climate chance, what we're really talking about is the carbon cycle. That's the term that scientists use to describe the different forms that carbon is stored in on the earth, and the different ways that it can move from form to form. Understanding the carbon cycle is one of the keys to understanding both the effect of burning carbon-based fuels and the issues involved in trying to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. According to a paper in the latest edition of Science, there may still be some pretty significant gaps in our knowledge of…
evolvingthoughts | January 3, 2009SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the top when new entries are published. If you are not a Scienceblogger, email me and let me know of your post, or someone else's. If you want suggestions for a topic to write on, just ask.
To subscribe to updates, use the RSS feed in the address bar of the complete post.
Mathematics
Statistics
Basic…
evolvingthoughts | December 26, 2008It is often said that one of the most significant discoveries in mathematics was the concept of zero, in the Indus valley sometime in the pre-Christian era. An equally important concept in logic is the operator NOT. While Aristotle, the founder of western logic, had discussed groupings of things in terms of what they are not in the Categories, chapter 10, the importance of NOT seems to have been realised first by George Boole in the nineteenth century. In this post I want to discuss it in the context of classification.
Aristotle wrote of four kinds of "contrarieties":
We must next explain the…
evolvingthoughts | December 16, 2008SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
Because Moveable Type is gagging on the number of links, I have had to break this into several different posts, as shown below the fold. New entries will continue to be listed in this post and linked.
Recent additions:
Taxonomy, by Dave Hone at Archosaur Musings
Basics: NOT by John Wilkins, at Evolving Thoughts
This is the main list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be…
sciencewoman | December 12, 2008While many of you are thinking about issues related to blogging and interviewing, let's take this opportunity to have a more constructive conversation on benefits and pitfalls of blogging while on the job market. Warning: I want the discussion in this thread to be focused on a wide range of experiences, questions, and generalities, and if I see it disintegrating into more rehashing of the specific case a few posts below, I'm going to exercise my moderation super-powers.
Let's say you've got a blog. Maybe its focused on your science, maybe it's more a journal of your life as a scienitst (or…
evolvingthoughts | November 8, 2008
It has become common in recent years for people to use terms of philosophy in distinct contexts, as it has terms of biology. Thus, ontology has gone the way of taxonomy, being dragooned into service of database techniques, to mean something quite the opposite of what it originally meant. I have noticed this tendency of computer technology for decades, ever since I got hopelessly muddled when doing database programming in the early 80s until I realised that they were using some terminology of formal logic in exactly the wrong way (I forget what it was now). A database ontology is not an…
jstemwedel | October 23, 2008This is National Chemistry Week. It's always chosen to coincide with whichever calendar week includes October 23 (or 10/23), since October 23 is "Mole Day".
"Huh? Why would chemists celebrate a furry critter that burrows underground?"
Not that mole. The mole chemists celebrate is a unit.
1 mole = 6.02 x 1023 of whatever it is you want a mole of.
You can think of a mole as being sort of the chemists' equivalent of a dozen -- it's a convenient sized bundle for working with the kind of stuff chemists work with, namely, atoms and molecules. If they were working with eggs, or shoes, or some…
evolvingthoughts | September 24, 2008SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the top when new entries are published. If you are not a Scienceblogger, email me and let me know of your post, or someone else's. If you want suggestions for a topic to write on, just ask.
To subscribe to updates, use the RSS feed in the address bar of the complete post.
Medicine
Introduction to…
skookumchick | August 25, 2008So, have you been asked whether you are married or have kids on an academic job interview? Many of us have, even though the people interviewing you are not supposed to ask. What strategies have you used (or would have liked to use ;-) ) to deal with these awkward questions? Do you wear your wedding rings? Do you change the background of your computer screen before using your laptop to give your presentation? If you are part of a dual-career couple, when do you bring up your spouse to take advantage of spousal hiring opportunities?
This thread stems from a comment on this post about an…
evolvingthoughts | August 21, 2008SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the top when new entries are published. If you are not a Scienceblogger, email me and let me know of your post, or someone else's. If you want suggestions for a topic to write on, just ask.
To subscribe to updates, use the RSS feed in the address bar of the complete post.
Historical and social…
evolvingthoughts | August 20, 2008SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the top when new entries are published. If you are not a Scienceblogger, email me and let me know of your post, or someone else's. If you want suggestions for a topic to write on, just ask.
To subscribe to updates, use the RSS feed in the address bar of the complete post.
Genes and Genomes
Gene by…
evolvingthoughts | August 20, 2008SPECIAL NOTE:This page and its subordinate pages will no longer be updated. See the new page at my new blog for the live version, and change all your subscriptions. Thank you.
This is a list of the Basic Concepts posts being put up by Science Bloggers and others. It will be updated and put to the top when new entries are published. If you are not a Scienceblogger, email me and let me know of your post, or someone else's. If you want suggestions for a topic to write on, just ask.
To subscribe to updates, use the RSS feed in the address bar of the complete post.
Physics and Astronomy…