General Science
evolvingthoughts | December 13, 2008The Wilkins Ice Shelf, of course. The European Space Agency has a "satcam" up for you to see how it's going.
evolvingthoughts | December 12, 2008I received a query from reader Jodi, of Nova Scotia (I so want to visit there one summer) about how to learn about a scientific subject as a layperson. Of course being a philosopher I was able to answer her quickly, but readers may wish to comment more authoritatively and knowledgeably, as we know philosophy is not bound by little things such as facts. This comes from a comment I made in my talk recently about getting one's theory of evolution from Dawkins or Gould... [Now there's a red rag to a certain curmudgeonly bull in Toronto]. Below the fold:
Jodi wrote:
Hi there,
My name is Jodi ...,…
evolvingthoughts | December 10, 2008I've been travelling a little to organise my move to Sydney. Love the building, the department, the people and the project. Not sure about Sydney... so anyway, nothing of substance from me for a while.
Here's a lovely little essay about Newton pissing off most of the European intellectual giants of his time, by one of our commentators, Thony Christie, at Etherwave Propaganda. He truly was the most egotistical and curmudgeonly bastard of his time, matched only by his actual achievements.
The latest Linnaeus' Legacy is up at Agricultural Biodiversity. They had the good taste to use one of mine…
evolvingthoughts | December 6, 2008I just love this:
Cambridge University's Space Flight club got local school children to make space suits for these teddy bears, which were attached to a helium balloon that rose to 30km, enough to see the curvature of the earth. All teds were recovered safely. I expect Prof. Steve Steve to take the next flight up...
sa smith | December 6, 2008LOL! I didnt know this was up yet!
Me and Ed Yong blithering for like, and hour :P
Full diavalogue!
evolvingthoughts | November 23, 2008
I am a fan of science fiction as far back as I can recall. The flights of imagination about large things, ideas and worlds, was enough to trigger off my own imagination. I read pretty well everything I could for over two decades before it all petered out into second rate thick books of fantasy and Star Wars knockoffs. Science fiction had a use-by date, and roughly when Dick Tracy's radio watch became ordinary, it stopped appealing, and I started getting interested in the science.
However, I had to unlearn much of the "science" I had picked up by reading SF (scifi is for latercomers). I…
evolvingthoughts | November 16, 2008
We had a little storm here yesterday. It left my brother's flat wet inside and out, destroying their mattresses, and giving my motorcycle a jet blast clean. It's clean for the first time since I bought it four years ago. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, very scared. Two minutes before I arrived at my brother's place, I was on the road on my bike. Then this happened. Hailstones the size of a small orange, winds up to 130km/h (and I am sure that was what I saw when I took this pic), tree branches down and water just pouring into the flat.
Anyway, that to one side, here are some…
evolvingthoughts | November 14, 2008
As I have argued before, there is a class of objects in the biological domain that do not derive from the theory of that domain, but which are in fact the special objects of the domain that call for a theoretical explanation. The example I have given is mountain, which is a phenomenal object of geology, and yet not required by the ontology of any geological theory, which does include overfolds, tectonic plates, upthrusts, the process of differential erosion, and so on. At the end of the theoretical explanation, the mountains have not disappeared so that we might now drive from Arizona to Los…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2008
Right now on the Australian ABC network they are reshowing a program that was first shown in April this year on Professor Sir Gustav Nossal AO [and a three line slew of fruit salad of awards, qualifications, and honours]. The transcript is here, but it doesn't do justice to the man himself. Gus, as he likes to be called, is one of the most remarkable people I have ever met, and the one who I count working for as a great honour, when I was the communications manager at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, where I worked while I did my PhD, for ten years (the PhD took six).
He discovered…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2008
There have been several attempts to produce an ontology of biology and the life sciences in general. One of the more outstanding was Joseph Woodger's 1937 The Axiomatic Method in Biology, which was based on Russell's and Whitehead's Principia and the theory of types. In this, Woodger attempted to develop a logic system that would account for all the objects of the theories of biology, especially of embryology, physiology (including cell theory) and genetics. It was hard going even for logicians (Tarski himself wrote an appendix), and the theory thus elucidated seemed to be very post hoc - it…
evolvingthoughts | November 10, 2008
Here, by the incredibly young, handsome and way too successful Carl Zimmer, late of the Seed stable. Carl brings to mind my favourite Truman Capote saying:
It is not enough to succeed. Friends must be seen to have failed.
Anyway, go read the bastard's excellent essay. I will just sit here in my pool of failure.
evolvingthoughts | November 9, 2008
...the albino silverback blinks once or twice, says knowingly "Yes, yes", and sends those who do understand math to these two posts at The n-Category Café: "Entropy, Diversity and Cardinality" post 1, post 2. If I read it aright, it means that diversity is measured as the entropy of some metric space, or the probability distributions of that space. Since this is roughly the same thing as Shannon entropy, it is no surprise to find that ecologists have tricked upon the same equations to deal with this problem. More than that I am not competent to say (curse my teenage lack of interest in…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
Hmmm... cool name for a song. Anyway, here are a few things that caught my eye while I was trying to ignore some politics.
The Internet filtering debacle has reached the pages of Nature. With luck this will blow up in Conroy's face. It really does look like this was pandering to the religious right here in Australia.
Siris has one of his usual erudite and evocative pieces, this time on herbs (i.e., drugs) making people beasts in classical sources. I wonder if the notion that drugs take us upward rather than downward was an invention of the moderns?
David White argues that intelligent design…
evolvingthoughts | October 28, 2008
One of the downsides to being old is that your favourite teachers die. I learned most of what I know about the Empiricists, in particular John Locke, from a book by C. B. Martin, who passed away recently. Hat tip to Leiter. I didn't know he spent so much time in Australia.
John Lynch is tantalising me with a workshop I very much want to go to but can't: The 2009 ASU-MBL History of Biology Seminar: Theory in the Life Sciences. It looks like enormous fun (hey, I'm a philosopher: I use philosophical values of "fun"). I Have Views on what counts as a theory in life sciences, and I'd love to…
evolvingthoughts | October 26, 2008
I love golden orb spiders - they are among the prettiest spiders you will find in Queensland, and the largest [click on the pic for information]. You'll come across them in the oddest places, too. I once nearly stepped on one on a footpath (sidewalk to non-English speakers) in the business center of Brisbane. I shepherded it to safety, of course.
Now their reputation has taken a hit: just because someone photographed one eating a mid sized bird that got caught in its web. Sure, they can get bigger than your hand, but they aren't aggressive, and their trick is to spin a really strong web. I…
evolvingthoughts | October 20, 2008
So, as many of my readers and all of my friends know, I am a moral vacuum. I routinely brush those earnest young folk aside who seek my signature on their morally worthy petitions with that statement - they usually stand there blinking. I mean, what do you do? Run after the psychopath and try to reason with him? Just try it, young fellow...
Anyway, in a self-conscious attempt to make up for this, see below the fold.
Janet has done all Seed stablemates proud by attempting to get us to donate to DonorsChoose. Since it's an American thing, and I am not American, I have chosen to not get…
evolvingthoughts | October 17, 2008
Melvyn Bragg, always an informed and interesting interviewer, has a podcast up from BBC Radio of an interview on the topic of vitalism in biology. Here the experts chosen are Patricia Fara, Fellow of Clare College and Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, Andrew Mendelsohn, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Imperial College, University of London, and Pietro Corsi, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oxford.
It's an excellent introduction to both the myths and facts about how modern…
sa smith | October 17, 2008I love the intrawebz!
I was bopping around on Google last night, looking for neat info about Cauliflower Mosaic Virus (post on that later!), and I stumbled upon a really awesome article from 1994:
The use of Cauliflower Mosaic Virus (CaMV) in genetic engineering: 35S Promoter (CaMV) in Calgene's Flavr Savr Tomato Creates Hazard
Now I have no idea who "Joseph E. Cummins" is. He might be as embarrassed by that article today as I am amused by it. But the website that is hosting that article is concerned about two things: FRANKENSTEIN GMOs, and cell phones mutating your DNA.
hehe.
Anyway,…
evolvingthoughts | October 14, 2008
... those weeds won't ever go away.
The inimitable Siris notes the problem with the myth that the US Electoral College is a restraint upon democracy (when it makes presidential elections possible where previously they weren't, so how can it be a restraint?). The article in the New Yorker he links to also notes that it was an Australian, no even a Victorian (my home state's) innovation to have the state produce the electoral ballots. Yay us!
Siris also notes what I should have realised: that before Descartes, philosophers thought animals had the rudiments of cognition. Given the Great…
evolvingthoughts | October 5, 2008
The two space shuttle disasters were due to political and military interference in the design of the shuttle. On the one hand, the various senators wanted parts of the shuttle manufactured in places like, of all states, Utah, necessitating the solid fuel segment design that failed catastrophically with Challenger, and put the fuel tank for the shuttle engines above the shuttle itself, causing the Columbia disaster. On the other the USAF wanted the Shuttle to be big enough to deploy spy satellites. The end result was a hybrid design that was unsafe and inefficient. So of course NASA and the…