Science
pharyngula | March 30, 2010Good news: the Large Hadron Collider is operational, and has fired two particles together with a force of 7 trillion electron volts…and it's only the beginning, since they're going to ramp up the power gradually. It's too bad Michio Kaku had to muck it up with a lot of nonsense.
"This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1 - what happened in the beginning," physicist Michio Kaku told The Associated Press.
"This is a Genesis machine. It'll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe."
Please, no. Genesis has zero correspondence to reality.…
drorzel | March 30, 2010SteelyKid is a fan of a web game called BumperStars, which my parents introduced her to. If I'm at the computer doing something, she'll march over, demand to be picked up, then point at the screen and say "Buh-Pah" until I open it up.
Of course, she's a toddler, and thus has an extremely short attention span (except when she doesn't). About two minutes after I start a game for her, she'll slide down off my lap, and go find something else to do. Which would be fine, except for one thing: I have competitive OCD.
I don't mean that I try to one-up other people who have obsessive-compulsive…
pharyngula | March 30, 2010
This is quite possibly the most awesome biology photo ever taken. It is two blind-folded crayfish battling each other in clouds of fluorescent green urine. It's a good thing it's just a picture, because if it were a video, in 3D, with the Star Trek fight music playing in the background, every science nerd in the world would have to lie down and die in ecstasy. Don't click on the little arrow below it! I won't be responsible for the consequences! (Fortunately, I can't put it into 3D motion, so I won't be slaughtering my readership here.)
Star Trek Fight Music sound bite Star Trek sound…
grrlscientist | March 29, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is only one week away and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in the…
drorzel | March 29, 2010A flurry of things to kick off the new academic term. Reviews and news:
A nice write-up on Wired's GeekDad blog by Kathy Ceceri, about last week's homeschool event. Includes a picture of me giving a tour of my lab.
ZapperZ says that I'm not teaching physics, I'm teaching about physics. Which is probably fair, as he defines the terms. Of course, How to Teach Your Dog About Physics isn't as good a title.
And a bunch of upcoming events:
I'll be on WAMC's Roundtable this Thursday at 10am (well, after the news report that runs at the top of the hour).
I'm giving a Physics colloquium at Cornell…
grrlscientist | March 28, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is less than two weeks away and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in…
grrlscientist | March 28, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My piles of books are a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited…
bioephemera | March 28, 2010Doesn't that title sound weird - like an experimental film? It may help to know that House of Sweden is Sweden's embassy in Washington, DC - a lovely glass building on the Potomac. If you're in the DC area, you should get on their mailing list, because they host interesting science-related panel discussions and receptions. Yesterday, they opened a new exhibit - the Virtual Autopsy Table. It's a touch-screen tabletop that lets you slice into, rotate, and magnify an MRI-based 3D representation of the human body, all with a brush of a hand:
The Virtual Autopsy Table from Norrkö…
pharyngula | March 27, 2010Speaking of the ABC, I revisited their Global Atheist Convention blog, which I can say without hesitation was absolutely the worst effort any of the media put out. I think I prefer the blatant stupidity of a Gary Ablett to the mawkish blitherings of a gang of pious apologists — at least it's honest. And that's all they've got — the blog is still limping along with a series of tepid guest posts by people making weak excuses for their faith. It was supposedly a blog about the convention, but it never quite rose to the standard of even meeting their own aims — instead, it's an exercise in breast…
grrlscientist | March 27, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is less than two weeks away and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in…
drorzel | March 26, 2010Somebody at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has a really high opinion of this blog, as they not only sent me an Advance Reading Copy of Paul Davies's forthcoming book about SETI, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, they followed it up with a finished hardcover. I read the ARC on the plane on the way back from the March Meeting, and put the hardcover in the mailbox of a colleague who just finished co-teaching a course on astrobiology.
This book is being released in 2010, which Davies cites as the 50th anniversary of an active Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI…
grrlscientist | March 26, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is less than two weeks away and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in…
oracknows | March 26, 2010I have an MD and a PhD. While many people find that to be impressive, personally I've become so inured of it that I certainly don't take note of it much anymore. Certainly, I rarely point it out. So, you may ask, why am I pointing it out this time, even going so far as to start a post with it? The answer is simple. If there was one thing I always thought about having both an MD and a PhD, it's that it should render one more resistant to pseudoscience and woo. I know, I know, maybe I'm being incredibly arrogant or incredibly naive--possibly both--but it was what I thought for a long time, even…
drorzel | March 25, 2010Been a little while since I've done an Obsessive Update, but a few noteworthy things have come up recently:
A very nice review at Pet Connection: "this brilliant and (relatively) simple book explains the basic premises of quantum physics in terms that dogs and most English majors can understand." Which is not to say that English majors are less likely to understand it than dogs-- English majors are a big part of our target audience, and it's nice to hear that it works for at least some of them.
Another blog review, this time at Synergy of One: "Throughout the book, the author's extremely…
pharyngula | March 25, 2010As yet another examples of the derangement of conservative thought, Sean Hannity has been pushing a list of 102 examples of 'wasteful' stimulus spending. I don't quite get it; this is money the government is disbursing to encourage jobs for the sake of jobs, and if they were hiring people to dig holes and fill them in again, it would accomplish their task. However, the money is being spent sensibly on projects that also improve the nation's infrastructure in small ways and increase knowledge.
One of the targets of their scorn are science projects, including this one, improving the facilities…
drorzel | March 25, 2010I did one sketchy update from Portland last Tuesday, but never wrote up my impressions of the rest of the March Meeting-- when I got back, I was buried in grading, and then trying to put together Monday's presentation. And, for reasons that will become apparent, I was unable to write anything up before I left Portland
Anyway, for those who care, here are my impressions from the rest of the meeting:
Tuesday
In the 8am session, I went to the polymer physics prize talk by Michael Rubinstein, which was a sort of career retrospective, talking about how he wandered into the disreputable field of…
oracknows | March 25, 2010I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm not really a political blogger. True, I do from time to time succumb to the blogger's temptation of being a pundit on current events or pontificating on politics, but in general I don't do that very often because political bloggers are a dime a dozen and politics isn't my area of strength. Writing about science and science-based medicine is. That's part of the reason why I really haven't said much about the massive health care reform bill that was passed on Sunday or the political process, except when on occasion the utter insanity of it all (…
bioephemera | March 24, 2010This is weirdly awesome. It's the Google Translation of a short web essay by Franco Bolelli. Entitled "Farewell to the scientist with his head in the clouds, now prefer to surf: the science has become pop," the article is pretty awesome, but that's probably in part because it was translated by a bot, giving it a kind of cyber-Italian accent on the screen.
Do you remember the proverbial stereotype of the scientist screwed with his head in the clouds, perched in his laboratory dealing with mysterious formulas? Well, has also done the end of the phone booths or VCRs, finally lost in the stormy…
oracknows | March 24, 2010It has often been written on this blog and elsewhere that the mark of a true crank is hatred of the scientific consensus, be it consensus regarding the theory of evolution, the science that says homeopathy is impossible, anthropogenic global warming; various areas of science-based medicine; or the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Perhaps the most famous expression of distrust of a scientific consensus is the famous speech by Michael Crichton, in which he famously said:
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is less than two weeks away and as usual, it is seeking submissions and hosts! Can you help by sending URLs for your own or others' well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me or by volunteering to host this carnival on your blog?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing that has been published in…