Science
drorzel | March 23, 2010The winners of the first Research Blogging Awards were announced today, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that this blog was named the "Best Blog -- Chemistry, Physics, or Astronomy." I knew that I was nominated-- I was one of the judges, and while I abstained from voting on my own blog, I did see it in the list with many other excellent blogs. Given that research blogging is only a small part of what I do, I didn't expect to win at all.
(In the manner of such awards, I now feel guilty for not having done any ResearchBlogging posts in ages, so I've queued one up for tomorrow morning…
oracknows | March 23, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging. This is one of those times. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in April 2007 and be assured that I'll be back tomorrow. Remember, if you've been reading less than three years, it's new to you, and, even if you have been reading more than three years, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged.
From fellow ScienceBlogger Abel, I'm made aware of an excellent post on the Health Care Renewal Blog about the financial reality of being an academic physician in a modern U.S. medical school. It's an excellent overview of how medical…
oracknows | March 22, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in November 2007 and be assured that I'll be back tomorrow. Remember, if you've been reading less than two and a half years, it's new to you, and, even if you have been reading more than two and a half years, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged.
I wish I had thought of this one, but I didn't. However, I never let a little thing like not having thought of…
grrlscientist | March 22, 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…
bioephemera | March 22, 2010
A short, wordless film inspired by numbers, geometry and nature, and created by Cristóbal Vila. Thanks to reader Esmeralda for passing this one along!
drorzel | March 22, 2010I gave a talk today for a group of local home-school students and parents, on the essential elements of quantum physics. The idea was to give them a sense of what sets quantum mechanics apart from other theories of physics, and why it's a weird and wonderful thing.
The title is, of course, a reference to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and the second slide was an embedded version of the Chapter 3 reading. I set the talk up to build toward the double-slit experiment with electrons, using the video of the experiment made by Hitachi. Here's the talk on SlideShare:
What Every Dog Should Know…
bioephemera | March 22, 2010I was reading through some back issues of Harper's and came upon an article by Rivka Galchen about climate change and meteorological engineering. I'm sick to death of reading about climate change, but I was immediately hooked by this article - her perspective is fascinating, and she is an excellent writer who draws on a wide range of interdisciplinary elements. Equal parts science writing, memoir, self-reflection, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and elegy to her late father, meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen, this is a hell of a good article.
[F]unding far-fetched projects can be justified for reasons…
catdynamics | March 22, 2010In six words.
Like this:
"Observe extragalactic Cepheids pulsate.
Measure H0."
h/t David Brin with a special thanks to PZ.
No, not that PZ, the real PZ.
oracknows | March 22, 2010Here we go again.
Every so often, it seems, the media has to recycle certain scare stories based on little or no science. Be it vaccines and whether they cause autism or not (the don't) or various environmental exposures supposedly linked to various cancers or other diseases in which the science is far more complex or tentative than represented, convincing people that some common thing to which we are routinely exposed is going to kill them seldom fails to bring in the readers. One of the favorite targets of this is the ubiquitous cell phone, and there have been two hunks o' burnin' stupid…
grrlscientist | March 21, 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…
stoat | March 21, 2010 Actually this is a post about statistics, but what the hell I've been listening to Carmina Burana a lot recently, even if Miriam thinks it is bombastic. So anyway, several people have commented on this article which (whilst it makes some points about statistics that are vaguely plausible) far far overgeneralises its bounds of validity: any single scientific study alone is quite likely to be incorrect, thanks largely to the fact that the standard statistical system for drawing conclusions is, in essence, illogical. Tamino points out the obvious: that statistics works, and it isn't stats…
grrlscientist | March 21, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My piles of books is 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…
catdynamics | March 20, 2010Eyjafjallajökull erupted tonight.
Small so far, we'll see how it develops, first eruption in 187 years.
Eruptions tracked the microquaking leading up to the eruption - fascinating and very long comment conversation and liveblogging of the precursors to the eruption. Tremendous use of blogging.
Farms south of the mountain are being evacuated, they'll see what it is like in the morning.
Should be a jökulhlaup underway (glacial flash flood).
Ashplume is headed north, airports are closed.
EUMETSAT images here
PS: according to ruv.is early sunday morning, the geoscientists driving up to the…
grrlscientist | March 20, 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…
bioephemera | March 19, 2010A slight science journalism FAIL in a story at iO9, originally from the New Scientist:
the Title: "First Quantum Effects Seen in Visible Object"
the Lede: "Does Schrödinger's cat really exist? You bet. The first ever quantum superposition in an object visible to the naked eye has been observed."
the Discovery: "[researchers showed] that a tiny resonating strip of metal - only 60 micrometres long, but big enough to be seen without a microscope - can both oscillate and not oscillate at the same time."
the Wait, what?: "Alas, you couldn't actually see the effect happening, because that very…
grrlscientist | March 19, 2010tags: embargoed science, embargoes, publishing, MSM, journalism, science writing
Image: Orphaned?
The short story: this kerfuffle was the result of a misunderstanding.
The long story follows.
I was surprised to realize that my rant was quite impressive to the people at AAAS, even though it was rather mild by internet/blogosphere standards (actually, it caused scarcely a ripple among science blog writers). Certainly, I was not (and am not) angry at any individual, but I was annoyed and frustrated by what I perceive to be an institutionalized gatekeeper that supports and protects the media…
grrlscientist | March 19, 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…
bioephemera | March 19, 2010--A great NYT article on science museums and cabinets of curiosities:
This antic miscellany is dizzying. But there are lineaments of sustained conflict in the apparent chaos. Over the last two generations, the science museum has become a place where politics, history and sociology often crowd out physics and the hard sciences. There are museums that believe their mission is to inspire political action, and others that seek to inspire nascent scientists; there are even fundamental disagreements on how humanity itself is to be regarded. The experimentation may be a sign of the science museum's…
awild | March 18, 2010
Harmonia axyridis, the Asian Multicolored Lady Beetle
If I had to pick the most annoying insect in Illinois it'd be Harmonia axyridis. This lady beetle was introduced to our continent as a control agent for aphids but became a pest in its own right. It consumes not just aphids but all manner of other insects, including beneficials like native lady beetles. Swarms of them descend into our houses in the fall. They get just about everywhere. They have a noxious odor. And they bite.
A study out in PLoS One byLombaert et al has determined that our local beetles here in eastern North America are…