Science
drorzel | September 8, 2009Like every other blogger with a political opinion, I read Paul Krugman's essay on economics last week, and tagged it for Saturday's Links Dump. And while I appreciate Eric Weinstein calling me out as part of the "high end blogosphere," I'm not sure I have much to say about it that is useful. But, since he asked...
Twitter's interface makes it almost impossible to go back and figure out what the hell was going on even a few days ago, but going through Eric's feed, the crux of the matter seems to be that he takes issue with Krugman's claim that "the economics profession went astray because…
bioephemera | September 7, 2009
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
-John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
On rereading the whole "Ode," this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be that either I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary…
ddobbs | September 7, 2009Bloggingheads.tv just posted a conversation Greg Laden and I had about the second-biggest scientific controversy of Darwin's time, and of Darwin's life: the argument over how coral reefs form. The coral reef argument was fascinating in its own right, both scientifically and dramatically -- for here a very capable andn conscientious scientist, Alexander Agassiz, struggled to reconcile both two views of science and the legacies of the two scientific giants of the age, one of whom was his father.
His story -- and the tumultuous 19th-century struggle to define science and empiricism -- is the…
grrlscientist | September 7, 2009tags: science, research, postdoctoral fellowship, academic life, unemployment
[Reprise: originally published in 2004]
New York City (AP) - After an unsuccessful two-year-long search for funds to support two more years of research and living expenses, a scientist and freelance writer has offered to fund her research by selling access to her internationally televised death by electrocution and by auctioning all body parts on ebay.
GrrlScientist, an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist, uses DNA to research the evolution and historical geographic movements of parrots among the islands of…
bioephemera | September 6, 2009
Via iO9, a gallery of stunning glass viruses by sculptor Luke Jerram, originally from the Guardian. (The one above is swine flu.)
grrlscientist | September 6, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
grrlscientist | September 6, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
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 by me and published here for your information and…
grrlscientist | September 5, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
pharyngula | September 5, 2009When I was in New York a while back, I got to meet Ben Fry, a clever fellow who has been doing some amazing things with data visualization. One of the things we played with was a a new toy he'd worked out, or rather, a new application of some old tools. One of the things biologists are interested in is change over time, and we compare genomes to see where changes have occurred between two or more species; one of the reasons we're interested in the chimpanzee genome, for instance, is that it is close to ours, and what scientists are doing is comparing the two, looking for the key differences.…
rallain | September 4, 2009I love this story. It is a story of how ideas changed about the nature of the atom. These are the notes (and diagrams) I use when I teach the atomic nature of matter to non-science majors. The best thing about this story is that it is a great example of science. Science (or scientists) build a model. If new evidence comes along, the model gets changed. There are several other websites that describe all of this stuff, I will list a couple at the end of this post.
Typical textbook model of an atom
Look in an intro, non-science majors textbook and you will probably see a picture like this…
drorzel | September 4, 2009I'm clearing out browser tabs before the weekend, which has reminded me that I've been terribly remiss in not passing along information about the Quantum to Cosmos festival being held next month at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario.
For 10 exciting days this October, Perimeter Institute's Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future (Q2C) will take a global audience from the strange world of subatomic particles to the outer frontiers of the universe. All events will occur on-site in Waterloo, Ontario and online at q2cfestival.com
Q2C's extensive program features more than 50 events --…
drorzel | September 4, 2009Physics Buzz has a nice article about Paul Erdos and the Erdos Number Project (mine is 6), which ends with a good question:
I for one, am wondering: who would be the Paul ErdÅs of the physics world?
It's a tough question, complicated further by the existence of really gigantic collaborations in experimental high-energy physics, where author lists can run to hundreds of people. The 511 collaborators that Erdos can boast is more impressive in math than in some fields of physics.
For something really equivalent in spirit to Erdos, you would need to look for a physicist who had a long and…
awild | September 3, 2009[brightcove vid=36652867001&exp3=25500650001&surl=http://c.brightcove.com/services&pubid=1138077173&w=300&h=225]
As if job prospects weren't already bad enough for myrmecologists, now we're competing with chimps.
At least they haven't figured out how to make pooters. Yet.
grrlscientist | September 3, 2009
Who: Toni Van Pelt, director of the Center for Inquiry's Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C.
What: free public presentation, "Lobbying for Science and Reason on Capitol Hill"
Where: University Settlement, 184 Eldridge Street (and Rivington St.) [map]
When: 730pm, Thursday, 10 September
Toni Van Pelt is the director of the Center for Inquiry's Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C. She will talk about her work as a lobbyist, promoting and advancing science and secularism. In her work, she asks our congresscritters to base law and policy on empirical evidence and the scientific…
drorzel | September 3, 2009"...Can you name the six noble gases?"
As this could be no poser for an economic geographer, I rattled them off in their proper aristocratic order. "Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, and -er- Radon. They were raised to the peerage in the eleventh year of England's George Fifth, and Neon was awarded the Order of the Seraphim by Gustav Sixth of Sweden for its compassionate service in guiding to bars and beaneries guys who roll into towns late at night."
-- from The Moon's Fire-eating Daughter by John Myers Myers
I used that as an opening quote (I can't remember the term for that-- "epigram…
drorzel | September 2, 2009I sort of feel like I ought to have something to say about the recent controversy over creationists on bloggingheads.tv, which has caused Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer to renounce the whole site. If you're too lazy to click through those links, the basic problem is that bloggingheads has twice invited creationists-- sorry, cdesign proponentists-- to appear on their "Science Saturday" segments in recent weeks. Sean and Carl feel that giving people from the Discovery Institute this sort of platform amounts gives them more credibility than they deserve, especially since neither of them was…
pharyngula | September 2, 2009The BBC has an article on the recent direct measurement of human mutation rates, and while it's not a bad article, it does seem to express the view that the result is something novel. It's not; it's a confirmation of a standard measure that scientists have known about for a long, long time. We have estimated the number of novel mutations in newborn human individuals to be somewhere between a hundred and a few hundred (best estimates were on the order of 150) based on a couple of facts.
We've had measurements of the fidelity of the enzymes that catalyze replication, and since we know both the…
drorzel | September 2, 2009This was delayed a day by yesterday's ranting, but I wanted to explain the significance of the people in Monday's lesser-known quantum mechanic smackdown. I'm happy to see that, as of this morning, three candidates have rallied past the "unique flower" option.
In reverse order of popularity:
Hendrik Kramers was a Dutch physicist who spent a long time working as a student and assistant to Bohr, and thus was involved in a lot of the early attempts to make a working quantum theory. He's best known for work in condensed matter physics, and for being the "K" in the WKB approximation.
Arnold…
oracknows | September 1, 2009For a change of pace, I want to step back from medicine for this post, although, as you will see (I hope), the study I'm going to discuss has a great deal of relevance to the topics covered regularly on this blog. One of the most frustrating aspects of being a skeptic and championing critical thinking, science, and science-based medicine is just how unyielding belief in pseudscience is. Whatever realm of science in which there is pseudoscience Orac happens to wander into, he find beliefs that simply will not yield to science or reason. Whether it be creationism, quackery such as homeopathy,…
drorzel | September 1, 2009It's probably a good thing that I don't have full-text access to Mark Slouka's article in Harper's, with the title "Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school." Just the description in this Columbia Journalism Review piece makes me want to hunt down the author and belt him with a Norton anthology:
According to the article itself, the dehumanizing element of the school system (especially universities) is actually its focus on producing businesspeople and "ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy." But "nothing speaks more clearly to…