Science
oracknows | September 1, 2009Seventy years ago today, the massed armies of the Third Reich poured across the Polish border, marking the official start of World War II. It would require nearly six years, millions of deaths, and the combined might of the Soviet Union, United States, Great Britain, and numerous other nations to bring the war to an end, with Hitler utterly defeated. I mark this occasion because of my interest in World War II history, the Holocaust, Holocaust denial, and because my heritage is Polish through my father's side. Another thing that needs to be understood about September 1, 1939 is that it marked…
Furious Seasons: Researcher who claimed 3-year-olds get depressed may have undisclosed industry ties
ddobbs | August 31, 2009If nothing else, this points out the need to clarify what "past 5 years" means in declaring history of possible conflicts of interest. 5 years before publication -- or research and writing? Presumably there's a difference, if we're specifyng a time frame anyway
drorzel | August 31, 2009SteelyKid's day care is closed today, meaning that I will be spending the day chasing her in circles in a variety of different places. this doesn't allow a lot of blogging time, so you get a poll to pass the time.
We'll go back to the historical physics thing for this one. The following poll lists a bunch of less-well-known physicists (that is, not Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Pauli, etc.) who contributed to the development of quantum mechanics. Which of them was the best?
Which of these less-well-known quantum pioneers was the best?(surveys)
While these are quantum pioneers, we're still…
grrlscientist | August 30, 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 | August 30, 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 | August 28, 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 "…
bioephemera | August 28, 2009
Blue Barnhouse Letterpress is simply awesome. I was idly coveting these classy anatomical heart thank-you cards when I discovered they actually have a special card FOR COLONOSCOPIES:
No, not even letterpress can make these brutal (and hopefully fictitious) colonoscopy implements "classy." But that's not stopping me from blogging it.
pharyngula | August 28, 2009Tips for flourishing after a mass extinction. Ceratites nodosus (MCZ-7232) (A), from the Triassic of Germany, was similar to the ceratitid ammonoid species that thrived in the water column in the Early Triassic (1), while bottom-dwelling species languished. Key to the ceratitids' rapid success after the end-Permian mass extinction were their ecological tolerances, which may be inferred by reference to their closest living relatives, the coleoids (squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish), including the low-oxygen specialist Vampyroteuthis infernalis (B).
This picture has a little story behind it.…
drorzel | August 28, 2009The Female Science Professor is thinking about what advisors owe their students:
When I got my PhD and went out into the great big academic world, I felt that I had the respect of my adviser, but I knew not to expect anything more from him in the way of support in my career other than the standard recommendation letter.
I never minded because he was that way with all of his students. He had a sink-or-swim philosophy of advising, and this continued after students graduated.
Now that I am an adviser with former students of my own, I think his approach makes some sense because it is a very fair…
grrlscientist | August 27, 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 "…
bioephemera | August 27, 2009
Science's July issue has an interesting article about mathematician Byron Cook, who teamed up with artist Tauba Auerbach to create nine new mathematical symbols. The symbols were intended to make the notation for Cook's work on a particular mathematical problem, called the "halting problem," more intelligible:
"When I was giving lectures or talking to product developers, I needed to get a lot of information across quickly, and this was getting difficult," says Cook. Things got even tougher when he began to write a book on the subject.
The article includes some interesting tidbits about the…
oracknows | August 27, 2009Want to know what will start my teeth grinding when I read it in a newspaper? That's easy. It's headlines like this one, which appeared two days ago in The Telegraph:
Scientists two years from developing 'potential cure' for breast cancer
The subtitle was even worse:
British scientists could be just two years away from developing a drug that may be a "potential cure" for breast cancer, it has been claimed.
Hear that grating? It's the sound of my teeth grinding together. The reason is simple. It's just plain silly to make claims like this about a basic science paper given that, as I have…
drorzel | August 26, 2009Janet is currently exploring the implications of the California university furloughs. If you haven't been paying attention, California is so grossly dysfunctional that the state government has had to order all employees-- including university faculty-- to take 9% of their work time off as unpaid "furlough" days, in order to cut costs enough to have an approximately balanced budget.
Janet's comments, and the stories about the impact on scientists reminded me of the Great Government Shutdown of 1995, when I was a grad student working at NIST.
That shutdown was the result of a game of "chicken"…
grrlscientist | August 26, 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 "…
oracknows | August 26, 2009I realize that I'm possibly stepping into proverbial lion's den with this one, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As you may also recall, the arguments and assertions that Chris and Sheril made in their book ruffled more than a few feathers around ScienceBlogs, chief among them the big macher of atheism around here, P.Z. Myers, who really, really didn't like…
bcohen | August 26, 2009Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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Part 3 with Julie Sze, discussing her book Noxious New York, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: What place did science play in the EJ issues of the communities you've studied? We've talked about tensions between expertise, technical knowledge, and lived community experience in other conversations. It's a vast subject, in fact, and I shouldn't cast this question so tidily. But for Noxious New York, where did scientific practices fit?
JS: Science played a large part in the story I told in New York City, a story…
bioephemera | August 25, 2009
Lovely minimalist poster design from Jordan Michael Gray's flickrstream.
via NOTCOT.
drorzel | August 25, 2009I'm doing better today, but still a little wobbly, and trying to conserve my energy for the Bruce Springsteen concert tonight. Thus, a poll:
Imagine you have a light switch box containing multiple switches, like to one at right. These switches control lights in adjoining areas of the house-- say, the living room, and the light on the stairs up to the bedrooms. At least one of these switches is part of a pair-- say, there's another switch at the top of the stairs controlling that light.
The question is this: when you go to bed at night, turning off all the lights, what should the position of…
drorzel | August 25, 2009NPR last week had a story about the changing kilogram:
More than a century ago, a small metal cylinder was forged in London and sent to a leafy suburb of Paris. The cylinder was about the size of a salt shaker and made of an alloy of platinum and iridium, an advanced material at the time.
In Paris, scientists polished and weighed it carefully, until they determined that it was exactly one kilogram, around 2.2 pounds. Then, by international treaty, they declared it to be the international standard.
Since 1889, the year the Eiffel Tower opened, that cylinder has been the standard against which…
pharyngula | August 25, 2009
Since I just chastised the misleading presentation of this paper in the press (and I must emphasize that the odd focus on Darwin is not in the paper at all), we can now take a closer look at the paper itself. The data is actually cool to see, and represents a large amount of work; I still have some criticisms for the interpretation, though. The fundamental question is whether the structure of the appendix was specifically selected for, and the authors are on the side of 'yes'. I'll come down on the side of 'maybe'.
But first, an important caveat. Creationists have long been yammering about…