Science
drorzel | May 8, 2009I get sent a lot of publicity material by people hoping I'll mention it on the blog, but because I'm a terrible person, very little of it actually gets used. One thing that shouldn't be allowed to slip through the cracks, though, is the announcement of the program for the 2009 World Science Festival, June 11-14 in New York City.
There's a lot of interesting stuff there. The emails I got specifically mentioned the Opening Gala, which I suspect is likely to be a little more expensive than I'd like. Unless some New York based science magazine were willing to cough up some, let's call it "seed…
catdynamics | May 7, 2009The Jesusita Fire in Santa Barbara has broken out and spread far west and south, situation is looking very serious, there will be a lot of loss tonight, evacuation orders extend to Goleta, refugees are moving to UCSB, and it may not be done yet.
It could be worse than the Tea Fire.
Well, I was right earlier this afternoon, when saw the fire's edge move west and the other side come south.
I had another social event this afternoon, and came out at UCSB campus shortly before sunset, the wind had shifted and we could see the western and southern edges of the flames.
It was a truly awesome sight…
catdynamics | May 7, 2009it is thursday afternoon, temperature is almost 100F
and the winds are picking up, right on schedule
looking through the window on the other side from my office I can see the fire flaring up
looks bad
It looks almost like there are 3-5 separate fires burning now, from my vantage.
Two are moving up the mountain, one on the north side in fresh bush, the other at the top of the canyons, and looks to have almost crested the mountain ridge - if it gets over into the backcountry we're in for a very long weekend... I gather a lot of the firefighter resources are up there on the ridge crest roads…
drorzel | May 7, 2009You might think that Monday's discourse on thermodynamics in the Goldilocks story was the only children's story in which physics plays a role, but that's not true. Physics is everywhere in fairy tales.
Take, for example, the story of Rumpelstiltskin, in which a mysterious little man demands a terrible price for helping a miller's daughter spin straw into gold. This raises the obvious question of exactly how one would go about extracting gold from straw.
The use of the term "spin" might suggest the use of rotational motion-- if the straw were ground up very fine, and mixed with water, it might…
catdynamics | May 7, 2009 evolutionary dynamics of influenza!
and how flu immunity is defined by you Hamming distance in protein bit space
The Kavli Institute has a very interesting biophysics program series...
Last semester there was another interesting biophysics colloquium:
The Puzzle of the Evolutionary Dynamics of Influenza
Luca Peliti, Univ. Federico II (podcast, video, slides)
Very timely talk that.
Worth browsing through.
drorzel | May 7, 2009I was surprised, a few days ago, to see a post from ZapperZ recommending a Wall Street Journal article on quantum entanglement. It was surprising not only because it's weird to see anything in the WSJ that doesn't have an immediate financial connection, but more than that, I was surprised because the article contains a lot of statements that are the sort of thing ZapperZ usually denounces as unforgivable ignorance by journalists who shouldn't be allowed to write about science.
Happily, by sitting on the article for a couple of days, Tom said most of what I would've said, and I was saved…
catdynamics | May 7, 2009Clone Wars: how are stockbrokers like colorectal cancer cells?
The Kavli Institute has a very interesting biophysics program series...
This weeks colloquium:
"Physics and Mathematics of Cancer Metastasis" - Robijn Bruinsma, UCLA, explains (NOT ONLINE YET podcast, video, slides)
excellent colloquium on "cancer for theorists"
including discussion of the basics of cancer and metastasis,
mathematics of cancer epidemiology,
including the Master Equation for microevolution of cancer cells,
and open questions
soon likely to be a KITP program...
bottom line: everyone will get cancer, eventually,…
bcohen | May 7, 2009Pt. I | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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Part 3 with Martha McCaughey, discussing her book The Caveman Mystique, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: So how is the use of evolutionary psychology to explain masculine actions not just quackery? Evolutionary biologists, and many who read science blogs, rightly announce and discredit the quackery of creationists or, more broadly, those who "deny" scientific truths. But, for the sake of argumentative symmetry, can one put that lens back onto evolutionary psychology? Besides the caveman issue, does that field…
drorzel | May 6, 2009The proprietor of Good Mom, Bad Mom emails to point out a post spinning off Monday's Goldilocks post. A good thing she did, as Technorati has collapsed into utter uselessness, at least for finding people who link to my posts.
Her post quotes an unnamed correspondent, who writes:
My two daughters are both compulsive readers, gobbling up everything in their path. As a result, they both have very large vocabularies are very well informed about a range of things. I love it--instead of watching TV and getting dumb, they're reading, and getting smart. Mostly they read novels, but it's amazing how…
oracknows | May 6, 2009A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed this tendency long before I saw Mark's post, including one Dr. Lorraine Day, who, besides being a purveyor of quackery, is also a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who had treated arch-Holocaust Ernst Zündel with "alternative" therapies when he was in jail awaiting trial, and a conspiracy theorist…
rallain | May 6, 2009I probably should have included this idea on my "All about science" blog post. Maybe I didn't put it in there because if I talk about what science is you can figure out what it is not.
Science is not math
Science is all about making models. It is true that many current models are mathematical models, but it doesn't have to be that way, and it hasn't always been that way. Think about rubbing a piece of metal with a magnet. It gets magnetized - right? What if you then cut that magnet in half? Then you have two smaller magnets. How can you make a model that explains this phenomena? Yes…
bcohen | May 6, 2009Pt. I | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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Part 2 with Martha McCaughey, discussing her book The Caveman Mystique, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: How do you see the relationship between the academic fields of gender studies and science studies? And how has that relationship changed in the past two decades? I'm asking for a few reasons, but one of them is that I remember from graduate studies that many of the most persuasive accounts of the politics of science and technology came from feminist scholars.
MM: It's a big question, so I'll offer but a start…
bioephemera | May 5, 2009You've probably already heard that Merck and Elsevier are being called on the carpet for producing a medical "journal" - Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine - that appeared to be peer-reviewed, but was actually a marketing ploy to encourage doctors to prescribe Merck drugs. Ouch.
Elsevier told The Scientist,
"Elsevier acknowledges the concern that the journals in question didn't have the appropriate disclosures," the statement continued. "It is worth noting that project in question was produced 6 years ago and disclosure protocols have evolved since 2003. Elsevier's current…
awild | May 5, 2009
Benoit Guenard has been hard at work the past couple years compiling broad-scale distribution data for all the world's ants, and his efforts are now online. Here they are- global range maps for all the ant genera:
http://www.antmacroecology.org/ant_genera/index.html
These maps will be a very useful resource, especially if the myrmecological community participates to add new records and vet the occasional error.
One thought, though, is that large umbrella strategies such as this will eventually be redundant with antweb.org. Â Antweb's distributions are built from accumulated individual…
awild | May 5, 2009
It has long been known that ants recognize their deceased nestmates using the smell of fatty acids that accumulate as the body decomposes. The chemical signature of deadness helps ants remove the corpses from their midst, keeping a clean and sanitary nest. Indeed, this classic tale of ants and oleic acid is one of E. O. Wilson's favorite stories.
But it turns out that the story is even richer than previously supposed. A study by Dong-Hwan Choe et al published in yesterday's PNAS note that Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) carry away the dead even before the fatty acids appear. It…
drorzel | May 5, 2009As I understand it, the Physics ArXiv Blog is not affiliated with the people who actually run the Arxiv (Paul Ginsparg et al.). Which is probably good, as I'm never entirely sure how seriously to take the papers they highlight.
Take yesterday's post, Diamond Challenges for Quantum-Computing Crown, which is about a paper that asks the question Could one make a diamond-based quantum computer?. It's an interesting idea, and something I wrote about last year, so it seems like a promising topic.
The preprint in question, though, is a little dodgy. It's indifferently proofread, with all sorts of…
evolvingthoughts | May 4, 2009Hard on the heels of the recent media coverage (well done Channel 7!) of the death of a child from Whooping Cough due to antivaccination sentiments in Australia, comes the death of an infant due to homeopathy.
The father is a homeopathy quack, and instead of treating his child's eczema with traditional creams, he allowed his daughter to get a major skin infection, lose weight due to malnourishment, and eventually die. The good news, if it can be called that, is that the parents are on trial for manslaughter by gross criminal negligence. I would hope this foreshadows all homeopaths,…
catdynamics | May 4, 2009General introduction to optimal control theory and how to control matter at the quantum level
David Tannor gave the Director's Blackboard Talk at KITP today:
Quantum Control: From Chemistry to Cooling to Computing
Very nice talk, goes on a bit in the middle talking about the time dependent quantum mechanical picture vs use of phase control.
Very nice finish on mathematics of optimal control theory and the physical picture of how to use variational schemes to implement practical control.
Things I took away from this:
optimal control theory is underway but has a lot of open interesting…
jrosenhouse | May 4, 2009During a recent bookstore browse, I came across Terry Eagleton's recent anti-New Atheist book Reason, Faith and Revolution. I was tempted to buy it in spite of Eagleton's deeply silly review of Dawkins in the London Review of Books. This review was, in large part, the motivation for P.Z. Myers to coin the term Courtier's Reply. By this Myers meant people who responded to Dawkins not by addressing his arguments in any serious way, but instead by rattling off a load of irrelevant theological esoterica Dawkins is expected to master before ever opening his mouth on the subject.
Since I am…