Science
drorzel | May 4, 2009SteelyKid is not yet at the stage where I can usefully read to her-- she likes sitting on my lap while I read just fine, but she's more interested in trying to eat the pages than listening to the story. I was reminded this morning, though, that when she gets to bedtime-story age, I'm going to face some real dilemmas. Some of the classic stories teach dangerously wrong lessons about physics.
Take, for example, the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears (referred to at the end of the previous post). In the usual telling, Goldilocks comes upon the Bears' house and finds three bowls of porridge…
drorzel | May 4, 2009I'm an experimentalists through and through, and have always known better than to attempt real theory. On two occasions, though, I've been forced to do a little bit of computer simulation work in order to interpret my results. One of these was for the time-resolved collisions experiment, and worked out well. The other was when I was a post-doc, and was... less useful.
The situation we were dealing with in my post-doc work was a Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium that we chopped into several pieces with an optical lattice. Whenever you do this, there is necessarily some uncertainty in the…
grrlscientist | May 4, 2009tags: The Beagle Project, science, fund-raising, humor, streaming video
This strange and amusing streaming video features a self-described "fat, bearded chap with a Charles Darwin fixation" whom I know in real life, has an important purpose: Let's knock ourselves out to rebuild the HMS Beagle and use this vessel to follow Darwin's journey of discovery! [1:14]
The Beagle Project aims to celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday by building a sailing replica of the HMS Beagle and recreating the Voyage of the Beagle with an international crew of researchers, aspiring scientists and science…
bioephemera | May 3, 2009
Some Kansas State University geographers have come up with some interesting maps of the US that purport to show the national distribution of the seven deadly sins. Obviously they can't gauge "sinfulness" directly, so they're using proxy data - such as STD infection rate to measure lust (above).
It's a fun thought exercise to assess the pros and cons of the various methodologies for measuring each sin. Consider greed, which was (as described in the Las Vegas Sun) calculated by comparing average incomes with the total number of inhabitants living beneath the poverty line. How does that…
grrlscientist | May 3, 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…
catdynamics | May 2, 2009just for laugh, here is the US H1N1 confirmed case count by date as provided by the CDC
now with added bonus WHO worldwide case count.
from CDC: past daily updates
click to embiggen
looks pretty linear now, I think the dip at day 7 is a CDC error and the case number was 109 then, not 91.
Doubling time is roughly 2 days, or e-folding of about 3 days.
The early rise is catching up on existing cases.
There is some sign of flattening, could be rate slowing, could be CDC lab falling behind.
If the doubling time is really about 2 days, and the confirmed case count is not dominated by the…
bioephemera | May 1, 2009I was recently reading A Scientist's Guide to Talking With the Media, a useful and clearheaded book by Richard Hayes and Daniel Grossman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Emphasizing the importance of science outreach, Hayes and Grossman praise the pop-sci luminaries who followed in the footsteps of Carl Sagan:
With his intriguing investigations into the activities of everyday life, Fisher joins a distinguished fraternity of public scientists that includes Barry Commoner, Jared Diamond, Sylvia Earle, Paul Erlich, and E.O. Wilson. These are some of the most famous of the hundreds of…
drorzel | May 1, 2009Some time back, I was a little surprised to hear James Nicoll use Asimov as a touchstone for science popularizers. I only really knew his fiction, and can't recall hearing his pop-science books cited by anybody who wasn't also an SF fan.
So, when I ran across one of his science books while we were sorting through a bunch of old books left in the department after we cleared out Ralph Alpher's old office and some other old book collections, I grabbed it figuring I should check out some of his science writing. The book in question is The Collapsing Universe: The Story of Black Holes. It has a…
catdynamics | April 30, 2009Daily Show does the LHC
and the path integrals of our lives
Daily Show does the LHC!
Not bad, Ellis is pretty good. Link when they have it.
Do you know what at Kelvin is?
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
M - Th 11p / 10c
Large Hadron Collider
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Economic Crisis
First 100 Days
damn, that was fast...
Life Path Integrals - at Information Processing
- reminds me of a Ted Chiang short story, or Anathem...
However, do note that the academic infinite postdoc path is closer to the sex&drugs&rocknroll then it is to corporate-kiss-ass…
drorzel | April 30, 2009I have two labs today, and a lunch meeting, so no time for detailed blogging about science. It's been a while since I did a Dorky Poll, though, so here's one to keep people entertained while I'm working:
What's your favorite color?
"What's dorky about that?" you ask. You need to give your answer in wavelength units. For extra bonus dorky points, specify an atomic transition of approximately that wavelength.
Personally, I'm kind of partial to the blue-green lines in helium, right around 501 nm. That's a nice color. The violet line in the hydrogen spectrum, around 435 nm, is also pretty good.…
grrlscientist | April 30, 2009tags: TEDTalks, Margaret Wertheim, mathematics, evolution, sea slugs, coral reefs, streaming video
This interesting video discusses evolution, mathematics, sea slugs, corals and crocheting as presented by science writer Margaret Wertheim [16:37]
drorzel | April 29, 2009I got email this afternoon from Andrei Derevianko, the leader of the research project badly described by the press release mentioned in the previous post. He sounds a little surprised by the whole thing (though not much more surprised than I am that my griping on the Internet got brought to anybody's attention), and explains what happened:
The original story (that I have went through with a writer) is posted here: www.unr.edu.
Unfortunately, the release writers have added introductory paragraph and the title without consulting with me (I was travelling giving talk about our result).
Now…
catdynamics | April 29, 2009World Health Organization raised the influenza pandemic alert to level 5.
Phase 5 Pandemic (Click to embiggen)
Phase 5 is characterized by human-to-human spread of the virus into at least two countries in one WHO region. While most countries will not be affected at this stage, the declaration of Phase 5 is a strong signal that a pandemic is imminent and that the time to finalize the organization, communication, and implementation of the planned mitigation measures is short.
WHO director's statement
" Based on assessment of all available information, and following several expert…
awild | April 29, 2009Seriously, is there a name for the disorder whereby people think everything with wings is a honeybee?
awild | April 29, 2009
Atta cephalotes, in the fungus garden
Big ant news today! Roche Applied Sciences is apparently funding the sequencing of a series of genomes- three ant and an array of fungal and microbial genomes- in an ambitious project to better understand the relationships among the players in the celebrated ant-fungus relationship. The sequencing project is headed by Nicole Gerardo of Emory University and Cameron Currie of the University of Wisconsin.
This trend in genomics away from sequencing isolated organisms in favor of comparative projects is a welcome one. With multiple attine species- in…
bioephemera | April 29, 2009Mark Buchanan, quoting Lee Smolin, on how big science may be biased against innovative iconoclasts:
Some scientists, he suggests, are what we might call "hill climbers". They tend to be highly skilled in technical terms and their work mostly takes established lines of insight that pushes them further; they climb upward into the hills in some abstract space of scientific fitness, always taking small steps to improve the agreement of theory and observation. These scientists do "normal" science. In contrast, other scientists are more radical and adventurous in spirit, and they can be seen as "…
bioephemera | April 29, 2009
Check out Brian's new review of A History of Paleontology Illustration (Life of the Past) by Jane Davidson, in Palaeontologia Electronica:
It is rare for fossils to be featured in fine art, but in the 15th century painting A Goldsmith in His Shop, Possibly Saint Eligius by the Flemish master Petrus Christus there is, if you look carefully, a fossil shark tooth among the objects scattered on the shop's table. The fossil plays a nearly insignificant role in the painting, but it reflects the general interpretation of such natural curiosities at the time. From this modest starting point,…
drorzel | April 29, 2009A wonderfully incoherent press release came across my EurekAlert feeds yesterday, with the headline "Particle physics study finds new data for extra Z-bosons and potential fifth force of nature." You can tell it's going to make no sense at all from the very first sentence:
The Large Hadron Collider is an enormous particle accelerator whose 17-mile tunnel straddles the borders of France and Switzerland. A group of physicists at the University of Nevada, Reno has analyzed data from the accelerator that could ultimately prove or disprove the possibility of a fifth force of nature.
As the largest…
ddobbs | April 28, 2009
Brandon Keim, who is part of Wired's ace science writing crew also keeps a blog, Earthlab Notes, where he recently put this nice post on The Language of Horses:
In a few slender leg bones and fragments of milk-stained pottery, archaeologists recently found evidence of one of the more important developments in human history: the domestication of horses.
Unearthed from a windswept plain in Kazakhstan, the remains were about 5500 years old, and suggested that a nomadic people now called the Botai had learned to ride a creature that had captured mankind's imagination thousands of years earlier.…
drorzel | April 28, 2009So, the President gave some sort of speech to a bunch of smart people yesterday (video, transcript), and hearts are a-flutter all over the science blogosphere, as President Obama promises great things for science:
We double the budget of key agencies, including the National Science Foundation, a primary source of funding for academic research, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which supports a wide range of pursuits - from improving health information technology to measuring carbon pollution, from testing "smart grid" designs to developing advanced manufacturing…