Science
awild | November 20, 2008
Atta cephalotes
Leafcutting ants of the genus Atta have perhaps the most complex caste systems of all the social insects. Mature colonies contain millions of workers of varying shapes and sizes. Here are two sisters from opposing ends of the spectrum.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
drorzel | November 20, 2008I seem to have been sucked into a universe in which I'm talking about the Many-Worlds Interpretation all the time, and Neil B keeps dropping subtle hints, so let me return to the whole question of decoherence and Many-Worlds. The following explanation is a recap of the argument of Chapter 4 of the book-in-progress, which will cover the same ground, with cute dog dialogue added.
The central question here is what sorts of things count as producing a "new universe" in Many-Worlds. The scare quotes are because I've come around to the opinion that the whole "parallel universe" language does more…
jrosenhouse | November 19, 2008This is cool. From Wired:
When the Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so.
These computers aren't just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they will enable a new class of science that wasn't possible before. As recently described in Wired…
drorzel | November 19, 2008A little while back, when I complained about the treatment of the multiverse in Anathem, a number of people commented to say that it wasn't all that bad. And, indeed, they were right. Compared to last night's History Channel program on "Parallel Universes," Stephenson's book is a miracle of subtle nuance, teasing out the crucial distinctions between different theories, and making them clear to the reader.
Yeesh. That was so actively irritating that I don't know where to start. So I won't-- you can read what I wrote in the earlier post, and apply it to the History Channel, ten times over.…
grrlscientist | November 19, 2008tags: Boston Museum of Science, education, science, streaming video
This fun and interesting video makes me want to go to Boston for a daytrip so I can go to the fabulous Museum of Science! [3:28].
awild | November 18, 2008In the comments, Rob Clack asks:
Iâve just read about Martialis on Pandaâs Thumb and have a question. If I interpret it correctly, your cladogram shows Martialis to be the sister group of all living ants. Since it was blind and many living genera are not, that presumably implies that vision evolved independently within modern ants. I would therefore expect there to be some significant differences between modern ant eyes and those of other hymenoptera.
I assume Iâm missing something.
Rob is referring to this post, going straight to the problem that Martialis seemingly poses for our…
drorzel | November 18, 2008In the previous post, I promised to say something more about Einstein and the photoelectric effect. It turns out that I already wrote about this, back in 2005. That post is the end of a long chain of links about the history of photons.
This is a good thing, because it frees me from having to try to type a new post with a baby on my lap. You're kind of getting short-changed, though, so to make up for the lack of new content, here's a relevant footnote from Chapter 1 of the book-in-progress:
Millikan thought the Einstein model lacked "any sort of satisfactory theoretical foundation," and…
drorzel | November 18, 2008The History Channel ran a two-hour program on Einstein last night. I had meant to plug this in advance, but got distracted by the Screamy Baby Fun-Time Hour yesterday, and didn't have time to post.
The show restricted itself more or less to the period from 1900, just before his "miracle year" in 1905, to 1922 or so, when Einstein received his Nobel Prize. This was his most fertile period, scientifically, and they did a fairly comprehensive job of covering his life during this time, including his struggles for acceptance and his complicated personal life.
There were, of course, some…
catdynamics | November 17, 2008Carnival of Space #79 at One Astronomer's Noise
Praxis #4 at The Lay Scientist
go browse.
pharyngula | November 17, 2008This is a spectacular video of the development of Clypeaster subdepressus, also called a sand dollar or sea biscuit. These are stunningly beautiful creatures (as are we all, of course), and it is so cool to see them changing here. The video starts with a little echinoderm porn — these animals are profligate with their gametes — and then we see early divisions, gastrulation, the formation of the pluteus larva, metamorphosis into Aristotle's lantern (one of the more charming names for a developmental stage), and into an ungainly spiky juvenile.
This is why some of us are developmental…
pharyngula | November 17, 2008
Christine Huffard sent me a note alerting me to the publication of her latest paper, and she thought I might be interested because I "seem to like cephalopods". Hah. Well. I've noticed that Dr Huffard seems to have some small affection for the tentacled beasties herself.
The paper follows on an old tradition and an old problem. While people have no problem distinguishing human individuals, we have a tough time telling one individual animal from another. This perceptual difficulty complicates problems of studying variations in behavior or physiology, or monitoring numbers and behavior, in…
drorzel | November 17, 2008There's a link in today's links dump to a post from Pictures of Numbers, a rarely-updated blog on the visual presentation of data (via Swans On Tea, I think). There's some really good stuff there about how to make graphs that are easy to read and interpret.
I would like to dissent mildly from one of their points, in the Better Axes post, specifically the advice about not starting at zero. In many cases, this is good advice, but like most rules of thumb, it shouldn't be followed too closely.
Take, for example, this post from one of my metastable xenon papers:
A strict application of the…
drorzel | November 16, 2008When I'm in the right mood, I'm a sucker for really awful sci-fi movies. For example, Saturday night I stayed up far too late to watch the end of the tv-movie version of The Andromeda Strain, based on the book by the prolific and recently deceased Luddite Fiction writer Michael Crichton. It's been twenty-plus years since I read the book, but I recall it being a whole lot better than this piece of garbage.
Crichton's original novel about a crack research team dealing with a disease of alien origin is remarkable for being somewhat understated. The action focusses on the scientists attempting to…
grrlscientist | November 16, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
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 enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
stoat | November 15, 2008I'm reading Anathem because Paul told me to. And because I'm enjoying it. And because its good and thick and will sustain lots of time. Read Paul's review if you're interested in an overview; I'm not going to do that, if only because I haven't finished it (I'm about half way through, if you care). Some of the following gives away some details of the plot that Paul is careful not to give away, so don't read on if you're intending to read it.
Its mostly sci-fi tosh, of course, but there is some philosophy thrown in, and perhaps more than that its sort-of inspiring to an intellectual type person…
drorzel | November 15, 2008As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here:
This was the first time I've done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
I'm rocking the handset in this because of the aforementioned cell phone service problems, and because the whole thing was very hastily arranged, and I wasn't able to obtain a headset for the landline. If they ask me back again, I'm definitely getting one.
On the other hand, being tied to the handset did restrain…
bioephemera | November 14, 2008
Wall of Fishes, Vanderbilt Museum
from Curious Expeditions
Nothing symbolizes the amateur naturalist's aesthetic as well as a wall of preserved specimens in glass jars, like the jewellike Wall of Fishes in the Vanderbilt Museum (captured here by the wonderful Curious Expeditions, in a fascinating slideshow treasure gallery of the Vanderbilt).
A similar glistening room of glass is found in my revious post about London's Hunterian Museum.
The problem with historical specimen collections like these is that slowly but surely, they're falling apart. Storing biological tissue in alcohol or…
awild | November 14, 2008
Nosodendron californicum - Wounded Tree Beetle
California, USA
From the Department of Really Obscure Insects, here's a beetle that few non-specialists will recognize. Nosodendron inhabits the rotting tissue of long-festering tree wounds. These beetles are not rare so much as specialized to an environment where few entomologists think to look.  If you can spot the telltale stains of an old wound on the trunks of large trees, you should be able to find Nosodendron. They feed on the microbes- the yeast and bacteria- that grow in the sap leaking from the phloem.
There are, in fact, whole…
drorzel | November 14, 2008I got a great "Living in the future" kick out of the headline on the New York Times story about Thursday's big astronomical announcement: First Pictures Taken of Extrasolar Planets. The phrasing of the headline conjures images of pictures of clouds swirling on distant gas giants; alas, the reality is a little more mundane:
In scratchy telescope pictures released to the world Thursday in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science, the new planets appear as fuzzy dots that move slightly around their star from exposure to exposure. Astronomers who have seen the new images agreed…
bioephemera | November 13, 2008This article originally appeared on the old bioephemera September 9, 2007.
Syphilitic skull with three trephine holes and osteomyelitic lesions
Hunterian museum
One of my favorite London experiences was my visit to the Hunterian museum. If only I had more time there! I liked it so much, I returned on my last day, procrastinating my departure for Heathrow as long as possible.
The Hunterian is tucked away inside the Royal College of Surgeons of England, on Lincoln's Inn Fields. In its Victorian incarnation, it was a wonderful multi-tiered gallery with railings, balconies, and suspended…