Science
drorzel | June 26, 2008A few days ago, some colleagues and I were discussing the year that just ended, and the curriculum in general, and the frequent lament about needing to repeat ourselves came up. Due to some quirks of our calendar, we have a lot of students taking courses out of sequence, and as a result, have to teach the same mathematical techniques in multiple classes.
On top of that, though, the students tend to say that any given technique is entirely new to them, even when they've already seen it. When that part came up, one of my colleagues said "Well, of course they do that-- I did that when I was an…
oracknows | June 26, 2008
Sigh.
He's baaack. Yes, that dualism-loving Energizer Bunny of antievolution nonsense, that "intelligent design" apologist neurosurgeon whose nonsense has driven me time and time again to contemplate hiding my head in a paper bag or even a Doctor Doom mask because of the shame of knowing that he is also a surgeon, that physician who denies that an understanding of evolution is important to medicine and who just doesn't know when to quit, Dr. Michael Egnor, is back to embarrass me yet again. It's been a long time--months, actually--and, quite frankly I found the break from his specious…
catdynamics | June 25, 2008Who is Obama's Science Adviser?
Obama seems to have number of technology advisers:
Julius Genachowski, former FCC, on communications;
Alec Ross showed up at the science debate by proxy, but he is really a computing and networks guy,
Larry Lessig at Stanford and Daniel Weitzner at MIT are also apparently Obama tech advisers, but they're both, again computing/tech oriented.
So, who is giving Obama advise on climate change, stem cells, NIH funding, America Competes, NASA science and exploration, DoE funding, NSF baseline?
Should be someone getting into the campaign for actual science, as…
pontiff | June 25, 2008One of the most interesting talks that many of us in the quantum computing world have seen is the talk by Manny Knill on fault-tolerant quantum computing. Above and beyond the interesting content, what was cool about this talk was that, as far as I could tell Knill used a linked PDF for the talk. That way if he needed to delve into deeper details on a particular subject, he could. While for some talks, like colloquiums, I don't see the need for this, for technical talks before a more informal audience, this, I think is a great tool. Now, having discovered TiddlyWiki, I wonder if it isn't…
pharyngula | June 25, 2008Let's play the most boring card game in the universe!
Here are the rules. We start with a fully sorted deck of 52 cards, and we deal out four hands. We don't deal in the ordinary way, either: we give the top 13 cards to the first player, then the next 13 to the second, and so forth. (We could also do the usual deal, but it makes the illustration and logic a little more difficult to see. We'll keep it simple for now.)
This is what the table will look like.
Hand 1
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Hand 2
A
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10
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Hand 3
A
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10
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Hand 4
A
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10
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4…
oracknows | June 25, 2008...from one of Michigan State University Professor Richard Lenski's E. coli cultures.
Lenski's second response to the clueless "request" of the creationist idiot Andrew Schlafly to provide his raw data to him for "independent review" supporting a recent PNAS paper (more here) by him that is yet another in a line of papers by evolutionary biologists that pretty much destroy the myth of "irreproducible complexity" deeply humbles me. It's a classic in sliding the knife into one's foe, carefully dissecting free an organ, pulling that organ out with a flourish, only to plunge to plunge the knife…
awild | June 25, 2008Arizona has five seasons: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, and Monsoon. Monsoon is my favorite.
By late June or early July, intense summer heat on the interior of the continent sets up a weather pattern pulling tropical moisture up from the south. After several weeks of baking at 106° with not a cloud in sight, the humidity spikes and we get afternoon storm clouds building over the mountains, the first rain in months, and a very welcome drop in daytime highs.
We entomologists love the monsoon; that's when the insects flourish. Ants hold their mating flights, jewel scarabs emerge, giant…
oracknows | June 25, 2008I was perusing the feeds of my fellow ScienceBloggers the other night when I came across a post by ERV that really resonated with me. In it, she expounds on the benefits of doing things "old school" in the lab, specifically with respect to having hard evidence to defend oneself if ever accused of scientific misconduct. She has a point, but that's not why the post caught my attention. I've actually been struggling with the conflict between "old school" and "new school" recently.
You see, I've recently been in the position where I've had to add people to my lab, and in fact the entire staff of…
drorzel | June 24, 2008I'm deep in book revisions at the moment, which largely accounts for the relative blog silence. This is expected to continue for a while yet, broken by the occasional post when something comes up that is irritating enough to push me to write about it. Such as, well, now.
In the chapter on the Copenhagen Interpretation, I spend some time laying out the basic principles of quantum mechanics, and mention the Schrödinger equation. I noted in passing that the name is taken from "the Austrian physicist and noted cad Erwin Schrödinger." Kate questioned whether this was really appropriate, but I left…
grrlscientist | June 23, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, scientific ethics, Hippocratic oath, life scientists, corporate culture
I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member.
Scientific misconduct is very expensive, leading to years of wasted research dollars and effort in pursuit of a scientific mirage, and it damages…
jrosenhouse | June 20, 2008That's the title of an interesting article from the current issue of The Atlantic, written by Nicholas Carr:
Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going -- so far as I can tell -- but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours…
pontiff | June 18, 2008David Brooks, has an op-ed in the New York Times about Tiger Woods and his astonishing string of triumphs in the golfing world (including last weekends U.S. Open which I watched the end of on both Saturday and Sunday: my wife was right he did make that last put.) Brooks piece waxes on and on about the Tiger's ability to concentrate
And for that, in this day and age, he stands out. As I've been trying to write this column, I've toggled over to check my e-mail a few times. I've looked out the window. I've jotted down random thoughts for the paragraphs ahead. But Woods seems able to mute the…
pharyngula | June 18, 2008Would you believe that Andy Schlafly, head kook at Conservapædia, wrote a letter to Richard Lenski, demanding release of his data to Schlafly and his crack team of home-schooled children? Schlafly is a creationist and ideologue of the worst sort; he has no qualifications in biology, and only wants the data because he doesn't believe it, and would no doubt then use his vast powers of incomprehension to garble it.
That isn't noteworthy, though. We expect creationists to act like indignant idiots when the facts are shown to them. What's really cool is that Lenski wrote back.
Dear Mr. Schlafly:…
pharyngula | June 16, 2008As I said I would, I'm watching this History Channel documentary about the origin of life. How about a little live-blogging?
8:00. Ugh. It begins with a bunch of tripe from Coyne and Polkinghorne, claiming we need religion to understand the meaning of life. This is a bad, bad start, but I'm hoping it's nothing but a weasely preliminary that they will then abandon to get to some real science.
There are lots of gimmicky special efects, but OK, let's get the general audience interested. I'm not too keen on the parade of talking heads, though: they keep trotting out different investigators,…
ddobbs | June 16, 2008Via the invaluable Knight-Ridder Science Journalism Tracker comes woeful news from the L.A. Times: One of the few remaining success stories, the Alaskan salmon fishery, is under threat by a parasite whose expansion seems related to climate change.
I'm trying to finish an unrelated story myself, so will simply post the Tracker's write-up below the photo, which comes from a first-rate photo essay that accompanies Kenneth Weiss's full story at the LA Times. There's also quite a nice video version at the Times' site. (I can't figure out how to embed it here, but it heads the main story.
http://…
catdynamics | June 12, 2008A few weeks ago I noted that the spring had the potential for some worrying flooding in the Mississippi basin
Still there.
As a quick glance at the Weather Channel reveals, the upper Mississippi basin is facing historic flooding right now.
Or the USGS waterwatch.
Now, last I checked, the eastern Rockies snowpack was heavy and melting, so there is water coming from the west into the basin, not just north.
The Ohio is not flooding the way it was, but rivers west of the eastern continental divide are flowing at a healthy clip, mainly due to residual rain from the line of storms that is flooding…
pharyngula | June 10, 2008
While I was traveling last week, an important paper came out on evolution in E. coli, describing the work of Blount, Borland, and Lenski on the appearance of novel traits in an experimental population of bacteria. I thought everyone would have covered this story by the time I got back, but there hasn't been a lot of information in the blogosphere yet. Some of the stories get the emphasis wrong, claiming that this is all about the rapid acquisition of complex traits, while the creationists are making a complete hash of the story. Carl Zimmer gets it right, of course, and he has the advantage…
grrlscientist | June 9, 2008tags: science, physics, time-saving techniques, peeling hard-boiled eggs, streaming video
We all know that each day is filled with a variety of time-wasting activities that are necessary for us to be able to enjoy those brief, fleeting moments of freedom from such drudgery. So I thought I'd suggest something that you can do to reclaim four days of your life that would otherwise be devoted to the time-wasting activity of peeling hard-boiled eggs -- and this is all due to the wonders of SCIENCE [0:36].
Of course, this looks like so much fun that you'll probably invest those four reclaimed days…
drorzel | June 9, 2008I've gotten a fair number of free science books in the last few years, from publishers looking for bloggy publicity, but Mark Alpert's Final Theory is the first time that I've been asked to review a novel on ScienceBlogs (I've gotten advance copies of some other novels, but I've specifically requested those). Mark Alpert is an editor at Scientific American, and Final Theory is his debut as a writer of thrillers.
David Swift, a former physics student turned historian of science, gets a call to come to the dying bedside of Hans Kleinman, a former mentor from his physics days, who has been…
catdynamics | June 4, 2008I am currently in one of my favourite physics hostels...
Aspen Center for Physics
My office is just behind the trees, kinda diagonally through on the other side of the building.
I'm here for a "gravitational radiation astronomy" workshop, which is being run in parallel with a "complexity" workshop.
Interesting crowd.
Been a very productive time, lots of interesting talks - strictly "Aspen rules" - blackboard talks or informal "alcove sessions" - expert level, on open issues and work in progress. Talks have been running for three hours, typically with 2-3 speakers in tandem.
This is the…