Science
drorzel | May 15, 2008Over at Swans on Tea, Tom has a great story of his Frankenstein Moment, that moment in science when the lightning flashes, and it's immediately clear that everything just worked, and you have successfully reanimated your creation, or split the atom, or discovered high-temperature superconductivity, or whatever.
As he says, these are rare. My own career has been lacking in real, definitive laughing-maniacally-during-the-thunderclap Frankenstein Moments. It's not that I haven't had experimental successes-- I've done some things that I like to think are pretty cool-- but most of them have been…
jrosenhouse | May 14, 2008That's the title of a truly excellent article by Stephen Pinker for The New Republic. The subject is the 500+ page report by the President's Council on Biotheics attempting to define what human dignity actually is. I despair of selecting just a few quotes, since the whole article is superb, but I will give it a try beneath the fold.
Although the Dignity report presents itself as a scholarly deliberation of universal moral concerns, it springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.
The report's oddness begins with…
pontiff | May 14, 2008Interesting new website from the New York Academy of Sciences: Scientists Without Borders:
Scientists Without BordersSM aims to mobilize and coordinate science-based activities that improve quality of life in the developing world. The research community is already promoting areas such as global health, agricultural progress, and environmental well-being, but current communication gaps restrict its power. Organizations and individuals do not always know about one another's endeavors, needs, or availability, which limits the ability to forge meaningful connections and harness resources. This…
awild | May 14, 2008
I've just received the following notice about an upcoming NOVA show on the life of biologist/myrmecologist E. O. Wilson:
NOVA is excited to partner with organizations that share our passion for scientific discovery as we spread the word about upcoming shows. On Tuesday, May 20, we invite you to join us for a look at the life and work of renowned Harvard entomologist and conservationist E.O. Wilson. From his groundbreaking discoveries about ant culture to his controversial take on the biological basis for human behavior, NOVA presents a sweeping chronicle of Wilson's extraordinary career. In…
esiegel | May 14, 2008Good news for science from... the Vatican? No joke. Father Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory and chief astronomer for the Pope, has just issued a public statement stating the following things:
Intelligent beings could exist in outer space.
Life on Mars cannot be ruled out.
The search for extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God.
Next year, the Vatican is organizing a conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.
Whoa. And whoa's wobbly cousin, woah. Did I just step into the 21st century? After my post last week on what Americans…
drorzel | May 14, 2008Some colleagues organized a bus trip to New York yesterday, which I went on, on the grounds that a) it was cheap, and b) in a few months, we won't be doing much traveling at all for a while. This required me to get up at an ungodly hour to catch the bus on campus, and the trip itself reminded me of why I don't take public transit, but on the whole, it was a good day. And, of course, blog fodder.
The purpose of the trip was to take students from the intro Astronomy classes to the American Museum of Natural History to see the planetarium show (cue Fountains of Wayne). As this show takes less…
awild | May 13, 2008
Pheidole pegasus Sarnat 2008
Fiji
Eli Sarnat, the reigning expert on the Ants of Fiji, has just published a lovely taxonomic revision of a group of Pheidole that occur on the islands. Pheidole are found in warmer regions worldwide, but Fiji has seen a remarkable radiation of species that share a bizarre set of spines on the mesosoma. Eli sorted through hundreds of these things to determine that the group contains seven species, five of which had not previously been described. Pheidole pegasus is largest and among the most distinct of the group. It was collected only once, from the…
jrosenhouse | May 13, 2008David Brooks has a fairly goofy column in today's New York Times. Apparently “hard-core materialism” is on its way out:
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings.
The idea that meaning, belief and consciousness emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of nerual firings is not an alternative to materialism, it is a consequence of it. The…
esiegel | May 13, 2008Sometimes, I publish things on this website that are not entirely correct (and when I do, I'll own up to it). Sometimes other people do on theirs. There are bad ways and good ways to argue these points, ranging from name-calling to explicitly explaining where the flaws are in one's arguments, and what the corrections are.
And I had no idea how I was going to articulate this. But then Lucas pointed this chart out to me, and it does a better job of explaining it than I ever could.
You know who could explain this? Captain Picard. Imagine you got to be a Starfleet officer. Here's what he has to…
pharyngula | May 10, 2008
Finals week is upon me, and I should be working on piles of paper work right now, but I need a break … and I have to vent some frustration with the popular press coverage of an important scientific event this week, the publication of a draft of the platypus genome. Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is "weird" or "odd" or worse, they imply that the animal is a chimera — "the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri — part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal". No, no, no, a thousand times no; this is the wrong message. The platypus is not part bird, as…
drorzel | May 10, 2008Via Swans On Tea, I see that Comedy Central has put up the video of George Johnson's appearance on the Colbert Report. Or, I should say, they claim to have put it up-- their video player didn't work worth a damn on my computer.
I saw this on the day-late rerun, and it was hilarious. Not because Johnson is at all witty or amusing-- he's not. But toward the end it turns into an xkcd comic, and achieves a sort of accidental brilliance.
Check it out, if you can get it to play.
pontiff | May 10, 2008Science is full of hard problems. One hard problem is protein folding. Indeed vast amounts of computer power have been thrown at this problem. So one wouldn't think that the computer we've got sitting on top of our body would be much use for this problem. But is this true? Can humans fold proteins better than computers? Enter onto the scene foldit developed by a group of researchers here at the University of Washington.
An Economist article explains:
The existing program uses trial and error, and pre-programmed mathematical rules that govern folding as understood today. But users of the…
ddobbs | May 9, 2008In a nifty bit of reporting, veteran health reporters Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer revealed in "Stealth Marketers," a story on Slate, that a "Prozac Nation: Revisited," a radio piece on antidepressants and suicide that ran on many public radio stations recently, "featured four prestigious medical experts discussing the controversial link between antidepressants and suicide" who all reportedly have financial ties to the makers of antidepressants -- as does the radio series, known as "The Infinite Mind," that produced the show.
As the story notes, the extent of the financial ties are…
catdynamics | May 9, 2008Passenger train halted and quarantined in northern Ontario
One dead, apparently 60 year old female.
Ten sick, four reported serious.
All reportedly part of a tour group from Alberta, train Vancouver->Toronto.
All from two sleeper carriages.
'flu like symptoms. Reports don't specify if that includes a fever.
Could be toxin - food or bad ventilation.
Or it could be infectious agent.
PS: with a food toxin or inhaled toxin fever is unlikely.
Presence of fever would suggest bacterial or viral infection.
Bacterial infection could be from food, though it is more likely to be gastric than…
esiegel | May 8, 2008Let's say we're having a nice day here on Earth; the Sun is shining, the clouds are sparse, and everything is just looking like a peach:
And then Lucas goes and tells me,
Oh my God, Ethan! It's Armageddon! An asteroid is coming straight for us! You've got to stop it!
Really? Me? Well, how would I do it? Let's say we've got some reasonably good asteroid tracking going on, and we've got about 2 months before the asteroid is actually going to hit us. We'd like to do something with the situation on the left, to avoid the situation on the right:
Well, what we really have to do is change the…
drorzel | May 8, 2008The video that accompanies this PopSci.com article is pretty impressive. A bunch of college kids show off their ability to hit trick shots with ping-pong balls, bouncing them off walls, doors, floors, moving skateboards, people, and items of furniture and into beer cups. As the PopSci piece notes, there's a good deal of physics in this-- if every student put half as much effort into learning the material as these guys put into practicing trick shots, the world would be a better place.
The title of the piece, however, is "The Physics of Beer Pong," which brings us to today's non-dorky poll…
oracknows | May 7, 2008...and suddenly he reveals his true stripes.
Oh, well, at least the Hitler Zombie hasn't eaten Jason's brain, as he has so many of the others who complain about being Expelled!
Yet.
Thanks, Jason. I needed the laugh after the events of yesterday and today. Oh, and congratulations on getting tenure!
pharyngula | May 7, 2008There's a clumsy little two-step move creationists like to make: first, point to dissent in the scientific community over real and often interesting issues at the edge of knowledge, and second, swap in their dissent over basics, like common descent, and pretend that the scientists are actually sharing in their ignorance-based concern. John Timmer has a good summary of a few genuine scientific arguments, contrasted with the bogus arguments creationists pretend are important.
There are some good and interesting questions out there. The creationists, and I include the phonies at the Discovery…
drorzel | May 7, 2008Writing in Scientific American, Mark Alpert argues that we need more novels about science:
A good work of fiction can convey the smells of a laboratory, the colors of a dissected heart, the anxieties of a chemist and the joys of an astronomer--all the illuminating particulars that you won't find in a peer-reviewed article in Science or Nature. Novels such as Intuition, with their fully fleshed out characters and messy conflicts, can erase the ridiculously sinister Dr. No cartoons. And most important, these books can inspire readers to become scientists themselves.
As you might imagine, this…
esiegel | May 7, 2008The American Association of Physics Teachers just published a study of 1,000 likely U.S. voters about science, religion, evolution, and creationism. The results are frightening. Here are some of the "highlights" of their study:
38% of Americans are in favor of the teaching of religion in public school science classrooms.
65% of Americans do not think that it is an important science goal to understand the origin and diversity of biological life on Earth.
47% of Americans believe that the earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.
21% of Americans do not believe that the…