Science
drorzel | December 2, 2007I don't really want to turn this blog completely over to bitching about the poor representation of science in "Year's Best" lists of books, but it's that time of year when every media outlet puts out their lists of favorite books, so it's hard not to talk about it. Today's list is from the Washington Post's Holiday Guide, where they helpfully break their non-fiction list down into categories. By my count, there were 94 non-fiction books listed, divided among 11 categories:
Arts: 7
Biographies: 17
Culture and Society: 9
Current Events: 8
Foreign Affairs: 9
History: 23
Literature: 2
Memoirs: 9…
awild | December 1, 2007PZ Myers gives an excellent holiday gift suggestion for aspiring scientists: a microscope.
To fully appreciate the small animals around us, they must be visualized on their own scale. For the uninitiated, the first glance of live insects through a microscope can be shocking. My favorite description comes from myrmecologist Deby Cassill, recalling her introduction to fire ants:
"Unexpectedly, a whole new world exploded into view. It was as though I had been yanked off the stool, sucked through the scope, and plunked smack-dab in the middle of a city teeming with the most beautiful glass-…
catdynamics | November 30, 2007It lives...
Philosophia Naturalis #15 is up on Sorting Out Science.
Volunteers needed for #16 before christmas...
pharyngula | November 30, 2007Since Phil has suggestions for holiday telescope shopping, I have to offer some suggestions for microscope shopping. If you really want to get a kid interested in biology, a microscope is a great gift, but I'll give you the price tag right up front: $150 is probably the minimum to get a decent, low-end student scope.
First, a few don'ts. Don't buy a microscope at a toy store, unless you want cheesy, cheap plastic junk. And probably the most important advice: don't judge a microscope by the highest magnification. You'll see lots of ads that shout "1500x!!!", but trust me: you can't get a good…
drorzel | November 30, 2007Via Kate, a story from a legal blog about a decisions in the case of a messy professor:
"Clean your room or get out!" Words from a frustrated parent to a messy teenager? Not quite. The mess-maker in this case was a chemistry professor at the University of Texas, who ignored repeated warnings to clean up his dangerously cluttered lab space. When University officials decided to clean it themselves, the professor caused such a disturbance that campus police had to lead him away in handcuffs. The professor was eventually fired, which prompted a lawsuit claiming that the University retaliated…
oracknows | November 30, 2007
I don't know what it is about woo-meisters and vibration.
I know I've said this before, but it seems to come up so often that I can't help but repeat it. Everything is vibration. Everything. And if it' not vibration, it's waves, be they energy waves, sound waves, or, as I like to describe them waves of pure woo. Add quantum mechanics to the mix, and you have the ingredients a veritable orgy of woo. (And if you want a real orgy, they might even have your back covered there, too.) I had thought that this fascination with vibration among purveyors of woo was a relatively recent phenomenon.
I…
oracknows | November 29, 2007Heard on the radio this morning, a commenter responding to a radio talk show host's pointing out to him that Mike Huckabee doesn't accept evolution as valid. This is as close as I can remember what he said, but the gist is correct:
We disagree on that. But not believing in evolution is something I can overlook. It's not that important. It's not as though he'll have stormtroopers knocking down my door because of it.
Maybe not, but if elected Huckabee would have a huge say over federal educational and biological research policy and funding. Being a creationist, as Mike Huckabee is, to me is an…
oracknows | November 29, 2007...for reaching a milestone in blogging.
One thing that's always puzzled me is why Abel's traffic isn't much higher (and mine lower, to be honest). True, I post much more frequently than he does, but that alone doesn't explain it. (Maybe it's EneMan.) Whatever the case, Abel deserves a much larger readership. There's a disconnect between the quality of his blog and the size of his readership.
drorzel | November 29, 2007In comments to my earlier cranky post about the New York Times, Carl Zimmer pointed out that they hadn't released their "Ten Best Books" list, so there was still an outside chance of a science book turning up. They posted the list today, and there's nothing on it that wasn't also on the Notable Books list, so no dice.
Another common response to my complaint was along the lines of "Do they ever list science books?" I was looking for a way to kill a little time at one point yesterday, so I went back through the last few lists and counted science books. The tallies for 2003-2006 (using a fairly…
pharyngula | November 28, 2007
Last week, I reported on this new breakthrough in stem cell research, in which scientists have discovered how to trigger the stem cell state in adult somatic cells, like skin cells, producing an induced stem cell, a pluripotent cell that can then be lead down the path to any of a multitude of useful tissue types. I tried to get across the message that this is not the end of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research: the work required ESCs to be developed, the technique being used is unsuitable for therapeutic stem cell work, and there's a long, long road to follow before we actually have stem cell…
drorzel | November 28, 2007Over at Unqualified Offerings, "Thoreau" offers some musings about peer review. I saw this and said, "Aha! The perfect chance to dust off an old post, and free up some time..." Sadly, I already recycled the post in question, so I feel obliged to be less lazy and contribute some new content.
I generally agree with most of what he says, but I would raise one quibble about his list of criteria:
What scientists are looking for when we evaluate a paper is whether the paper clearly addresses 3 points:
1) What is the question or issue being studied in this work?
2) What are the methods being used,…
drorzel | November 27, 2007Over at Backreaction, Bee has a long and thoughtful post (they don't do any other kind) about the interaction between science and the popular imagination. She says a lot of interesting things, but I think she comes to the wrong conclusion at the end, when she writes:
However, despite this general trend, what worries me specifically about popular science reporting is how much our community seems to pay attention to it. This is a very unhealthy development. The opinion making process in science should not be affected by popular opinions. It should not be relevant whether somebody makes for a…
oracknows | November 27, 2007
I was originally planning to do a real science post today. Indeed, there are at least two or three interesting studies that have been released in the last month or two that I've been meaning to write up, you know, to lose the snark and make this a real Science Blog. True, having a little fun deconstructing the silliness of homeopaths or antivaccinationists is educational (not to mention entertaining and so fun). However, very so often I feel the need to get serious, and over the last couple of weeks I think I let the snark run a bit more wild than usual, not counterbalanced as much with…
drorzel | November 27, 2007Scott Eric Kaufman draws my attention to the fact that the New York Times has posted its Notable Books for 2007 list. The list is divided into "Fiction & Poetry" and "Non-Fiction," and Scott correctly notes that the "Fiction & Poetry" books all have terrible blurbs, but I'd like to point out a much larger problem with the list, relating to the "Non-Fiction" category:
There is not a single science book on the list of "Notable Books" for the year.
There are books on history, books on politics, personal memoirs, collections of critical essays, but nothing about science. There are…
drorzel | November 26, 2007The infamous Davies op-ed has been collected together with some responses at edge.org, and one of the responses is by Sean Carroll, who reproduces his response at Cosmic Variance. Sean's a smart guy, and I basically agree with his argument, but I'm a contrary sort, and want to nitpick one thing about his response.
He builds his response around the question, raised by Davies, "Why do the laws of physics take the form they do?" He considers and discards a few responses, before writing:
The final possibility, which seems to be the right one, is: that's just how things are. There is a chain of…
drorzel | November 26, 2007I said I wasn't going to write anything about the Paul Davies thing, but it's been the hot topic for the last day or two, and I've found myself reading a bunch of the responses in blogdom. I basically agree with most of what various science bloggers have said, but being a contrary sort, I can't help poking at a couple of points in the responses that seem a little iffy to me.
The main argument has centered around Davies's claim that science has its own form of "faith:"
All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist…
tqa | November 25, 2007
Verse one of Chapter 11 of the Letter of Paul to the Hebrews reads (in the King James translation of the Bible): "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." I mention this not because it is Sunday, or because I intend to offer a sermon, but because when I hear the word "faith," the definition that comes into my mind first is "the evidence of things not seen." By that definition, I have a very hard time thinking of science as requiring faith. If anything, "science" is the exact opposite of "faith". The body of knowledge that we call "science" consists of…
pharyngula | November 25, 2007Paul Davies has written a curious op-ed that has been blithely published by the New York Times. I'm not sure why the NYT saw fit to publish it, except that Davies does have a reputation as a popularizer of physics, and as something of an apologist for deism; they certainly couldn't have chosen to print it on its merits. His argument is the tired and familiar claim that science has to be taken on faith, so it's just like religion. I recall hearing variants on this back in the schoolyard, usually punctuated with "nyaa nyaas" and assertions about each others' mothers, and while we may not have…