Science
drorzel | November 14, 2007Dave Bacon watched "Judgement Day" last night, and has a question:
It's not like, you know, there aren't people who think quantum theory is wrong or that quantum theory is somehow related to the Vedic teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. So why is it that quantum theory (which after all is "just a theory" wink, wink, nod, nod) doesn't illicit courtroom battles of such epic scope as the Dover trial?
The answer: Because quantum physics involves math, and Math Is Hard.
If you want to construct a cockamamie theory that can pretend to be an alternative to quantum mechanics, it needs to have…
drorzel | November 14, 2007So, in case you missed the splashy banner ads that have been running here for the last week, NOVA ran a show about the Dover, PA "Intelligent Design" trial last night. You can find all manner of commentary on ScienceBlogs, for example here, here, and here.
I'm not as, shall we say, personally invested in the issue as many of my fellow bloggers, but this did look interesting to me, so I watched it last night (with occasional flipping over to the Syracuse basketball game). It was... pretty good. I doubt it would change anybody's mind, in the unlikely event that any "Intelligent Design"…
oracknows | November 13, 2007Today's the day, everyone.
I haven't mentioned this before, but the documentary on the trial over the teaching of "intelligent design" creationism in the classroom in Dover, Pennsylvania two years ago is set to premiere on your local PBS station tonight at 8 PM. The Nova documentary, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, already has the Discovery Institute up in arms because from all reports thus far (and indeed from the content of the documentary website, which presents fossil evidence and a detailed discussion of evolution) it is uncompromising in its viewpoint that ID is not science…
drorzel | November 13, 2007 Jennifer Ouellette meantions it as the jumping-off point for her particle-wave duality post, but I want to spend a little time talking about this paper on single-electron interference (Science 318, 949 (2007)), because it's a very nice piece of work. There's also a Physics World news article about the experiment, which is pretty good, but slightly understates the coolness of the experiment.
The experiment here is extremely simple: They take a jet of molecular hydrogen, and hit it with extremely high-energy photons from the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. These…
oracknows | November 13, 2007Yesterday, inspired by a post by fellow ScienceBlogger Martin, I had a little fun discussing the evolution of "alternative" medicine (a.k.a. "complementary and alternative medicine" or CAM), specifically speculating about the possible selective pressures, positive and negative, that have influenced the course that its evolution took. Essentially, the discussion centered around whether, by its very nature CAM undergoes negative selective pressure for having as little effect as possible, positive or negative, a point I found somewhat, but not entirely, convincing. Although the post inspired a…
drorzel | November 13, 2007The indefatigable Bora Zivkovic is soliciting contributions for the science blogging anthology The Open Laboratory. He's titled the post "Last Call for Submissions," but the actual deadline is December 20th. On or about December 19th, I expect a post title along the lines of "Wolf! Wooooolllllfffff!!! Oh My God, a Wolf!" but that's neither here nor there.
Being a commmitted advocate of Open Science, Bora has posted the full list of submissions to date. Looking it over, my main reaction is "Where's the Physics?" It's not just that this blog isn't nominated, but a general lack of physics posts…
oracknows | November 12, 2007I wish I had thought of this one, but I didn't. However, I never let a little thing like not having thought of an idea first to stop me from discussing it, and this particular idea is definitely worth expanding upon because (1) it's interesting and (2) it combines two of my interests, alternative medicine and evolution. I agree with parts of the idea, but it's not without its shortcomings. Indeed, I'd very much welcome any of the evolutionary biologists who read this blog to chime in with their own ideas.
Fellow ScienceBlogger Martin Rundkvist over at Aardvarchaeology has proposed a rather…
mark_antimony | November 11, 2007Since I took Cell Biology last year, the Telomerase Gene has been an object of curiosity to me. Manipulating this pathway could slow down aging. On the other hand, it could be used in the opposite way to fight cancer. I do understand that this raises the ethical issue of how much we are supposed to tamper with. Then again, tampering is what we do as scientists, climbing mountains because they're there.
I've been looking at this article for a paper I still haven't started for Biochemistry.
Is any one here doing work with telomere regulation? If so, I'd like to here about it.
pharyngula | November 11, 2007Here I am, rooming with that space case, Phil Plait, and what should appear on the astronomy photo of the day but a cosmic cephalopod, a picture of Comet Holmes that has a resemblance to a cartoon octopus.
Perhaps this is a sign of reconciliation? That the savage enmity between two science blogs shall be soothed? That the ferocious competition between the best science blog on the web and the blog that tied with a junk science site shall be at an end? That disparate disciplines can find common ground in the beauty of the natural universe?
Naaah, I hope not. The rivalry is too much fun.
oracknows | November 11, 2007Hilarious.
Even though I risk bringing back some of the anthropogenic global warming "skeptics" (in reality pseudoskeptics) here, this is too rich not to mention, because it reminds me of how advocates of all stripes of pseudoscience react, particularly advocates of alternative medicine, most of whom wouldn't recognize a well-designed study if it bit them on the behind. Apparently, Rush Limbaugh and the usual suspects fell for a rather obvious hoax in the form of an online journal article:
Daniel A Klein*, Mandeep J Gupta*, Philip Cooper**, Arne FR Jansson**. Carbon dioxide production by…
grrlscientist | November 9, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, women in science, feminism, gender disparity, academia, career
Image: East Bay AWIS.
An article was published in today's issue of Science that explores the reasons that female scientists are not achieving that elusive Principle Investigator (PI) status that is generally thought to be the epitome of success in academe. In short, this article argues that family responsibilities hold women back; women sacrifice their own career aspirations to care for children or elderly parents, and they also are more likely to sacrifice their career in favor of their spouse's…
drorzel | November 9, 2007 I have a bunch of science news sources in my RSS feeds, and every evening, I scan through the accumulated articles to try to figure out what physics-related stories there are to talk about. Sometimes, it's hard to find anything, but other days, you get stories that lead to four press releases at EurekAlert (one, two, three, four), a write-up at Backreaction, a Physics World news story, and a Dennis Overbye piece in the New York Times. I guess I really ought to say something about the new results from the Pierre Auger Observatory, published this week in Science (Science 318, 938 (2007), if…
grrlscientist | November 7, 2007tags: evolution, politics, education, Kitzmiller, Dover School District, intelligent design, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, NOVA, streaming video
Occasionally, very rarely in fact, I wish I had a television, and this is one of those days. I just received an ad from Kate Becker, regarding a new NOVA program, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" which will air 8 pm on Tuesday, November 13 on your local PBS station (you might have also noticed that they are advertizing this program on this site).
This program documents the war over evolution that came to Dover, Pennsylvania…
pharyngula | November 6, 2007Ladies, there are people who want your menstrual blood. It contains stromal cells, which are a multipotent adult-stem-cell-like population that might be a useful source of fairly plastic, proliferative cells. This distant possibility has prompted one company, C'Elle, to offer to collect, test, purify, and store these cells for you. As they say, these cells "may potentially provide phenomenal life saving treatments and customized therapies in the future"…so you should stash away a supply in cryogenic storage, just in case someone comes up with a use.
There is some serious science here, and…
pharyngula | November 6, 2007Here's a cool idea: pick a color palette for your website by sampling photomicrographs. There are some nice color samples there; I think I'd go with something along the lines of a DIC image of a zebrafish embryo, which would have lots of blues, a few weakly saturated yellows, and an occasional flare of gold from the birefringence. Time for a site redesign! If I had any time, that is.
evolgen | November 6, 2007During my first semester of college I took an introductory chemistry class from a poet, playwright, and Nobel laureate -- that's all one guy, not three. His Nobel Prize is in chemistry, which made him more than qualified to teach us about acids, transition metals, and the other basics of chemistry. He also advocated a well rounded education, and he required we read The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. In addition to our exams and lab reports, we had to write an essay about one of Levi's short stories.
I bring this up because the intro-chem instructor, Roald Hoffmann, gave a lecture last night…
pharyngula | November 5, 2007Perhaps you haven't noticed, but we've got a serial spammer in the comments. This twit, calling himself Peter Moore (also known as Ken DeMyer, or Kdbuffalo, as he was known on Wikipedia before being banned there), is repeating himself over and over again, asking the same stupid question, never satisfied with any answer anyone gives him. Forty nine insipid comments in three days is enough.
I will answer him one last time. Any further attempt to spam multiple comment threads with his demands (and this alone makes him an ass: an incompetent, unqualified hack like Moore is in no position to make…
catdynamics | November 5, 2007 ...was the command line
As we know, Google is not-so-secretly building a distributed artificial intelligence, that will not doubt promptly transcend and take over the world, except possibly for those of us with inbuilt immunity.
I, personally, will welcome our new prescient disembodied overlords.
What can I say, Google still sends me (small) checks on random occasions. (More, please!)
The only residual uncertainty is when, and how, the Eschaton will imminence.
Now, the Yorkshire Ranter makes a good point: Google is really just a very large, distributed command line Unix interface to the Web…