Science
catdynamics | September 26, 2007I'm hosting the next physical science carnival: Philosophia Naturalis #14 on Oct 4th 2007.
It is a memorable date, send me entries on any relevant physical science bloggings.
drorzel | September 26, 2007Physics World has a somewhat puzzling news article about the solar system:
Physicists have known for some time that the motions of Pluto and the inner planets are chaotic. This means that a small external force on a planet could, over time, cause a major change in the position of the planet within its orbit. Although no planets are likely to collide or be ejected from the Solar System anytime soon, the chaos means that the orbits of these planets cannot be forecasted with any long-term reliability.
Whether the orbits of the gas giants are chaotic, however, is less certain -- some computer…
tqa | September 25, 2007
Most of the readers of this blog are intelligent, interested, scientifically literate individuals, but I'm guessing that at least a few of you aren't familiar with one of the nouns in the title. Those of you who do know what a conodont is are probably wondering what it has to do with the others. If you bear with me for a little bit, the connection will be clear shortly. It has to do with fossils, fossilization, and the latest spectacular misunderstanding of those two things at Uncommon Descent.
Conodonts are (or, rather, were) an interesting group of animals. They were around from late in…
catdynamics | September 25, 2007I gather Halo 3 just came out.
How much did it cost to develop?
A news story on the wire quotes a development cost of $30 million for Microsoft, with another $30 million or so in marketing and bonuses, for a launch cost of $60 million. Which implies very high profit margins for a successful game.
But, the story also claims it took 300 elite programmers three years to put the game together, which is plausible.
So, an elite programmer can be had to $33,000 gross per year?
I don't think so.
You might think that this is because most of the programming is done somewhere off-shore at very low…
oracknows | September 24, 2007Pity poor John Ioannidis.
The man does provocative work about the reliability of scientific studies as published in the peer-reviewed literature, and his reward for trying to point out shortcomings in how we as scientists and clinical researchers do studies and evaluate evidence is to be turned into an icon for cranks and advocates of pseudoscience--or even antiscience. I first became aware of Ioannidis two years ago around the time of publication of a paper by him that caused a stir, entitled Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research. In that study,…
catdynamics | September 23, 2007In a few years, I am going to leave this book lying out somewhere in my house and see if one of the kids picks it up and reads it.
"The Canon" by Natalie Angier
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-24295-5 Houghton Mifflin Books
The Canon is a pop overview of some key concepts in science, starting with scientific methodology and quantitative analysis, and then in six short chapters covering a couple of concepts in six of the major subfields of the natural sciences. No equations, all qualitative conceptual discussion.
The concept of the book is sounds, I couldn't really quibble with any of the choice of topics…
pharyngula | September 23, 2007
One concept that is sometimes used in developmental biology is the idea of the "master control gene" or "master switch" — a single gene whose expression is both necessary and sufficient to trigger activation of many other genes in a coordinated fashion, leading to the development of a specific tissue or organ. It's a handy concept on which to hang a discussion of transcription factors, but it may actually be of rather limited utility in the real world of molecular genetics: there don't seem to be a lot of examples of master control genes out there! Pax-6 is the obvious one, a gene that…
pharyngula | September 22, 2007Hmmm. Estimates of the cost of the war in Iraq range from $4.4 to 7.1 billion per month. If I assume about $5 billion, it looks like we're throwing away about $7 million per hour in that effort; so it looks like a little bit more than a half-hours worth of bloody war costs us $4 million. So let's just stop for about 40 minutes, OK?
What was the point of that calculation? The government is threatening to shut down the Arecibo Observatory unless they can cough up $4 million dollars for its operating budget for the next three years. Wow.
The National Science Foundation, which has long funded…
pharyngula | September 22, 2007Take a look at the winners of The 49th International Conference on Electron, Ion and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication Bizarre/Beautiful Micrograph Contest. It's itty-bitty art and weirdness!
grrlscientist | September 21, 2007tags: gender issues, gender disparity, blogosphere, science blogs, life science blogs
PZ asked his students these questions on an exam that he was recently writing;
14. Hey! Have you noticed the lack of women scientists so far? Briefly speculate about why they're missing.
15 (2 pts extra credit). Name a female scientist of any era.
So .. in addition to those questions, I pose these questions for you regarding female scientists;
Can you name any? Who?
Who is the first woman scientist who comes to mind?
Do you have a "favorite" woman scientist?
My answers to these additional questions are…
pharyngula | September 21, 2007Feathers only rarely fossilize, so the distribution of feathers in dinosaurs is difficult to determine. Sometimes feathers mark the bones, though, and bones do preserve well. Here's an example: the forearm of a Velociraptor retains an array of small bony bumps evenly spaced along its length. What could they be?
In the photo below is the homologous bone of a turkey vulture, showing similar bumps. They are quill knobs, or places where a ligament anchors the root of a secondary feather directly to the bone. Their presence is an indicator of the presence of a large feather — something more than a…
drorzel | September 20, 2007On September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving through rural New Hampshire, and had an odd experience that has become probably the most famous alien abduction story in the history of UFO folklore.
As it happens, they drove right past the town where SF author and Making Light blogger Jim Macdonald lives. Now, armed with a digital camera and a scientific mindset, Jim has set out to produce the definitive explanation of the Hill story, following published accounts step by step through the New Hampshire countryside.
It's a terrific piece of work, even in an incomplete state (he's still…
drorzel | September 20, 2007I'm in a Department of Physics and Astronomy, so several of my colleagues are astronomers. We also have a rather nice on-campus observatory, used for student research projects.
Unfortunately, the combination means that we have a running argument with the rest of the campus regarding lights. The rather nice observatory is basically useless if there are big bright lights on all around it all the time, but various other groups want to have bright lights on all the time: Athletics wants the lights on the football field on so they can run night practices and intramurals; Campus Safety wants more…
jrosenhouse | September 19, 2007Maybe evolution is not the front line in the fight for good science education. Judging from this clip, from Dan Abrams' show on Tuesday night, it would seem there are more pressing problems in that area:
ABRAMS: It's time for tonight's “Beat the Press”, our daily look back at the absurd and sometimes amusing perils of live TV. First up: A lot of the time, conversations on ABC's “The View” aren't exactly intellectual. But one interchange today would suggest that their new co-host needs to review her 3rd grade color-coded books.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WHOOPI GOLDBERG, THE VIEW: Do you--is the…
oracknows | September 19, 2007Thanks to fellow ScienceBlogger Abel Pharmboy, it would appear that I was mentioned in an article in The Scientist about science blogs in general (not ScienceBlogs in particular). I'm gratified at how many mentions of my humble blog I see in the comments, and far be it from me to toot my own horn...
Oh, whom am I kidding? Head on over to register your favorites--even more so if Respectful Insolence is one of them.
oracknows | September 17, 2007While I'm flogging blog carnivals, here's another one that's right up my alley that seemingly came into existence without my having been aware of it: the Cancer Research Blog Carnival.
The first edition of the carnival at Bayblab has a lot of good stuff. The next edition will be at nosugrefneb.com on October 5. I might have to submit a piece.
drorzel | September 17, 2007Sean Carroll takes a look at economics from the point of view of a physicist:
Economists have a certain way of looking at the world, in which (to simplify quite a bit) people act rationally to maximize their utility. That sort of talk pushes physicists' buttons, because maximizing functions is something we do all the time. I'm not deeply familiar with economics in any sense; everything I know about the subject comes from reading blogs. Any social science is much harder than physics, in the sense that constructing quantitative models that usefully describe the behavior of realistic systems is…
oracknows | September 16, 2007There's a long and strange history of truly bizarre experiments done in the name of science. Alex Boese has gathered twenty of the strangest examples here. There are the usual suspects, such as the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram obedience experiment, but there were others that I hadn't heard of. To me, the award for the most bizarre has to be a tie between the vomit drinking doctor and this one:
Ever since the carnage of the French Revolution, when the guillotine sent thousands of severed heads tumbling into baskets, scientists had wondered whether it would be possible to keep a…
drorzel | September 15, 2007Speaking of science explanations in SF, or at least science explained by SF authors, there's a very nice history of dark matter at SFNovelists.com by Mark Brotherton (via Tobias Buckell):
The story of dark matter starts back in the 1930s with Fritz Zwicky, a brilliant but difficult Caltech astronomer, who was studying galaxy clustering. Galaxies group together, apparently under the force of gravity, and between Newton and Einstein, humans seem to have a pretty good idea of how gravity works. There's a very general relationship between gravity, speed, and size, that governs everything from the…
drorzel | September 15, 2007In a comment to my Worldcon wrap-up, "fvngvs" asks a question following up on the science in SF panel:
So Chad, now that you've had some time to think about it, can you think of a list of books/stories with a really good treatment of science concepts?
It's a good question, and deserves a full post in response. It also probably deserves better than to be posted on a Saturday morning, when nobody's reading, but oh, well.
Anyway, the question stems from a question posed during the panel, asking for books or stories that do a particularly good job presenting some science concept or another. I…