Science
pharyngula | August 15, 2007Sandy is peeking at and playing with Jim Watson's most intimate bits. So can you!
drorzel | August 15, 2007Michael Nielsen, who's so smart it's like he's posting from tomorrow, offers a couple of provocative questions about the perception of a crisis in funding for basic science:
First, how much funding is enough for fundamental research? What criterion should be used to decide how much money is the right amount to spend on fundamental research?
Second, the human race spent a lot lot more on fundamental research in the second half of the twentieth century than it did in the first. It's hard to get a good handle on exactly how much, in part because it depends on what you mean by fundamental…
oracknows | August 14, 2007It arrived a little early, but it's here now, the latest, greatest edition of Tangled Bank is now posted over at Fish Feet. Go now and get caught up on the best science blogging of the past fortnight.
oracknows | August 14, 2007Via Pure Pedantry, I've become aware of a post that resonates over here, given the recent series of posts I did about a certain comic who, unable to dispute the science behind global warming or the health hazards of secondhand smoke in any serious way, has a penchant for labeling scientists who support such positions and think that indoor smoking should be banned as fascists (or Maoist), power hungry, bureaucrats who don't view people as individuals, geeks who got beat up on the dodgeball court and are now taking their revenge, or avid players of role-playing games such as Dungeons &…
drorzel | August 14, 2007A simple but high-stakes fill-in-the-blank question:
The right and proper symbol to represent the square root of negative one is _______.
The incorrect answer will brand you as an engineer, and you will be cast into the outer darkness to spend eternity converting drill sizes into sensible units.
Choose wisely.
drorzel | August 13, 2007A simple question today:
Which do you prefer, e or π?
They're both irrational, they're both "about three," and of course they're related by Euler's formula, but they're very different. One is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, the other is the base for the exponential function.
You can only pick one: which one is it?
I think I'll go with e. Nothing against π, but I've spent a lot of time working with differential equations, and you just have to love a function that is its own derivative.
And nobody has ever been dorky enough to attempt to show off by memorizing the…
drorzel | August 13, 2007I am sorry to report the passing of Ralph Alpher, of the famous "Alpher-Bethe-Gamow" paper. I don't know many details, but he's been in poor health for some time, so this is sad but not surprising news.
Ralph Alpher was an astrophysicist and cosmologist whose thesis work with George Gamow on the origin of the universe was a critical early step in the development of the "Big Bang" theory. Alpher predicted the existence of the cosmic microwave background, and estimated its temperature (at 5K, not far from the correct value of 2.7 K) in 1948, nearly two decades before it was detected by Penzias…
oracknows | August 12, 2007
Science tattoos have been all the rage lately. Even though I'm a scientist, I'm also a surgeon; so naturally I was wondering if there was anything that I'd like to see too.
There is.
Over at Street Anatomy, there's a great collection of anatomy tattoos. Anyone who has any surgery-related tattoos, send a picture of them to me, and maybe I'll get in on the action by posting it. A tattoo of the abdominal contents on someone's abdomen would be really cool.
denialism | August 10, 2007Do I have to roll up a newspaper?
Big Tom warned me in today's cranks post of the ABC news' headline Global Warming Tipping Point in '09?" in regards to this paper from the Hadley Centre on new more sophisticated modeling techniques. Could they be more boneheaded?
Fortunately, nowhere in the article do they mention "tipping" points for '09, it's just that yellow headline. The point of the story is that this modeling that uses current weather patterns and data to model climate for the near future shows a likely lull in the current upward trend before further increases in temperature after…
pharyngula | August 10, 2007Here is an excellent article on the biology of sexual orientation. We all know this is a contentious issue — are we born with an orientation, or is it a 'choice' that people make? — and the article just lays the facts out for us and points out some of the lacunae in our knowledge.
First, I'll confess to my own position on that nature-nurture debate: it's both and it's neither, and the argument is misplaced. There is no template on the Y chromosome that triggers a sexual response when Pamela Anderson enters the visual field, but there almost certainly are general predispositions that are a…
drorzel | August 8, 2007
The "Ankle-Breaker Crab" (Coenobita iversonii) is a species of carnivorous land crab found in the Caribbean Islands. It closely resembles the ordinary Caribbean hermit crab (Coenobita clypeatus), but is distinguished from its more common cousin by its habit of living in special titanium-reinforced shells, and its diet, which consists primarily of hikers.
Coenobita iversonii are most commonly found at altitudes of 150 m or more above sea level, living in colonies of 100 or more in the underbrush near hiking trails. They are the only arthropod known to feed primarily on humans, and they hunt…
denialism | August 8, 2007No.
However, there is never a shortage of crankery from Mike Adams who asserts Microwave ovens destroy the nutritional value of your food. There may be too much idiocy here to address but let's get started.
The rise of widespread nutritional deficiencies in the western world correlates almost perfectly with the introduction of the microwave oven. This is no coincidence. Microwave ovens heat food through a process of creating molecular friction, but this same molecular friction quickly destroys the delicate molecules of vitamins and phytonutrients (plant medicines) naturally found in foods.…
oracknows | August 7, 2007The third season of Doctor Who is over. There's nothing on the horizon for many months (such as the return of Doctor Who or Torchwood) that's interesting enough to me coming out of the U.K. that I'd go to the trouble of firing up BitTorrent to check it out, rather than wait until it somehow finds its way to these shores.
Until now.
Yes, it's Richard Dawkins' long-promised investigation of alternative medicine and New Age practitioners, entitled The Enemies of Reason:
Prof Dawkins launches his attack in The Enemies of Reason, to be shown on Channel 4 this month. The professor, the author of…
oracknows | August 7, 2007After a long run of arguing against global warming and indoor smoking bans, it appears that our favorite Libertarian comic with a penchant for bad arguments and ad hominem attacks on scientists has temporarily left the field of blog combat in a huff of "giving up" that reminds me of a certain Black Knight telling a certain King that he's not beaten and that it's "just a flesh wound." I'm not worried; I'm sure he'll be back whenever he returns from his vacation to speak for himself. In the meantime, while the blog silence is golden, I'd like to step back a minute. I don't want to rehash old…
pharyngula | August 6, 2007Despite a miserable red-eye flight — I left San Jose at 6:30 last night, and arrived in Minneapolis at 4am, followed by my familiar long drive home — I'll try to say a few words about Sci Foo.
Short version: weirdest meeting ever. That's a good thing, though.
The guest list included
Carl Djerassi,
Eric Drexler,
Eric Lander,
Eugenie Scott,
Freeman Dyson,
Henry Gee,
James Randi,
Kim Stanley Robinson,
Martha Stewart,
Martin Rees,
Paul Sereno,
and a few hundred other people, so the first function was to just get all these very different people to ping-pong off each other. There were some…
denialism | August 6, 2007How will the homophobes greet this latest article in Nature describing a pheromone "switch" in mice that when inactivated - even in adult mice - appears to change their sexual orientation?
Briefly let's go over what the researchers found.
Mice that lacked a gene named Trpc, responsible for encoding an ion channel in the vomeronasal organ, were previously discovered to have indiscriminant mating patterns among males. In other words, the boys would try to mount anything that moved, male or female. It was thought that mice, which don't exactly look at girly mags, can probably only distinguish…
pharyngula | August 5, 2007I've got to get back to my meeting, but Cosma just had to distract me with these classic video clips on dissecting the squid giant axon, including movies of one of my personal heroes, JZ Young (pronounced, as everyone knows, as jay-zed), in action. It's beautiful stuff.
oracknows | August 4, 2007In case you haven't seen it yet...
Sad.
I can't believe Behe is still using the mousetrap analogy for "irreducible complexity" when the very concept has been so thoroughly debunked over the last several years.
oracknows | August 4, 2007I really, really wish the Discovery Institute would stop putting out idiocy like this:
We have blogged in the past about the growing numbers of doctors who are skeptical of Darwinian evolution to explain the complexity of life.
Those numbers are continuing to grow, and conesquently doctors are beginning to organize themselves and reach out to others who hold similar positions. Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (PSSI) has for sometime had a website at www.doctorsdoubtingdarwin.com. Recently they have begun using the site to organize and promote conferences about Darwinian…
oracknows | August 3, 2007Michael Behe, that Don Quixote of "intelligent design" who never tires of tilting at windmills of "fatal flaws" in evolutionary theory that he think he's identified, did quite a bit of tilting at HIV in his book.
Watch his blathering taken down by a pre-graduate student named Abbie. It's so good it's been republished at Panda's Thumb.
Enjoy.