Science
catdynamics | May 21, 2007Last year Sean wrote a marvelous short on Boltzmann's Brains
A Boltzmann Brain is a self-aware entity that spontaneously appears from a low probability statistical fluctuation to a low entropy state.
A very low probability fluctuation.
We're talking something like a potted plant appearing spontaneously high above a planet's surface, thinking "oh no, not again" and then plummeting to its more probable, energy conserving, high entropy disassembly.
No violation of physical law or cherished symmetries, just a low probability rapid assembly of ordered mass, followed by return to normalcy.
The…
pharyngula | May 20, 2007Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on their opinion page (yeah, boo, crap so runny and putrid you can't even get rid of it with a shovel, I know) that claims biologists have been actively inflating species numbers as a cheap ploy to gain better support for conservation efforts. I really can't rebut that any better than Loren Coleman does here:
What is occurring is a classic theoretical battle between lumpers and splitters, not a fight of conservationists vs non-conservationists, not a war of Greens vs non-Greens, although "Species Inflation May Infect Over-Eager Conservationists"…
oracknows | May 19, 2007A few days ago, I posted a note of congratulations to Gregory Simonian, a 10th grader at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, for winning the Alliance For Science essay contest, for which the topic was Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution? At the time, the winners had been announced, though, the actual essays hadn't been published yet.
Now they are.
Head on over to the Alliance for Science website and read Greg's essay and the other three winning essays; they're each only two or three pages long, and it'll be well worth your time. (I'm only disappointed that none of…
oracknows | May 18, 2007I want to apologize to Abel Pharmboy in advance on this one. This is the second time in less than three months that I've invaded his territory to a certain extent in Your Friday Dose of Woo, specifically his The Friday Fermentable feature. Last time around, I couldn't believe it when I encountered some serious farm woo particularly common in wineries known as biodynamics, which involved burying various animal parts (among other things) on the farm in order to promote its life force. Who said that the best woo is found only in medicine?
Certainly not me. At least, not anymore.
This time around…
drorzel | May 17, 2007Via Steinn, the Smithsonian's Astronomy Abstract Service has an index entry for some book called De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by some Polish guy. They've got a scanned electronic version available for free, but the stupid thing is in Latin, and who speaks that these days?
Also, it's only got two citations, and both of those are more than ten years old. Boy, this guy will never get tenure...
If you have access to JSTOR, you can also read a cranky letter from some guy at Cambridge. The more things change...
As Steinn says, "I love those intertube thingies, may they never be clogged."
denialism | May 17, 2007PLoS has an intriguing article providing additional reasons why the thermodynamic arguments against evolution are more than silly. It's called the maximum entropy production (MEP) hypothesis, and John Whitfield describes why life is actually may be favored by the second law of thermodynamics.
At first glance, life and the laws of thermodynamics seem to be at loggerheads. Most glaringly, the second law states that over time, any system will tend to the maximum level of entropy, meaning the minimum level of order and useful energy. Open a bottle of perfume in a closed room, and eventually the…
pharyngula | May 16, 2007Hey, you want some science? My latest Seed column on battling beetle balls is online.
(And I've just arrived in Ann Arbor after a long travel day!)
drorzel | May 16, 2007I have a big stack of exams and lab reports to grade, so I need to go off someplace where I don't have Internet access and do that. In my absence, here's a Dorky Poll question inspired by recent news:
Which Nobel laureate (in any field) is the craziest?
There's no real shortage of scientists who have won the Nobel Prize for something or another, and then gone completely goofy. But which Nobel laureate is the most goofy?
In physics, it's hard to top Brian Josephson, who was recently cited as a noble defender of Rusi Taleyarkhan against the mean folks at Nature.
The problem is, he has a couple…
oracknows | May 16, 2007One of the favorite targets of pseudoscientists is the peer review system. After all, it's the system through which scientists submit their manuscripts describing their scientific findings or their grant proposals to their peers for an evaluation to determine whether they are scientifically meritorious enough to be published or to be funded. Creationists hate it. HIV/AIDS denialists hate it. Indeed, pseudoscientists and cranks of all stripes hate it. There's a reason for that, of course, namely that vigorous peer review is a major part of science that keeps pseudoscientists from attaining the…
drorzel | May 16, 2007One of the fun things about EurekAlert is that it allows you to trace the full life cycle of the publicization of science in a way that used to be impossible for a regular person. For example, take the recent "Ring of Dark Matter" story.
First, there's a rumor of a result. This first stage lasts about a week, and if all goes well, it manages to generate a little buzz, and maybe even some divination.
The rumor, warmed by the buzz, will then hatch, giving rise to a press release. Dependning on the species, you may get two, and for highly collaborative research, you can generate even more.
In…
oracknows | May 15, 2007The winners of the Alliance for Science essay contest that I mentioned a couple of months ago, where high school students were asked to write an essay of 1,000 words or less about the topic Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?, have been announced.
My only question is why the actual essays aren't posted on the Alliance's website. I did find, however, that the winner, Gregory Simonian, has a blog, where he describes his struggle to write the winning essay:
I'll give you some behind-the-scenes commentary. I had a super tough time cutting that essay within the word limit. I had…
drorzel | May 15, 2007Via Toby, a detailed proposal for floating colonies on Venus. I heard Geoff Landis talk about this at Boskone a while back-- the basic idea is that the Venusian atmosphere is so dense that you could easily build structures that would float high enough up in the atmosphere to be above the hellish temperatures. You still have to deal with the sulfuric acid clouds, but what would life be without its little challenges.
The post linked above adds an extra, counter-intuitive motivation to the picture:
There are many other reasons to colonize Venus. First and foremost, human survival is dependent…
catdynamics | May 15, 2007Sitting in a hotel room, reading Generation Rx by Greg Critser, it is very disconcerting to see out of the corner of your eye the topic of the book - the ad for the "purple pill", the generic pretty people running through the field, and the very strange two bathtubs-on-a-cliff ad...
ok, so I know what the third one is for, but why are there two bathtubs, and do these ads really work on the east coast in winter? Also, I have got to check what I'm viewing, I'm just not in those demographics...
Generation Rx (Mariner Books ISBN-13: 978-0-618-77356-5 is a nice little book.
It rambles a bit,…
oracknows | May 15, 2007A while back, I coined a term for woo so irrational, woo so desperate to masquerade as reason and science, that it could be spewed forth into books, the Internet, and the blogosophere by only one man.
The man is Deepak Chopra, and the term is Chopra-woo, examples of which can be found here and here.
I had thought that there was no man quite as capable of producing such concentrated woo cloaked in the language of science (well, except perhaps for the DNA Activation guy or the guys at Life Technology, but their woo is so utterly over-the-top that I have a hard time accepting that they actually…
pharyngula | May 14, 2007Seed is doing a Good Thing and hosting a site and forum for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (when I was growing up, this was better known as the Westinghouse science fair, and it is very prestigious). Some of the projects that come out of that science fair are just plain intimidating—teachers and students might want to browse the fair for ideas, but don't be discouraged if some of them are a little overwhelming. It probably helps maintain your perspective to notice that Seed has sponsored an amusing gimmick, too, the world's largest baking soda and vinegar volcano. (I don…
pharyngula | May 12, 2007This is a beautifully done movie, although it does get a bit silly in the end.
One point this brought to mind: have you ever looked at sperm? They're amazing. We humans do go through a single-celled haploid stage which is the focus of some very intense selection pressure, and humans in their haploid phase possess some impressive abilities. No brains, but the sperm are motile and exhibit seeking behavior. Eggs are also wonderful — they are precisely balanced on the edge of criticality, ready to erupt into a cascade of changes with a single stimulus. It's easy to dismiss gametes as blobs and…
pharyngula | May 11, 2007James Kakalios gets to use the latest Spider-Man movie as an excuse to explain the physics of granular materials in the New York Times. Good thing they didn't ask a biologist about Sandman … all I could think about was that there was no way a loose aggregate of coarse sand would be able to mimic the function of the human brain, which is built upon the sub-micron-scale specific organization of diverse molecules. I would be such a wet blanket.
No, wait, I did think of another thing: could you incapacitate Sandman by dumping your cat's litterbox on him? I'd think he'd go running off to do some…
catdynamics | May 9, 2007Four Dee
Fourty
Two.
If you read any more I will sue.
4D 42 0B 61 97 8F B5 07 D4 66 EE 63 73 AA B0 85
That number is mine.
Freedom to Tinker generated it, and deeded it to me
It is my very own, tip-top super secret decryption code to a very valuable and copyrighted text.
You may not know it, read it, copy it, display it or memorize it.
Not like this, or this
77661197151143181721210223899115170176133
or this
3 * 11 * 607921 * 38711767
Not as an image, or a poem, or through any algorithm that may generate it.
That is a lot. 'Specially since there are a lot of algorithms to generate it...
I own…
catdynamics | May 9, 2007The EU and US signed an "open skies" agreement earlier this week.
The primary purpose of the agreement is to relax landing right restrictions and open internal flights to international competition, but I hear anecdotally that there will be an added benefit.
Currently, in the US, federal workers and academic taking international flights paid for by federal grants must fly out of the US on a US flag carrier.
They also should take US carriers as far as possible to their final destination.
This can make it interestingly tricky to find reasonably priced international flights on some routes.
It is…
pharyngula | May 9, 2007I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the Encyclopedia of Life project. It's to be an online encyclopedia with a substantive page dedicated each species on the planet, and it's endorsed by E.O. Wilson, with sponsorship from some of the most prestigious museums around. It's a fantastic idea that would be incredibly useful.
But then …
The demonstration pages are beautiful, maybe too beautiful. There's the promise of a colossal amount of information in each one, although at this point all they've got are very pretty but nonfunctional images of what the page will look like — but you can see…