Science
evolgen | March 30, 2007PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKET
Early next week, the amorphous, indefinable entity that is Corporate will take on a man named Charles Robert Darwin in the third round of the Science Spring Showdown. That's right, we're down to sixteen teams, including the eleven seed Corporate and the seven seed Darwin. This match up of Chair Region powerhouses will be presented on evolgen. A preview of this potentially epic battle can be found below.
Some may say that Charles Darwin was a tentative man. They base this claim on the fact that Chuck waited twenty years from his first ideas on evolution by…
pharyngula | March 29, 2007The mammalian tree is rooted deeply and branched early!
(click for larger image)All orders are labelled and major lineages are coloured as follows: black, Monotremata; orange, Marsupialia; blue, Afrotheria; yellow, Xenarthra; green, Laurasiatheria; and red, Euarchontoglires. Families that were reconstructed as non-monophyletic are represented multiple times and numbered accordingly. Branch lengths are proportional to time, with the K/T boundary indicated by a black, dashed circle. The scale indicates Myr.
That's the message of a new paper in Nature that compiled sequence data from 4,510…
oracknows | March 29, 2007I was going to try to be a good boy. Really, I was. I had been planning on answering a question about the early detection of tumors. It was an opportune time to do so, given the recent news of cancer recurrence in Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow, coupled with a couple of papers I saw just yesterday and the announcement of new screening guidelines for breast MRI. However, I was finding that writing the piece would be fairly complex (because it's a complex topic) and that it might even require a multi-post approach. There was no way to do it justice today; doing it over the weekend would make a…
evolgen | March 28, 2007PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKET
The folks that brought you the Second Round of the Octopus Region of the Science Spring Showdown (part 1, part 2) will be bringing you one of the marquee match ups of the third round. Those folks are us, and the place is here at evolgen. We're down to sixteen teams (some would even call this collection of teams "sweet"), which means there are eight games that will be played on the internets over the course of the next week.
We'll be playing host to a game from the Chair Region between Darwin and Corporate. That's right, we're delving into the Philosophy of…
pharyngula | March 28, 2007He mangles science, now he defames history. Michael Egnor is like the Swiss army knife of creationist hackery.
Former Vice President Al Gore famously claimed to have invented the Internet because years ago he was in the Senate and sponsored a bill. The assertion that Charles Darwin's theory was indispensable to classical and molecular genetics is a claim of an even lower order. Darwin's theory impeded the recognition of Mendel's discovery for a third of a century, and Darwin's assertion that random variation was the raw material for biological complexity was of no help in decoding the genetic…
catdynamics | March 28, 2007The Incoherent Ponderer just submitted a paper to Science, and got an e-mail notifying him that he was listed as a co-author and asking him to do something if he did not accept this.
I had the same thing earlier this year, was a second author and immediately after submission got a verification e-mail from Science like that. It is not something I had encountered before, as recently as last year.
Interestingly, NASA's NSPIRES now also does this - it sends you a warning e-mail if someone listed you as a co-I on a proposal and gives you electronic access. Also something I don't recall from…
oracknows | March 27, 2007Really, this guy is making that very argument with a straight face!
My brain hurts after seeing such unbelievable stupidity presented as a viable argument by Chuck Missler, the minister who founded the Koinonia House. This makes Dr. Egnor's blather seem intelligent by comparison. It's even more idiotic than the now-infamous video that claimed that the banana disproves atheism and evolution:
(Hat tip to: Stupid Evil Bastard.)
pharyngula | March 26, 2007There are a couple of events going on here in Morris this week that I'll be participating in, and that any of you in the region might find worth seeing. First, tonight:
Everyone is cordially invited to the last session of
THE 31st
MIDWEST PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM
Personal Identity
Eric T. Olson
(Professor of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, UK)
Will present
"When Do We Begin and End?"
Monday, March 26, 7:30 p.m., Newman Catholic Center
306 East 4th Street, Morris
The gradual nature of development from fertilization to birth and beyond leaves it uncertain when we come into being; advances…
oracknows | March 25, 2007In case you wondered, yes, ScienceBlogs is just a big cabal, and, as evidence, I present the following photo from a week and a half ago, when I managed to meet, drink, and conspire to take over the science blogosphere at the Toledo Lounge in Washington, D.C. with Tara Smith of Aetiology, Evil Monkey of Neurotopia, and Chris Mooney of The Intersection. The locale was appropriate enough, given Tara's and my Toledo connection, and a good time was had by all.
Does Orac normally look like that? Well, remember, around this time, Dr. Egnor was at the height of his foray into making still more…
pharyngula | March 24, 2007Do you read the 'supplementary information' in science articles? If you're familiar with the way journal articles work, they publish a traditional and formally formatted article in the print version of the journal, but now they often also have a supplementary information section stored in an online database that contains material that would be impractical or impossible to cram into print: raw data, spreadsheets, multimedia such as movie files. This is important stuff, especially if you want to dig deeper or re-analyze or otherwise rework the information.
Another important function is, I think…
drorzel | March 23, 2007Via Bookslut, there's an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about whether reading is really important:
Is it always a good thing to read an entire book? When I was a graduate student, it dawned on me that I often had the most intelligent things to say about books I'd only half- or quarter-read. I was surprised by my observation -- it didn't seem to make sense. But it just seemed to work out that professors preferred my insightful and trenchant comments on, say, the first part of Tristram Shandy than on the whole wandering thing.
In that way, a little knowledge can be a practical…
drorzel | March 23, 2007The case of Purdue's Rusi Taleyarkhan, cleared by the university of charges of misconduct in a murky process, has taken another turn. Congress is getting involved, with the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee requesting more details from the university.
On the one hand, I'm not enthusiastic about Congress getting into this (aren't there some drug-using professional athletes that they could investigate?), but then again, Purdue brought it on themselves with their ridiculously cryptic statements about the case. If they hadn't acted like they…
jrosenhouse | March 22, 2007Speaking of cranks, all of the recent fuss over Al Gore's testimony to Congress on the subject of global warming has seen the revival of statistician Bjorn Lomborg. You might remember him as the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, the book that was going to set us all straight on the subject of environmentalism. According to Lomborg, everything is much better than we've been led to believe.
I only made it through about half of Lomborg's book before conking out. I was not really in a position to assess a lot of his claims. There were some crank warning signs, like the conversion…
oracknows | March 22, 2007I've been remiss about this (mainly because I've been aware of it for a few days now), but it turns out that Mark and Chris Hoofnagle have started a rather promising-looking blog, Denialism.com. It's a blog dedicated to discussing six main areas:
HIV/AIDS Denialism
Global Warming denialism
Creationism/Intelligent Design Denialism
Holocaust Denial
Anti-Vaccination denialists
Animal testing denialists
Hmmm. Looks like they're muscling in on my territory a bit, although I seldom write about global warming for the simple reason that I don't know as much about it as I know about other topics.
Oh…
pharyngula | March 22, 2007When we had last seen our basic embryo, it had gone through gastrulation — a process in which cells of a two-layered sheet had moved inward, setting up the three germ layers (endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm) of the early embryo. In particular, cells at the organizer, a tissue that induces or organizes migrating cells, had rolled inwards to set up specific axial mesoderm structures: the prechordal plate, which will underlie cranial structures, and the notochord, which resides under the future hindbrain and spinal cord. At this point, the embryo has an outer layer of ectoderm, and lying under…
oracknows | March 22, 2007I just heard on the radio last night while driving home what has to be one of the worst analogy about global warming that I've ever heard, and, at the risk of annoying fellow SB'ers who frequently write about these topics, like Chris Mooney or Tim Lambert, I felt like commenting.
Oddly enough, the soundbite came from Al Gore, of all people, the last person I would expect to make such a flawed analogy:
The planet has a fever," Gore said. "If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, 'Well, I read a science fiction novel that told…
oracknows | March 21, 2007...like this (explanation here):
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pharyngula | March 21, 2007Sometimes we're a little bit mean to engineers here — there's the Salem hypothesis, for instance, that notes that creationist apologists who claim to be scientists often turn out to be engineers. In compensation, though, watch this video of a Michigan man with simple, clever strategies for moving massive objects. I was impressed. I guess the ancients didn't need the assistance of high-tech alien astronauts to build impressive stone structures, all they needed was a Wally Wallington.
pharyngula | March 21, 2007Is there anyone in the Stevens County area who reads this blog? Just in case, I'll mention this event sponsored by the UMM Geology Club to anyone interested in coming on down.
Geology Club will be displaying lunar rocks and soil samples collected during
the Apollo missions to the moon this Thursday night at 7:00 p.m. in Sci.
1650. These rocks are brought to us by Geology Professor Jamey Jones, which
he currently has on loan from NASA. This event is open to the public, so
come and check it out!
What: Super cool moon rocks!!
Date: Thursday, March 22
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Place: Sci. 1650 (the…
evolgen | March 21, 2007SECOND ROUND PREVIEW | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
Welcome back to our coverage of the second round of the Science Spring Showdown. We had two great games yesterday, and another one finished earlier today. The final game of the round, between HIV and Psychology, is just wrapping up now; we'll bring you the result as soon as that one goes final.
Tom Ribosome: Earlier today, Phylogenetics took on Unipotent in one of the more non-traditional match ups. Coming off of games against classic rivals, Taxonomy and Totipotent, no one was sure what to expect when the tree builders and fated cells…