Science
evolgen | March 14, 2007It's March, and you know what that means: brackets. There are two ScienceBlogs brackets to keep your eye on:
The barkers at the World's Fair have put together a Science Showdown -- bracket style -- broken into four regions: Octopus (life sciences), Mortar and Pestle (chemistry), Chair (philosophy and science studies), and Orbit (physics). Showdowns between competing disciplines will be decided, in part, by reader participation, and the winners will advance to face off with other disciplines. Go here to share your opinion on the opening round.
A more traditional March bracket contest is…
drorzel | March 14, 2007
Announcing the first round games of the Orbit Region of the 2007 Science Showdown: These games match central physics concepts against one another, in a bid to determine the greatest physics idea, which will eventually face and humiliate ideas from other fields of science.
I'll be announcing the winners on Friday, but ehre's your chance to contribute: The eight first-round match-ups are shown in the graphic above: Which do you think should win? Leave your votes in the comments, and help determine the outcomes.
The games:
1) Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation vs. 16) Newton's Second Law of…
drorzel | March 14, 2007Posting has been basketball-heavy of late because, well, there isn't much else going on that I find all that interesting at the moment. More importantly, though, it's the Season of the Bracket...
I'm not the only one affected, of course, though many people who don't care about hoops have to find other outlets for the impulse to construct match-ups between various concepts, and arrange them in a single elimination tournament:
Locally, there's the Science Spring Showdown. I'll be announcing the first-round winners in the "Orbit" bracket on Friday, and while my decisions are final, they are…
drorzel | March 13, 2007The New York Times offers an article profiling Terence Tao, mostly focussing on his child prodigy background:
Dr. Tao has drawn attention and curiosity throughout his life for his prodigious abilities. By age 2, he had learned to read. At 9, he attended college math classes. At 20, he finished his Ph.D.
Now 31, he has grown from prodigy to one of the world's top mathematicians, tackling an unusually broad range of problems, including ones involving prime numbers and the compression of images. Last summer, he won a Fields Medal, often considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and a MacArthur…
pharyngula | March 13, 2007
What do you know…just last week, I posted an article dismissing a creationist's misconceptions about pharyngeal organization and development, in which he asks about the evidence for similarities between agnathan and gnathostome jaws, and what comes along but a new paper on the molecular evidence for the origin of the jaw, which describes gene expression in the lamprey pharynx. How timely! And as a plus, it contains several very clear summary diagrams to show how all the bits and pieces and molecules relate to one another.
The short summary is that there is a suite of genes (the Hox and Dlx…
pharyngula | March 12, 2007The chat with Lynn Margulis is over; thanks to Dr Margulis and all who participated. I've included the transcript below the fold.
[17:08] * Margulis (~pjirc@ZiRC-60364A8F.hsd1.ma.comcast.net) has joined #pharyngula
[17:08] <TimMc> oh, right
[17:08] <TimMc> ah, there we go
[17:08] * Cairnarvon sets mode: +v Margulis
[17:08] * TimMc taps mike "Is this thing on?"
[17:09] <Margulis> Yes
[17:09] <Margulis> So?
[17:09] <TimMc> Well, the gang's all here.
[17:10] <Margulis> hat now in my first chat room disexperience
[17:10] <Margulis> What now?
[17:10] <…
drorzel | March 12, 2007If you can't figure out basketball, but are looking to get in on the excitement of filling out bracket sheets and arguing about seeds, well, the boys at the World's Fair have got just the thing for you...
The Science Spring Showdown 2007
That's right, they've got brackets set up for the ultimate showdon of the sciences. Bosons vs. Fermions! Popper vs. Kuhn! Caffeine vs. Ethanol!
The only thing missing is numerical seeds, so we can argue about how on earth "Experiment" got stuck with a 12 seed vs. 5-seed "Theory"...
pharyngula | March 12, 2007Lynn Margulis has sent the opening statement for her blog tour below. You should feel free to respond to it, raise other questions of any relevant sort, or say whatever you want in the comments; she'll be along later today to respond to those that interest her. I will be policing the comments, so trolls, please don't bother; serious comments only, and keep in mind that she's only going to respond to a limited subset, so make 'em good.
In addition, she'll be available later today in the Pharyngula chat room (channel #pharyngula on irc.zirc.org; if you don't have an IRC client, that link will…
oracknows | March 12, 2007It figures.
After my having written repeated debunkings of various physicians who are creationists (mostly of the "intelligent design" variety), in retrospect I should have seen this one coming. I should have seen that the Discovery Institute, eager to use anyone they can find whom they can represent to the public as having scientific credentials (never mind whether those credentials have anything to do with evolutionary biology) and thus dupe the public into seeing them as having authority when they start laying down ignorant brain farts about how they "doubt Darwinism," would settle on…
pharyngula | March 11, 2007
I was reminded of one of the more comical, but persistent misconceptions by creationists in a thread on Internet Infidels, on The Coelacanth. Try doing a google search for “coelacanth creation" and be amazed at the volume of ignorance pumped out on this subject. I've also run across a more recent example of the misrepresentation of the coelacanth that I'll mention later … this poor fish has a long history of abuse by creationists, though, so here's a brief rundown of wacky creationist interpretations.
Crystal Clear Creation: Unlock the secrets of nature, wildlife, the world, from a…
drorzel | March 11, 2007A good weekend for science in the Sunday New York Times, with a nice magazine article about dark matter and dark energy, and also a piece about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), inexplicably located in the Book Review section (the article, that is, not the aliens).
It's probably possible to draw some sort of parallel between the two-- after all, the notion of dark matter was viewed as bordeline kookery for decades before gaining wide acceptance, and SETI is still widely viewed as a little bit off. I'm a little discombobulated from yesterday's long trip, though, so I'll…
oracknows | March 8, 2007As longtimers around here know, I have a great interest in all things World War II, including the Holocaust. I've written numerous times, either in the context of discussing the Holocaust or while discussing bioethics and the evolution of about the horrific medical experiments carried out by the Nazis. Much less frequently mentioned are the equally horrific excuses for "medical experiments" carried out by the Japanese on various prisoners that fell into their hands. Although not as systematic or widespread an atrocity as the Nazi medical experiments, they should not be forgotten, and,…
oracknows | March 8, 2007...That all around evolution-ignorant but nonetheless eager lapdog of the Discovery Institute, SUNY Stonybrook Professor of Neurosurgery Dr. Michael Egnor, is back.
Rats. I thought that the utter drubbing he took at the hands of myself and my fellow ScienceBloggers (in particular PZ Myers) might have given him the message that he needs to lay low for a while. Apparently not. I guess he must have the monumental ego that more than a few neurosurgeons are famous for. (After all, it takes supreme confidence in one's own abilities to be able to cut into the human brain and believe that the patient…
oracknows | March 7, 2007...even ten years after his death.
I kind of like the reaction in this photo. It cracks me up. Maybe I should find a permanent home for it somewhere on the blog.
(Don't ask me how I became aware of this one.)
pharyngula | March 7, 2007Here's an interesting opportunity: Lynn Margulis, the controversial scientist, is going on a 'blog tour' to promote her new imprint of science books called Sciencewriters Books. What does that mean? She's going to hang out for a little while on a few blogs and chat and answer questions. If you've wanted to have a conversation with the author of the endosymbiont theory and critic of neo-Darwinian theory, here's your chance.
The tour will kick off on Monday, 12 March, at Pharyngula. She'll be sending me a short article that I'll post that morning, and we'll collect comments and questions. Later…
oracknows | March 6, 2007Last week, I wrote a quick and (semi-) facetious piece about how my colleague and I are sweating to the NIH payline, as we wait to find out whether our R01 application will be funded or not. With its being rumored that National Cancer Institute (NCI) paylines will be in the range of the 12th percentile, it's going to be really, really tight whether we make it below that line or not, although my colleague's being a new PI will certainly help.
Wouldn't you know it that Writedit, the blogger whose excellent and highly useful blog, Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship I discovered and…
pharyngula | March 6, 2007Vox Day asks a question: what is my definition of science? It's a bit weird coming from him — he is not usually that lucid or civil — but OK, I'll take it seriously.
Unfortunately, "science" is one of those hugely polymorphic terms that carries a tremendous amount of baggage, and any one definition is going to be inadequate. This is one of those subjects where a smart philosopher (Janet? John?) could go on at amazing length, and even then, everyone will argue with their summaries. I'll just charge in, though, and give a couple of shorter definitions off the top of my head.
This first one isn'…
oracknows | March 5, 2007Sorry I'm a bit late on this. (Yes, I know that Tara and John pimped this contest nearly a month ago, but somehow it slipped by me to mention it myself; that is, until Skepchick reminded me of it as I caught up on my blog reading over the weekend.
If you've read my Medicine and Evolution series, you'll know I'd be interested in this contest. From the Alliance for Science, it is an essay contest for high school students. The topic is Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution? They're asking for an essay of 1,000 words or less, and the due date is March 31. Official rules are here.…
pharyngula | March 2, 2007Tim Lambert summarizes an informal survey of 59 right-wing bloggers: 100% of them deny the idea that humans are the primary cause of global warming, contradicting the scientific evidence. They were also asked about other issues—the majority approve of the "surge" in Iraq, think Bush is doing an acceptable job in foreign policy, and believe Democrats like the idea of losing the war in Iraq, but only on global warming is their unanimity.
It's too bad the survey didn't ask about other science issues. I'd like to know if they are similarly wrong about evolution, HIV as the cause of AIDS, and…
pharyngula | March 2, 2007(click for larger image)Reconstruction of O. reburrus by M. Collins. The precise arrangement of the anteriormost region remains somewhat conjectural.
Halkieriids are Cambrian animals that looked like slugs in scale mail; often when they died their scales, called sclerites, dissociated and scattered, and their sclerites represent a significant component of the small shelly fauna of the early Cambrian. They typically had their front and back ends capped with shells that resembled those we see in bivalve brachiopods. Wiwaxiids were also sluglike, but sported very prominent, long sclerites, and…