Science
oracknows | March 1, 2007I apologize for submitting you to the previous three creationist videos. I realize that they were pretty mind-numbing, and then there was that cheesy Christian rock ballad.
So here's one antidote. (Warning: The video is nearly two hours long; even I haven't had time to watch the whole thing yet.) And it happened at one of my old alma maters, Case Western Reserve University.
it's good for what ails you. Watch it a little at a time if it's too long to watch all at once.
oracknows | March 1, 2007Here's the finale of my audience participation project for today. I've saved the "best" for last. This short video, called Science Refutes Its Own Laws?, is the target. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to answer the questions contained therein and/or demonstrate why they represent typical creationist canards, and do it without reference to Talkorigins.org. It's pretty easy, but it's also depressing that this crap persists. Also, don't be too depressed. There's one more of these coming, but it's an antidote.
It's also amusing how confident the tone of the video is. Forgive me…
oracknows | March 1, 2007Here's part 2 of my audience participation exercise. This is a continuation of my audience participation/open thread set of posts for today. It's called "list the creationist fallacies." This post is part 2 of this endeavor. This short video, called Which came first, the DNA or the protein?, is the target. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to answer the questions contained therein and/or demonstrate why they represent nothing more than the typical creationist canard. It's pretty easy, but it's also depressing that this crap persists. If that's not entertaining enough, feel free…
drorzel | March 1, 2007Dr. Lonnie Thompson of THE Ohio State University spoke at Union Wednesday night as part of the Environmental Studies Seminar Series on Abrupt Climate Change. Dr Thompson is an eminent climate scientist, and has spent thirty-ish years doing research on glaciers around the world, and what I learned from his talk is that I'll never make it as a single-issue blogger.
His talk was basically an overview of what we can learn from ice cores, taken from a variety of palces all around the world, and what we learn is that the 20th century was a pretty unique time, climate-wise. There were lots and lots…
oracknows | March 1, 2007Busy, busy, busy last night and all day today until late, namely because I'm out of town on business. My schedule has been packed, and I won't be home until late. There's no time to post one of my characteristic pearls of verbosity. So what do I do when this happens?
Be grateful that YouTube exists, that's what. With a little planning ahead and a few minutes' work, I can make sure that the Respectful Insolence you all know and love keeps flowing while I'm away, only this time with some help. This time around, I'm going to do a couple of audience participation/open thread kind of posts. It's…
drorzel | February 28, 2007The Cosmic Variance post that led to the Cult of Theory post earlier this week was really about a New York magazine article about the negative effects of praising kids for intelligence. It mostly concerns a study done by Carol Dweck, in which fifth-graders who were praised for being smart after an easy test were more risk-averse and scored lower on subsequent tests than students who were praised for working hard:
Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. "Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control," she…
oracknows | February 27, 2007Like many biomedical investigators, I've been sweating it over the resubmission of an R01 grant my collaborator and I worked furiously on and submitted on November 1. He's the principal investigator, but I'm a coinvestigator with 25% effort; I also wrote one of the three specific aims and most of another, the justification for animal use, and the IACUC (animal use) protocols for the project. Consequently, I have almost as much invested in the success or failure of this grant proposal as its PI does, although he certainly gets props from me for pulling us two co-investigators together with…
drorzel | February 26, 2007Kate has posted a report on Boskone talk by Brother Guy Consolmagno, on hunting for meteorites in Antarctica. Guy is a Jesuit brother, and also a research astronomer for the Vatican, and a better example of the peaceful coexistence of science and religion would be hard to find.
He's also a very entertaining speaker. I forget what I was doing that kept me from seeing this talk, but I was on a panel with him later, and he's a charming fellow. If I'd known he was spending the year on sabbatical in New York, I would've tried to get him booked into our colloquium schedule...
Anyway, the talk was a…
oracknows | February 26, 2007I'm getting really, really tired of this.
You've all read my rants at the propensity of surgeons who clearly don't have clue one about evolutionary theory spouting off ignorantly about the alleged shortcomings of evolution as a theory while either explicitly or implicitly promoting the pseudoscience of "intelligent design" creationism. I don't think I have to expound much on just how much this phenomenon irritates me other than to repeat my desire to find a more permanent solution to the question of hiding my face in shame over the antics of my fellow surgeons on this. Perhaps it truly is…
drorzel | February 23, 2007It's a good day for people posting about science I don't understand...
Peter Woit points to the Non-Commutative Geometry blog, at which Alain Connes, the godfather of non-commutative geometry, is posting. It's not the most polished blog, but if you can understand what they're talking about, it's probably interesting.
Scott Aaronson is excited about new results in quantum computing, where somebody has "announced a quantum algorithm for evaluating NAND trees in O(âN) time." I'm not quite sure what he's talking about either, but it has something to do with ants, sugar cubes, and teaching…
drorzel | February 22, 2007The only reason I'm not going to hunt and kill James Nicoll for pointing me at the Conservapedia thing is that he also provides a link to the latest results from the Spitzer telescope. Not the one that Kate's former boss uses to keep an eye on the New York State Legislature, but the one that scientists are using to look at the atmospheres of planets around other stars:
The data indicate the two planets are drier and cloudier than predicted. Theorists thought hot Jupiters would have lots of water in their atmospheres, but surprisingly none was found around HD 209458b and HD 189733b. According…
pharyngula | February 21, 2007The article about gastrulation from the other day was dreadfully vertebrate-centric, so let me correct that with a little addendum that mentions a few invertebrate patterns of gastrulation—and you'll see that the story hasn't changed.
Remember, this is the definition of gastrulation that I explained with some vertebrate examples:
The process in animal embryos in which endoderm and mesoderm move from the outer surface of the embryo to the inside, where they give rise to internal organs.
I described frogs and birds and mammals the other day, so lets take a look at sea urchins and fruit flies…
drorzel | February 21, 2007John Scalzi is being railroaded into heading a new movement in SF: The New Comprehensible. He disdains manifestoes ("people who issue literary manifestos should be thrown into jet engines"), but does offer a set of precepts for people seeking to write in the New Comprehensible:
1. Think of an actual person you know, of reasonable intelligence, who likes to read but does not read science fiction.
2. Write with that person in mind.
He goes on to note that these same rules apply to other genres of fiction. He does not, however, make the point that this is also excellent advice for non-fiction…
pharyngula | February 20, 2007A sense of giddy enlightenment emerges from reading Jennifer Ouellette on chocolate and Carl Zimmer on tapeworms. They were the highlights of my morning browse, anyway.
pharyngula | February 19, 2007That guy, John Wilkins, has been keeping a list of presentations of basic concepts in science, and he told me I'm supposed to do one on gastrulation. First I thought, no way—that's way too hard, and I thought this was all supposed to be about basic stuff. But then I figured that it can't be too hard, after all, all you readers went through it successfully, and you even managed to do it before you developed a brain. So, sure, let's rattle this one off.
In the simplest terms, gastrulation is a stage in early development; in human beings it occurs between two and three weeks after fertilization…
oracknows | February 19, 2007This one's been floating around the science blogosphere for about a week or two now. I tried to resist its pull, but finally I have given in and decided that, if you've got it, flaunt it, baby!
In any case, I'm talking about a bunch of merit badges for scientists (a.k.a. "The Order of Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique," although I may not qualify for that latter part.
And which ones did I earn? Well, take a look (click on the badges to see what each one signifies):
(Sadly, I'm not likely ever to duplicate that last one.)
And, finally, the one…
catdynamics | February 19, 2007So, what are the intractable problems in science?
Which scientific open issues or problems are we limited in making further progress in, right now, because the problem is technically too hard?
Where we simply do not know what to do, or how to make further progress, through lack of technical ability in actually approaching the problem and its solution; as distinct from resource limited problems which we could solve if we had bigger telescopes or accelerators, or more grad students or faster computers, or simply more money over more time?
catdynamics | February 19, 2007I am not at the AAAS meeting in San Francisco, even though I am only about 30 minutes from where it is held...
So I was interested to see Larry Page addressed the meeting and admonished scientists for their failings
AAAS podcast here
Apparently science needs to be more entrepreneurial, needs better marketing, and has some problems to solve.
Now, I actually agree with science's need to be more entrepreneurial, even though I come from one of the more abstract and useless of the sciences. Science is too conservative, and too many scientists don't think about how their research might be of use…
pharyngula | February 18, 2007Here's an excellent and useful summary of the appendix from a surgeon's perspective. Creationists dislike the idea that we bear useless organs, remnants of past function that are non-functional or even hazardous to our health; they make up stories about the importance of these vestiges. Sid Schwab has cut out a lot of appendices, and backs up its non-utility with evidence.
The study I cited most often to my patients when asked about adverse consequences of appendectomy is one done by the Mayo Clinic: they studied records of thousands of patients who'd had appendectomy, and compared them with…
oracknows | February 18, 2007It's truly depressing to see children indoctrinated in anti-science like this:
The part where a preacher has the kids singing along about how the Bible supposedly describes dinosaurs in the Book of Job has to be seen to be believed, and seeing little kids parroting antievolution anti-science is truly depressing. But worst of all is the kid who says he wants to be a biochemist and go to work for the Institute of Creation Research when he grows up.
(Via Bad Science.)