Science
pharyngula | October 18, 2006Human X (left) and Y (right) chromosomes
Did the internet get stupider while I was away this past week? I mean, it's gratifying to my ego to imagine the average IQ of the virtual collective plummeting when I take some time off, but I really can't believe I personally have this much influence. Maybe the kooks crept out in my absence, or maybe it was just the accumulation of a week's worth of insanity that I saw in one painful blort when I was catching up.
What triggers such cynicism is the combination of Deepak Chopra, Oliver Curry, and now,
William Tucker. Tucker wrote a remarkably silly…
drorzel | October 18, 2006It's fall, which means lots of good things: football on tv, college basketball just around the corner, apple cider donuts (mmm.... donuts...), and the leaves turning colors. One of the real highlights of living in New England is the spectacular foliage. Sadly, it tends to bring out the leaf-peepers, people from down toward New York or Boston, who drive around at about six miles per hour looking at the trees, but the trees are certainly worth a look.
Ever wonder why it is that the trees do that? So have a lot of scientists. Carl Zimmer has a round-up of their findings. Short answer: "Beats us…
oracknows | October 17, 2006...check out Ed Brayton's masterful fisking of some truly awful anti-evolution "arguments."
Note especially the way that the two bloggers who run the site, when faced with criticisms of their mangling of facts and attributing "holes" in evolutionary theory that really aren't, simply repeat the same fallacious arguments again and again in the comments and keep calling evolution a "conjecture" that is not supported by facts, even though it is arguably the best-supported theory in the history of science.
It's truly depressing to see such astonishing ignorance coupled with such overweening…
drorzel | October 17, 2006Sean Carroll is offering more unsolicted advice (though it is in response to a comment, which makes it borderline solicited...), this time about choosing an undergraduate school. He breaks the options down into four categories, with two small errors that I'll correct in copying the list over here:
Liberal-Arts College (LAC), such as Williams or Union.
Specialized Technical School (STS), such as MIT or Caltech.
Elite Private University (EPU), such as Harvard or Stanford.
Large State School (LSS), such as UCLA or Michigan.
There. That's much better.
I should note two things up front: the…
catdynamics | October 17, 2006Iceland's Fisheries Minister has announced that commercial whaling will resume, with an initial quota of 30 minke whales and 9 fin whales.
The minke page is somewhat inaccurate - the meat has been for sale for some years, and is also served in a number of restaurants. It got relatively popular with the surge in interest in traditional cuisine and as the better restaurants focused on local cuisine with local ingredients and modern fusion cuisine.
This is distinct from the "scientific whaling" that Iceland has intermittently conducted over the last couple of decades. Current quota for…
pharyngula | October 14, 2006
The latest Tangled Bank is online (a little bit late) at Neurophilosophy. My notice is a little bit late, too, but in one of those odd coincidences, it's because I'm in London…as is this week's host, and I met him at the natural history museum yesterday.
Better late than never, and just in case you haven't read it already, head on over.
oracknows | October 14, 2006Here we go again.
The "scientists" at the Discovery Institute seldom miss an opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot by making specious arguments that anyone with a reasonable understanding of evolution can shoot down. It doesn't take an evolutionary biologist to thoroughly dismantle most of the "scholarship" that flows from the DI (which is indeed fortunate for me, given that I am not an evolutionary biologist). Leave it to the North Koreans, with their recent apparently successful test of a nuclear explosive device, to give the intrepid Don Quixotes over in Seattle the excuse to tilt at…
catdynamics | October 13, 2006NY Times has article claiming US Air Force sources say they found radiological evidence for a nuclear explosion on overflights
Tentative, but indicative.
We may now find out whether Japan could literally build a nuke over a long weekend.
They ought to be able to, maybe one of two nations that could but haven't yet (Germany is the other).
Then there's the dozen or so who could make one in less than a year, one of which is certainly South Korea.
I won't get worried until Sweden and Canada start dusting off their contingency plans, they're definitely both capable.
catdynamics | October 13, 2006The physical science carnival, Philosophia Naturalis Part Deux is out at Nonoscience
See here for future carnivals
drorzel | October 13, 2006The silliest graph I've ever seen presented in public looked something like this:
It was an after-dinner talk at a DAMOP meeting a few years back, and the speaker was somebody associated with the Hubble Space Telescope. I don't recall what was being plotted, but he talked for a while about ho proud they were of this data, and how well it fit the theory, and then he put up this plot. The blueish circle is the data point, and the dotted line is a theoretical fit to the data.
The physicists in the audience all guffawed. He asked "What's so funny?" and somebody near the front asked "What's the…
evolgen | October 12, 2006Ralf Neumann has interpreted my fascination with -omics as distaste for neologisms:
A blogger named "RPM" reacted even more drastically to the methylome-paper on his weblog "evolgen" (http://scienceblogs.com/evolgen) in a post entitled "Yet Another '-ome'". "We can thank Andrew Feinberg for introducing the term methylome, which he defines as 'a neologism that describes the complete set of DNA methylation modifications of a cell'. Check out this definition of neologism: 'A meaningless word used by a psychotic.' Exactly. Enough with the -ome already." It seems as if more and more researchers…
catdynamics | October 11, 2006Nuclear Mangos has a good summary and pointer set on North Korea and its nuke.
armscontrolwonk has a good series of informative posts. Including a seismograph image from IRIS which I shamelessly pass on:
IRIS says magnitude 4.2, presumably on the Richter scale.
I've heard ranges from 3.6 to 4.6 quoted (the scale is inherently ambiguous in absolute scaling).
It is a logarithmic energy scale, with magnitude 4.0 corresponding to roughly 1 kiloton of TNT equivalent (or 4.2 trillion Joules).
If the South Korean numbers, magnitude 3.6, are right, then it is a dud - only ~ 500 tons of TNT…
drorzel | October 11, 2006Back in late July, I got email from a writer for Physics World magazine (which is sort of the UK equivalent of Physics Today), asking my opinion on a few questions relating to particle physics funding. The basis for asking me (as opposed to, you know, a particle physicist) was presumably a post from April in which I ranted a bit about the justification of Big Science projects.
The article is now out, but not available on-line, so I haven't read it. I spent a fair amount of time typing up my response, though, so I'm going to recycle it into a blog post, because I can do that.
The original…
jrosenhouse | October 10, 2006Benjamin over at The World's Fair and Chad over at Uncertain Principles have already blogged this, but neither acheves the proper level of indignation in my opinion.
In this post from September 15, I discussed an astonishingly poor discussion of string theory, written by Gregg Easterbrook and published in Slate. Now, in an apparent effort to cement its reputation for unreliable commentary on science, they have run this silly essay. The subject is a recent experiment by sociologist Henry Collins. He posed seven questions about gravitational waves to a professional physicist. Both Collins…
drorzel | October 10, 2006In a weird example of synchronicity, Dr. Free-Ride posted about science journalism yesterday, and Inside Higher Ed offers a viewpoint piece by Michael Bugeja on the same topic this morning. You might almost think it was one of those "meme" things.
They both agree that there's a problem with science reporting, but come at the problem from different ends. Bugeja is mostly concerned with the supply side of the problem, talking about the difficulties scientists have with communicating to the public:
These professors rank among the most ingenious, passionate people I have ever met.
Put some of…
pharyngula | October 9, 2006Sometimes a plan just comes together beautifully. I'm flying off to London tomorrow, and on the day I get back to Morris, I'm supposed to lead a class discussion on the final chapters of this book we've been reading, Endless Forms Most Beautiful. I will at that point have a skull full of jet-lagged, exhausted mush, and I just know it's going to be a painful struggle. Now into my lap falls a wonderful gift.
There was a review in the NY Review of Books that said wonderful things about Carroll's work, and in particular about the revolutionary nature of evo-devo. This prompted Jason Hodin, an evo…
drorzel | October 7, 2006Sean Carroll comments on an item in the Atlantic Monthly on test scores compared across nations. There are two things that really bug me about this item, the most important of which is the deeply dishonest graphic the Atlantic did to illustrate the item.
Here's the honest version of the graph, redone using data from this table (the relevant figures don't appear in the report cited in the original piece). (Click on the graph for a larger version.)
I've plotted the normalized test score (the score for each country divided by the reported maximum score, because I'm a physicist and like…
catdynamics | October 6, 2006It is almost midnight, and we seek guidance.
Oh, mighty iPod one: is the Smith solution of the Navier-Stokes equations a true immortal solution of this legendary problem?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Why - Tracy Chapman
The Crossing: The Passion - Billy Bragg
The Crown: Shipbuilding - Elvis Costello
The Root: Mbh - Billy Bragg
The Past: Winter - Vivaldi
The Future: King of Pain - Police
The Questioner: Deep Dark Truthful Mirror - Elvis Costello
The House: Carnival of the Animals: Kangaroos - Peter and the Wolf
The Inside: Don't Leave Me Now - Pink Floyd
The Outcome:…
jrosenhouse | October 6, 2006From Tuesday's New York Times:
They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self.
Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces.
But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus…
drorzel | October 6, 2006Kate points me to a real head-scratcher from Slate, about Harry Collins posing as a physicist. Collins is a sociologist who studies expertise, and also has a very strong interest in gravitational wave detection experiments. Collins and co-workers collected a bunch of qualitative questions about gravitational waves and detectors, and got an expert in the field to write answers to them. He then wrote his own answers, and sent both sets of answers to a bunch of people in the field, and asked them to guess which set of responses was from the expert in the field.
The surprising result from this is…