Science
catdynamics | September 21, 2006The Weather Service has announced a severe storm warning for coastal areas as hurricane Gordon is expected to hit land friday morning.
Not, not the Gulf, or the Virginia shore: England, and Wales and Ireland.
Strong winds, gusting to 80 mph, heave rain and coastal flooding are predicted; with some damage and severe morning commuter disruption expected.
Yes, there have been hurricanes, yes they've "recurved" back out to sea.
Not they don't just stop. They hit somewhere in Europe, although the passage over cool water typically reduces their strength so sustained hurricane force winds are rare…
pharyngula | September 21, 2006First I reported that Palaeos was lost, and then that it might be found, but now it looks like we can safely say it is being reborn. The old version of Palaeos has been at least partially restored, but the really important news is that a Palaeos wiki has been set up and people are working on reassembling old content and creating new information in a much more flexible format. If you've got some phylogenetic or palaeontological expertise, you might want to consider joining the Palaeos team and helping out with this big project.
pharyngula | September 20, 2006Wheee, I'm going to zip into New York again next week. I'm flying in on Monday to talk at the Inspiration Festival on Tuesday. I'm on the Seed slate with:
Chris Mooney - Washington Correspondent, Seed Magazine
Lisa Randall - Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Natalie Jeremijenko - Design Engineer / Technoartist, Yale University
PZ Myers - Associate Professor of Biology, University of Minnesota
Randy Olson - Lecturer
Jonah Lehrer - Editor-at-Large, Seed magazine
Pardis Sabeti - Researcher, Broad Institute / Lead Singer, Thousand Days
And here's my job, in one very short talk:
From…
catdynamics | September 20, 2006ESA Envisat press release shows north pole ice pack cracked from Svalbarð to the pole.
Finally large container ships will be able to take the short cut from Hong Kong to Rotterdam. Eh?
The NASA EOS Aqua satellite provided the complimentary data on this but have not seen an associated NASA press release.
"Mark Drinkwater of ESA's Oceans/Ice Unit said: "This situation is unlike anything observed in previous record low ice seasons. It is highly imaginable that a ship could have passed from Spitzbergen or Northern Siberia through what is normally pack ice to reach the North Pole without…
drorzel | September 20, 2006Back in May, the DAMOP keynote address was delivered by a DoE program officer who basically chided scientists for being politically active, in a "you have only yourselves to blame if your funding gets cut" sort of way. Obviously, she hasn't read The Republican War on Science, or she'd understand why 48 Nobel laureates publically endorsed John Kerry in 2004.
(Full comments below the fold.)
I didn't read this book when it first came out because I'm a scientist and I follow the news, and I figured I already knew the story. Why buy a book to make myself depressed? I generally buy books to make…
drorzel | September 19, 2006The "Genius Grants" for 2006 have been announced, and as usual, your humble correspondent is not among the winners. Damn.
You know, if I were a MacArthur trustee, I'd be sorely tempted to throw one grant a year to somebody completely bizarre-- $500,000 to Giblets for excellence in Fafbloggery-- just for the hell of it. Or, better yet, just pick a name out of the phone book, and drop $500K on them. Why him? The MacArthur Foundation works in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform...
This is probably sufficient explanation of why I will never be selected to help administer a multi-million-…
evolgen | September 19, 2006Scientific American has an online review of four books: God's Universe by Owen Gingerich, The Language of God by Francis Collins, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan. Here's a choice quote:
"In my view," [evolgen's least favorite NIH director, Francis] Collins goes on to say, "DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God." Evolutionary explanations have been proffered…
oracknows | September 18, 2006Listen to this episode of Point of Inquiry. It includes an interview with Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow, who cowrote Cosmos and Contact. That's good enough (although the sound quality of her connection is not so good), but what will really get you fired up is the last half of the podcast contains last public address for CSICOP, from its conference in Seattle in 1994. Entitled "Wonder and Skepticism," Sagan how he became interested in science and astronomy because of his sheer wonder at science and the stars, argues why science is the best way of looking at the world (his part about the…
pharyngula | September 18, 2006Let's say you don't want to actually read James Kakalios's Physics of Superheroes(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)—it doesn't have enough pictures, and the text isn't in word balloons, or maybe the word "physics" causes an acute case of the heebie-jeebies—well, now you're in luck. Some of his lectures are on the web via the magic of YouTube, so now you can find out about the Death of Gwen Stacy, or what's up with Electro & Magneto, or what silly bloopers were made by Superman or The Atom.
That's a good trick, making physics fun.
drorzel | September 17, 2006So, the good news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about football for ESPN again. His "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" columns are some of the most entertaining football writing around. Here's hoping he can make it through the whole season without saying something stupid to get himself fired.
The bad news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about science for Slate. Actually, Gregg Easterbrook writing about anything other than football is bad news, but science is particularly bad. His knowledge of the subject always seems to operate at the Star Trek sort of level-- like he's read the glossary of a…
pharyngula | September 16, 2006An old pal of mine, the splendiferously morphogenetical Don Kane, has brought to my attention a curious juxtaposition. It's two articles from the old, old days, both published in Nature in 1981, both relevant to my current interests, but each reflecting different outcomes. One is on zebrafish, the other on creationism.
1981 was a breakthrough year for zebrafish; I think it's safe to say that if one paper put them on the map, it was Streisinger et al.'s "Production of clones of homozygous diploid zebra fish (Brachydanio rerio)"1. George Streisinger was the father of zebrafish as a model system…
oracknows | September 16, 2006It may not seem like much when it comes to dealing with animal rights "activists" who cross the line into vandalism, harassment, and intimidation, but it's a start:
Three animal rights activists who organized a campaign to harass employees and clients of a New Jersey research lab were sen tenced to prison yesterday by a judge who said their commitment to social justice had morphed into frightening and sometimes violent protests outside people's homes and offices.
"The means used, the harm im posed, almost arrogantly, is serious -- and warrants serious punishment," Senior U.S. District Judge…
pharyngula | September 16, 2006
Whoa…watch this phenomenal video of the Vampire Squid. They've caught it feeding and using a few sneaky tricks to escape predators.
pharyngula | September 15, 2006
I mentioned before that IDEA clubs insist that expertise is optional; well, it's clear that that is definitely true. Casey Luskin, the IDEA club coordinator and president, has written an utterly awful article "rebutting" part of Ken Miller's testimony in the Dover trial. It is embarrassingly bad, a piece of dreck written by a lawyer that demonstrates that he knows nothing at all about genetics, evolution, biology, or basic logic. I'll explain a few of his misconceptions about genetics, errors in the reproductive consequences of individuals with Robertsonian fusions, and how he has completely…
jrosenhouse | September 15, 2006In an incomprehensible display of poor editorial judgment, Slate recently published this unusually bad article on the merits of string theory, by Gregg Easterbrook.
It's a familiar name to connoisseurs of bad science writing. Easterbrook has previously come out in favor of teaching ID in schools as a legitimate theory in opposition to evolution, for example. The present essay is just a series of slurs and groundless attacks against physicists, tied together with clear evidence that he hasn't the faintest idea what he is talking about.
Since this essay is written in the creationist mode, it…
pharyngula | September 15, 2006We just had one of these!
Mendel's Garden #6
Friday Ark #104
Well, just to flesh it out a little more with some random links, here are some photos. I was told the second one made someone think of me (warning: body modification!). And, jebus help me, for some reason I thought this photo was very sexy. Or appetizing. I don't know, something in the midbrain flickered.
Oh, and several of us sciencebloggers were interviewed for an article by Eva Amsen on "Who benefits from science blogging?" It doesn't mention the benefit of people sending you pictures that tickle the cingulate.
drorzel | September 15, 2006The New York Times has a story about yet another weird extrasolar planet, this one a gigantic fluffy ball of gas bigger than Jupiter, but less dense than water:
While gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are made primarily of hydrogen and helium, they also possess rocky cores and crushing pressures within that squeeze the hydrogen and helium to higher densities. Jupiter's average density is 133 percent greater that of water, while Saturn's is 70 percent that of water. The density of HAT-1-P is one-quarter that of water.
Astrophysicists now have two problems to solve: how a planet that has…
pharyngula | September 14, 2006Now the physicists are putting together carnivals: it's Philosophia Naturalis #1. Hey, aren't these carnivals kind of like…stamp collecting?
stoat | September 14, 2006Or, Reading the entrails of chickens: molecular timescales of evolution and the illusion of precision. Pointed out to me by a palaentologist friend. There's a pdf here. Nothing at all to do with climate, but an interesting tale nonetheless. Or so I assume: it seems sensible, and was recommended by someone sensible, but may have been superceeded since 2004 for all I know. But this is the first time I've heard this wonderful story, and as someone who occaisionally reads about molecular clocks in the papers and assumes its all kosher, this article was a surprise.
Whats up (its fairly clear from…
catdynamics | September 14, 2006First Philosophia Naturalis Carnival is up at at Science and Reason.
Some good stuff there, including new blogs to browse, in your copious spare time.
Not a plug for this 'ere blog. I was traveling and missed the deadline to submit.