Uncategorized
gregladen | April 28, 2010We talk to Sherman K. Stein, mathematician and author of "Survival Guide for Outsiders: How To Protect Yourself From Politicians, Experts, and Other Insiders."
What makes us so susceptible to social influence, and how can we guard against being manipulated?
And
Matthew Linsdell on Personal Training
This Friday at 6 PM MST
gregladen | April 27, 2010This is the opening paragraph which gets you very interested in the topic.
This is the part where I make you want to do something to find out more, or to help with the disaster. And, just as you really really want to click on something (the obvious next thing to do on the internet) this is the part where I say:
CLICK HERE
The previous post was an experiment. Click above to see what it is all about.
Seriously. This is important. Just go click there. Thanks.
Oh, and take this post and/or the one you click through to and tweet it and post it on your facebook page and so on and so forth…
gregladen | April 27, 2010I'm using the Internet connection of some neighbor who's name is "linksys" because my 6 year old wireless router died this morning. I have had a GI disease of some kind for the last few days which has made it impossible to eat pain meds. Ouch ouch ouch. Tomorrow, I get oral surgery. I blew all the dust out of all of my computers with those cans of air, and it settled on everything. And the vacuum cleaner sucks. In that it doesn't.
So don't expect any great blogging from me today, or even tomorrow, OK? Just don't.
Maybe I'll twitter baby duty tomorrow.
cortex | April 27, 2010The process of enculturation doesn't just afflict middle-aged scientists, struggling to appreciate a new anomaly. It's a problem for any collection of experts, from CIA analysts to Wall Street bankers. Let's stick with Wall Street, since Goldman Sachs is in the news. The question for senators and regulators is why some very smart people (and their very clever quantitative models) missed a financial bubble that, in retrospect, looks devastatingly obvious.
Let's begin with a classic experiment, led by Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman. A group of undergraduates was briefly shown a series of…
pharyngula | April 27, 2010This is an excellent review of a program that will be on tonight:
Tonight on Frontline, "The Vaccine War" presents both sides of the controversy over whether young children should be vaccinated for diseases such as measles and polio, and in a rare display of TV-news common sense and independence, one side is shown to be — sorry — wrong. Frontline's documentary will, I hope, leave any sensible viewer feeling that you'd have be deluded or selfish not to have your kids vaccinated.
Now I'm going to have to tune in just for the unbelievable spectacle of a television show taking a skeptical,…
cortex | April 27, 2010I just discovered (via Tyler Cowen) a fascinating economics paper on the changing dynamics of scientific production over the 20th century. A few months ago, I wrote about the tangled relationship of age and innovation, and why different fields have different peak ages of creativity. In general, math, physics and poetry are for the young, while biology, history and the social sciences benefit from middle-age:
Interestingly, these differences in peak age appear to be cultural universals, with poets peaking before novelists in every major literary tradition, according to [Dean] Simonton's…
agelman | April 27, 2010See discussion here. I've linked to it from here because ScienceBlogger and investigative journalist Tim Lambert has written some on the topic.
gregladen | April 26, 2010Knife throwing is for real. This came up on a different thread. Although it is possible to make a fake stage act that involves what looks like knife throwing, that is actually fairly rare. It is easier to learn to throw the knife than to make a contraption that would actually fool today's skeptical audiences.
The following is a YouTube video that happens to be of a performance that Stephanie Zvan, Julia and I saw last September (I remember two or three things in this video that identify it as that specific show, that specific day).
OK, OK, so maybe that looks easy. Try this:
pharyngula | April 26, 2010Remember this?
I mentioned this on an old thread that was on of the precursors to the immortal thread. Now there's another twist: that video is up for a Webby Award. Go sign up and vote! We need to send Jim Kakalios to New York to accept his prize!
I looked at the other four competitors in this category: boring. No science anywhere.
gregladen | April 26, 2010I felt prettty sick all day, so I was unable to attend our local boobquake dinner. But I have been monitoring the seismographs. It is in fact somewhat rare to have an earthquake of 6.0 or greater on a given day. There are about 200 a year at that level, and they are random, and thus cluster somewhat as random things do. So the daily expectation of one or more earthquakes is less than 4/7. Nonetheless, the single 6 magnitude earthquake that happened on Boob Day (using the international time coordinates) was not impressive. We can conclude:
Intense praying by Islamic clerics reversed…
grrlscientist | April 26, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
This week's edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People); "Scientia Pro Publica 27" was published by Mel at her blog, Melliferax.
Of course, this means that the Scientia email account has once more been emptied of submissions, so if we are to publish this blog carnival on a weekly basis this spring, we need to either find others or publish our own essays that are suitable for the next issue of Scientia that will (hopefully!) be published next Monday…
pronald | April 26, 2010Today I wore a bikini for science.
Last week, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, Tehran's acting Friday prayer leader was quoted as saying :
"Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,"
Today, blogger Jen McCreight, is running a global experiment to test the hypothesis that not dressing modestly causes earthquakes.
"With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake," she wrote.
Join in the experiment; bare an ankle or two.
tsaunders | April 26, 2010From the Obesity Panacea Archives: The following post first appeared on January 11, 2010.
In the past year or so I've seen lots of online discussion about the nutritional value of juice, and the role that it may play in obesity and weight management. Although there are a lot of good nutritional arguments against juice consumption, they are all a bit abstract (for a quick review of the main arguments, click here). We can tell people again and again that orange juice is the nutritional equivalent of Coke, but when they look at at a glass of orange juice, it still looks like a glass of…
cwilcox | April 26, 2010My friend and fellow science blogger, Allie, needs some help. She ran like a champ this Saturday to benefit The Wildlife Conservation Society as a part of their Run for the Wild. The only problem? She hasn't reached her donation goals!
WCS is accepting donations up until April 28th. Allie has her own Donation Page where you can support the WCS's efforts to save tigers.
It's a great cause! So if you can, give Allie a hand in reaching her donation goal! Every penny helps.
cortex | April 25, 2010I spent a fair amount of time hanging out with professional poker players while writing How We Decide. For the most part, these players have exquisite control over their facial expressions, so that those micro-muscles around the eyes and mouth rarely betrayed their inner thoughts. (The players reacted with the same look of unflappable boredom to a pair of aces and a hand with mismatched number cards.) But I was always amused by their insistence on wearing opaque sunglasses inside the dimly lit casino. What relevant information did they think their eyeballs would betray? (Most muttered…
esiegel | April 25, 2010
Last night, I had the absolute pleasure to hear Midori, one of the top violinists in the world, play with the Oregon Symphony Orchestra.
(For those of you wondering, she was spectacular.)
What does Midori sound like? Here's her playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto fifteen years ago with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
While I recognize that classical music may not be to everyone's taste, I believe that much like a quality education and quality science, everyone should have access to a quality arts program, too.
But the philanthropic work that Midori is undertaking to those ends…
gregladen | April 25, 2010Really, is getting vaccinated for whooping cough really a socialist plot to take over your minds?
If you've ever spoken to a mother who has lost a child, you will never forget what she has to say. Mariah Bianchi is such a mother, and she wants you to know why you need to get the pertussis vaccination. Not just for your child, but for you, and anyone who comes into contact with your child.
Her message comes just as the CA Dept. of Public Health is warning people to get vaccinated. Health officials say 2010 is shaping up to be a "peak" year for pertussis, aka whooping cough. The highly…