Uncategorized
gregladen | December 18, 2009In about an hour, turn on your intertubes!!!
Lisa Hammet will talk to us about pathogens, viruses, probiotics, antibiotics... if it's too small to be seen without a microscope, it's up for discussion.
Details here
mspringer | December 18, 2009Some of you may have heard in the news recently about a possible detection of the particles that may make up dark matter:
Detectors in the mine, part of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment, were tripped recently by what might be weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. WIMPs are among the most popular candidates for dark matter, the invisible material that scientists think makes up more than 80 percent of the mass in the universe. Recently detectors in the mine recorded two hits with "characteristics consistent with those expected from WIMPs," according to a statement posted…
ddobbs | December 18, 2009
Like a compulsive crack user desperately sucking on a broken pipe, we can't get enough of addiction.
via slate.com
Great to see Bell in Slate, and as usual he brings some good hard facts -- along with finely wrought opinion and wit. â to an area that can get mushy quick.
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
gregladen | December 18, 2009In case you are interested ....
The latest Senate health care bill has no public option. No expansion of Medicare. And it does too little to guarantee that uninsured Americans will actually be able afford the coverage they'll be required to purchase.
But it's not too late to fix the bill. And as Joe Lieberman has shown, just one senator willing to stand in the way can force legislation to be changed dramatically.
Senator Bernie Sanders, a strong proponent of the public option, has already made clear that he's opposed to the legislation in its current form--and he could decide to block it…
gregladen | December 18, 2009Joe Lieberman has announced that he will not vote to stop the filibuster of any for a health care bill that contains the public option. He justifies this position by saying that a government-run health insurance option will cost taxpayers and increase the National Debt even though the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecasts $100 billion in savings thanks to the public option. He further claims that his position is what is best for his constituents, even though polling in Connecticut shows that among likely voters 68 percent favor a public option, while only 21 percent oppose it.
Now is…
palmd | December 17, 2009I was listening to Tell Me More yesterday and was drawn into the story.
The host interviewed Michael Crawford, a DC-based activist. He attempted to debunk the idea that black communities are strongly anti-gay marriage. They played a clip of former DC mayor Marion Barry explaining how he personally might approve of gay marriage but he felt he had to represent his constituents by voting against it. Crawford called him out on a couple of scores. First, Crawford pointed out that Barry gave no polling data. Then he pointed out that he has the support of a large coalition of clergy,…
gregladen | December 17, 2009James Randi says, of global warming, I Am Not "Denying" Anything. PZ is not entirely sanguine about it. But James wants to give Randi a pass.
Anybody want to buy a goat?
mspringer | December 17, 2009I've finally buckled down and started reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Though the author is probably my favorite living fiction writer, the three-volume, ~3000 page monstrosity is just something that's hard for a busy grad student to tackle. I'm only maybe 1/5th through the first volume, but so far so good. Plenty of interesting science as well.
One character (pre-Newton) correctly surmises that the gravitational force of the earth must diminish with distance. To check this, he proposes an experiment that sounds suspiciously Einsteinian but is in fact entirely classical. Put a…
gregladen | December 17, 2009It is not possible for anyone to understand every policy-important aspect of scientific knowledge at the level of detail necessary to accept that knowledge as valid, or to defend it against the evil anti-science denialists. So what is a skeptic to do?
Real science happens at the very edge of knowledge. If you go do real science for a while ... a few weeks ... then go back to science geek land where you normally live (and I know you live there because you are reading this blog) and read about the same topic you were exploring in real science land, you will see two different worlds. When a…
cortex | December 17, 2009Earlier this week, I wondered if all of our new knowledge about the brain, which is too often presented in a lazy causal fashion - if x lights up, then we do y - might undermine our sense of self and self-control. I've since riffled through the literature and found some interesting and suggestive answers.
The first study was done by Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler. The experiment itself was simple: a group of undergraduates was given two excerpts from Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis. The first excerpt espoused a fiercely deterministic and reductionist view of the brain:
You,…
gregladen | December 16, 2009I don't expect these dyed-in-the-wool cranks to change their minds, but it is appropriate that those of us who do have bits and pieces of the internet in our charge keep the dialog honest and progressive. The denialists are putting up offensive, inaccurate, one-liner billboards. We are burning the billboards down with science. It is worthwhile work, important work, and it can even be fun on occasion.
Read more...
gregladen | December 16, 2009Aardvarchaeology's Martin Rundkvist is celebrating his Fourth Blogoversary today! Congratulations Martin!
Go say hi!
gregladen | December 16, 2009
I had missed this, so it is belated. Abel's blog was Four yesterday. Go and give your best wishes.
mspringer | December 16, 2009This is a painting called The Supper at Emmaus. Its subject is the story in the 24th chapter of Luke's gospel, and the story of the painting is itself quite a tale.
It was discovered from obscurity in 1937 by the Dutch painter Hans van Meegeren, and it was acclaimed by experts as a heretofore unknown masterpiece of the legendary 17th century painter Johannes Vermeer. Soon other previous unknown Vermeers began to surface thanks to his efforts. During the occupation by the Nazis, van Meegeren sold some of the paintings to the loathsome Hermann Göring for the equivalent of millions of…
gregladen | December 15, 2009Linux in Exile has some boot time data for Fedora and an interesting piece on how Microsoft Word can cause you to lose access to your own documents.
There are now 20,000 Android apps.
Yet another approach to downloading YouTube videos.
gregladen | December 15, 2009He practically invented modern TV evangelical preaching and grubbing. His death reminds me of Kristine's story.
agelman | December 15, 2009Here's the entry from the statistical lexicon:
The "All Else Equal" Fallacy: Assuming that everything else is held constant, even when it's not gonna be.
My original note about this fallacy came a couple years ago when New York Times columnist John Tierney made the counterintuitive claim (later blogged by Steven Levitt) that driving a car is good for the environment. As I wrote at the time:
These guys are making a classic statistical error, I think, which is to assume that all else is held constant. This is the error that also leads people to misinterpret regression coefficients causally. (…