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agelman | November 12, 2009A reporter contacted me to ask my impression of this article by Peter Bancel and Roger Nelson, which reports evidence that "the coherent attention or emotional response of large populations" can affect the output of quantum-mechanical random number generators.
I spent a few minutes looking at the article, and, well, it's about what you might expect. Very professionally done, close to zero connection between their data and whatever they actually think they're studying.
(Just for example, they mention that their random number generators are electromagnetically shielded--which seems kinda funny…
cwilcox | November 12, 2009Hey there fellow nerds! Carnival of the Blue #30 is now up at Oh For The Love Of Science!. Be sure to swing by and get your feet wet.
And if you're blogging some salty news yourself, be sure to submit your posts for the next Carnival of the Blue to... ME! December's Carnival of the Blue will be hosted right here at Observations of a Nerd.They've got this new handy-dandy BlogCarnival submission form you can use now to submit your posts! If you have any trouble, feel free to e-mail me at NerdyChristie [at] gmail [dot] com.
tqa | November 12, 2009
ScienceBloggers Greg Laden and Matt Springer have both weighed in on the weapons used by Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Matt disagrees with the basic gun control argument that Greg initially raised, but focused primarily on correcting some factual errors that Greg made in a later post. Unfortunately, Matt seems to have some incorrect assumptions about firearm availability on military installations. He also seems to have missed at least one important factual point about the firearms that were used in the shooting.
Matt starts off quite badly, at least from the perspective of the facts on…
agelman | November 11, 2009Steve Levitt links to this article by Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer on an educational innovation to improve the education of ethnic minority children. Dobbie and Fryer write:
Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) is arguably the most ambitious social experiment to alleviate poverty of our time. We [Dobbie and Fryer] provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ on educational outcomes, with an eye toward informing the long-standing debate whether schools alone can eliminate the achievement gap or whether the issues that poor children bring to school are too much for educators to…
mspringer | November 11, 2009God help me, I resisted mightily. If my fellow SB friend Greg wants to spin the Ft. Hoot shooting as a cause for gun control then frankly there's pretty much nothing further to say. You'd think a @#$% major in the @#$% army on a @#$% army base just might not have been terribly inconvenienced in procuring weaponry even if every civilian gun in the hemisphere vanished in a puff of sunshine and wishful thinking. But I was going to leave it alone, assuming that that particular point makes itself. To each his own.
But he wrote a follow-up post asserting a few points of fact, pretty much all of…
gregladen | November 11, 2009Almost Diamonds on Veterans Day
Vitaly Ginzburg, Man of Courage and Brilliance
Mat Springer: Veterans Day (and the scientists who help them win)
More Dark Energy at Starts with a Bang
gregladen | November 11, 2009
~Also of interest:~
Tales of life in the Congo: The Congo Memoirs 1 ~ The Zodiac
Falsehoods of Life, Culture and Evolution
The Natural Basis for Inequality of the Sexes
Hat Tip: Andrea Semlar
pontiff | November 11, 2009Last month a local restaurant group, Chow foods---among whose restaurants is one of our favorite Sunday breakfast spots, The Five Spot---ran a contest/charity event: "Chow Dow." The game: guess the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the close of the market on October 29th, 2009. The closest bet under the closing value which did not go over the value would be the winner. The prize was the value of Dow in gift certificates to the Chow restaurants: i.e. approximately $10K in food (or as we would say in Ruddock House at Caltech: "Eerf Doof!" We said that because it fit nicely with…
gregladen | November 11, 2009Music, a bar, a fashion show by Lizzie and some other people. (If you go you can find out the actual identify of Lizzie ... you did know that is a pseudonym, right?)
Here's a flyer:
gregladen | November 11, 2009If you are an atheist, you won't want to see this. It will shatter (he he) your beliefs. This was sent to my daughter by a fellow student.
What I love about this is that it is a simple unadulterated lie. But it's OK to lie for god.
gregladen | November 11, 2009Or so says Stephanie Zvan, and she makes a pretty good case:
There's no place better than the internet to be sick. No, really. The people around here are amazing. I would have had a truly miserable last couple of months without them.
Read the rest here
gregladen | November 11, 2009Don't as me. Ask PZ Myers. Next Monday, November 16th in Saint Paul.
Dr. Jerry Bergman and Dr. PZ Myers will be debating the topic: "Should Intelligent Design Be Taught In The Schools?"
This event is sponsored by the Christian Student Fellowship and Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists.
The event is held at the North Star Ballroom, St. Paul Student Center (Buford Ave. near Cleveland Ave.)
7:30 to 9:30 PM, student center, St. Paul campus.
mspringer | November 11, 2009On Veterans Day we commemorate the living veterans of the American armed forces. On Memorial day we commemorate those who lost their lives. We should also spend a moment to remember those who helped make sure more soldiers fit into the first category. Though I've made the point before on this blog, I'd like to commemorate two men in particular who between them likely saved the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers during the Second World War, simply by doing brilliant science. Their names are Alan Turing and Robert Watson-Watt.
Turing was a mathematician and computer…
gregladen | November 11, 2009Hominid Blogger Afarensis has fallen ill, and is in hospital with Pneumonia, likely caused by Swine Flu. Please drop over here and leave a note.
grrlscientist | November 11, 2009
My friend and former ScienceBlogs colleague, Afarensis, is in the hospital with pneumonia, a complication of a probable case of "swine" flu; H1N1 Influenza. His youngest daughter posted a message to his blog yesterday, so let's all head over there to leave our best wishes for his speedy and uneventful recovery! I know from experience that it's all of you, your kind words and your funny comments, who can really make a difference!
gregladen | November 11, 2009An anti-toxin that protects against ricin poisoning is to move into production for the first time, after eight years of research.
It is the result of eight years of work by researchers at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL).
The anti-toxin can protect against three times the lethal dosage of ricin and can be administered to 24 hours after exposure.
According to security experts, ricin is one of the weapons which could be used in a bio-terror attack.
source
agelman | November 11, 2009Jonathan Raban writes:
For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one's own and full of pitfalls and 'false friends'. The word nature, for instance, means something different here - so do community, class, friend, tradition, home (think of the implications beneath the surface of the peculiarly American phrase 'He makes his home in ...').
I can't tell if Raban is being serious or if he is making some sort of joke. The paradox of the statement above is that very few readers will be qualified to assess it.
In any case, if someone can explain to me how…