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gregladen | May 24, 2009Something is wrong with my site. Comments appear to be totally screwed up. This situation started on Friday, and I informed Scienceblogs Central of this. Since then I've been off the internet, wandering through the wilderness in the Great American Southwest. The tech people are aware of this, but I have not heard any details of when it may be fixed.
My posts are still coming out as scheduled, apparently, but comments go into the Twilight Zone. Sorry about that.
I have a few suggestions: Comment over here, on my old blog:
gregladen.com
or
Just don't comment for a while
and
Seriously…
mspringer | May 23, 2009Yesterday we talked about how fermions and bosons had different values of spin and thus their wavefunctions had different symmetry properties. In particular, fermions are antisymmetric under exchange of particles. We'd like to write the overall two-particle wavefunction in terms of the individual wavefunctions for each of the two particles. The result will look like this:
You can see that if you switch around r1 and r2, you get the same function back with a negative sign in front of it. If these particles were bosons, we'd need a plus sign in the middle instead of a minus sign so that we…
jjacquet | May 23, 2009I am currently attending the International Marine Conservation Congress (so please pardon my long absence) and wanted to quickly share some new ideas on how technology could contributions to conservation.
Erwin Brunio from Japan's Graduate School of Marine Science and Technology (itself an interesting concept) presented on how enforcement in Philippino marine protected areas is being assisted by:
...the creation of anonymous community watchers scattered among islands armed with mobile phones to report violations. The innovation is the presence of an intermediate structure between watcher and…
gregladen | May 22, 2009Consider attending the Flying Spaghetti Monster Dinner Fund Raiser for Minnesota Atheists on Sunday, May 31st
Details here.
grrlscientist | May 22, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) blog carnival celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "permalink", the…
gregladen | May 22, 2009Mat Nisbet's Framing Perspective: Interview w/ The Scientist on Ida's Media Strategy
Creationists react to Darwinius masillae at Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge.
Google co-opts Ida. Thus creating Gidagle.
Creationists freak out over Darwinius
(In case you have not seen, here's my non-meta straight-up science writeup: Ida the Fossil Primate)
sb admin | May 22, 2009Alison Bass directs our attention to the tragic story of Denis Maltez, a 12-year-old Miami boy who died of serotonin syndrome after being given two anti-psychotic medications (Seroquel and Zyprexa) plus an anti-seizure drug and tranquilizer. Serotonin syndrome occurs when a combination of drugs causes the brain to produce excess serotonin. Denis had severe autism and was living in a Rainbow Ranch group home; the lawsuit just filed by his mother, Martha Quesada, says the drugs were used as a "chemical restraint to control Denis's behavior."Â Florida shut down Rainbow Ranch shortly after Denis…
cortex | May 22, 2009Over at the New Yorker website, I've answered a few questions from readers about the marshmallow task:
Do you think the future results of success would be different for a sample of kids born in the twenty-first century considering the decades of behavioral, economical changes in the society?
Hassan Patwary
San Jose, Calif.
I think it would be hard to replicate the marshmallow task now, if only because it's gotten much tougher to feed hundreds of preschoolers sugary snacks in the name of science. There are allergies, peculiar diets, and all sorts of food issues. So you'd have to find something…
mspringer | May 22, 2009Last time on Sunday Function we talked about two types of symmetries that a real function might have: odd and even symmetry under reflection about the y-axis. Much more than I expected even as an undergraduate student, these types of symmetries turn out to be of amazingly fundamental importance in fundamental physics. One of these fundamental symmetry results in the Pauli exclusion principle, which says no two electrons (or any Fermions for that matter) can be in the same quantum state.
To do a little review, there's a property of subatomic particles called spin. An electron isn't actually…
gregladen | May 21, 2009For those of you who have never seen Wisconsin, have a look at my friend Elizabeth's blog to get an idea. Really; It pretty much looks like this everywhere I've been in the state, and I used to live there.
gregladen | May 21, 2009James Hrynyshyn points us to the Waxman-Markey bill and tells us where to learn more.
mspringer | May 21, 2009Transverse or longitudinal waves, purely as a matter of aesthetic preference? Transverse all the way, of course.
Not that there's a huge difference mathematically speaking. It's more of a species-type categorization than a rigorously formal one. Transverse waves oscillate perpendicular to their direction of motion, longitudinal waves oscillate parallel. This stuff does however give me a chance to spread the light (ahem) on a common misconception my 208 students often seem to have. This is the type of picture usually presented in physics textbooks of a transverse wave (a light wave in this…
gregladen | May 20, 2009... almost.
This is the Solar Birdhouse. The idea is that the bird house sits there and collects energy from the sun all day and stores it in a battery, then at night, there is a kind of nightlight that lights up the perch on the front of the birdhouse.
According to the ad that was mailed to me:
Why would only humans make use of eco-friendly technology? Studio OOOMS designed a birdhouse with a solar panel on it's roof. During the day sunlight feeds the solar panel , charging a small battery inside. At twilight the transparent stick will light up and cast a tiny light on your garden.
This…
grrlscientist | May 20, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
gregladen | May 20, 2009... Number 91 - Eine kleine Nachtlesung, is now up and running. Visit the special foto-genic edition of this important blog carnival!
gregladen | May 20, 2009If this is a typical installation of Scientia Pro Publica, then Scientia Pro Publica is the best science carnival out there. Good job Grrrrlllll Sccccientissst..... for creating this carnival.
Go to this link at Nature Network and read the Primate Diaries version of Scientia Pro Publica ... #4, the "In Memory of Stephen Jay Gould" edition.