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mspringer | May 2, 2009Well, we've explored some groundwork in three previous posts and so it's time to put it all together. Why exactly do bosons have such weird behavior at very low temperatures, with a large fraction of their number crowding into a single quantum state? Let's plow on. If you're not familiar with the mathematics or the physics, don't worry. What you've absorbed from the previous posts will be fine - you don't need to know the details to understand the big picture.
The number of bosons is given by the grand partition function Q in the following way:
Each term in the sum is the expected number…
gregladen | May 1, 2009Or, really, it is going to me more like a three way conversation. Maybe we can get Stephanie Zvan involved too, because she's going to be right there. This is not the official announcement... I expect to get the press release tomorrow and I'll post it. But I thought some of you would like to know in advance so you can go to Saturday Night Mass and listen to the show on Sunday Morning.
We're going to talk about Science Education and stuff, as you might expect. 9:00 AM Central Time.
"Atheists Talk" airs live on AM 950 KTNF in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.
To stream live, go here.…
sb admin | May 1, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
Just a brief note to remind everyone about the case definitions CDC is using for reporting on swine flu (or whatever name we collectively settle on). In order to make sure numbers are comparable from day to day and place to place we have to decide on criteria for knowing we have something to count. Is someone with flu-like symptoms to be counted as a case? Or do we confine it to someone with laboratory proved infection with the virus? Should there be different categories of diagnostic certainty?
For the moment, CDC is using the following…
jwilbanks | May 1, 2009Quick hit at the end of the week. I've got a couple of posts I'm trying to finish up and post next week.
But it's worth noting that the new H1N1 is sequenced and available under the same open access terms as the rest of the NCBI data and contents.
All that misery and expense and illness, from this short series of letters. Nature's one hell of a programmer.
1 atggatgtca atccgactct acttttccta aaaattccag cgcaaaatgc cataagcacc
61 acattccctt atactggaga tcctccatac agccatggaa caggaacagg atacaccatg
121 gacacagtaa acagaacaca ccaatactca gaaaagggaa agtggacgac aaacacagag
181…
grrlscientist | May 1, 2009I have been raising hell behind the scenes because my blog is experiencing a crisis that causes it to download incompletely. This issue has not been addressed, so you and I are stuck waiting for some stories I have been working on that I meant to publish today. So I guess I should ask you to please excuse the mess, and since nothing is being done to correct this situation, and I am completely unable to fix these issues myself, I am going out to get a drink.
gregladen | May 1, 2009... the web log carnival about birds ... is HERE at Migrations. It's a good one, go check it out.
cortex | May 1, 2009Evan Lerner has a quite interesting article on seedmagazine.com about physical performance and exhaustion. That painful lactic acid throb? It's mostly in your head:
The finish line is in sight, but you're not going to make it. Your lungs are burning and deeply in oxygen debt. The muscle fibers in your legs have converted most of the carbohydrate supply in your body into lactic acid. This was a fine plan for generating the extra energy needed to keep you moving in the absence of adequate oxygen, but it is now making your quads and hamstrings feel like they are on fireâ--âwhich is more or less…
grrlscientist | May 1, 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) blog carnival is seeking your recently published blog entries (within the previous 60 days) about science, nature and medicine for inclusion in its upcoming edition on Monday, 4 May 2009. To send submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right. Be sure to include the URL or "permalink", the essay title and, to make life easier for the host, a 2…
pharyngula | April 30, 2009A Pew poll finds that church attendance is correlated with willingness to torture.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
I can't be too smug about it, though: that difference isn't exactly huge, and 42% is a depressingly large number of non-church-goers favoring barbarous behavior. I wouldn't be…
pharyngula | April 30, 2009The province of Alberta has decided to make education optional. If there's something in the real world that you don't like, such as that you evolved from other apes, or that gay people exist, or perhaps that understanding the motion of bodies requires some of that difficult math stuff, students will be allowed to close their eyes and plug their ears and pretend those uncomfortable complexities don't exist. How sweet! And then they can graduate without ever learning anything new, and go on to be ignorant voters who will no doubt continue the trend of dumbing down everything.
This is a very…
mspringer | April 30, 2009Normally I stay mostly on the physics beat, trying to mostly stay out of the controversy arena except occasionally when my lunatic reactionary politics crops up in something like my Social Security piece a while back. But all things considered I much prefer to a nice, collegial, uncontroversial discussion about eigenfunctions of the Dirichlet problem than charging in with guns blazing to the nearest eruption of sloppy thinking.
Nonetheless there are occasionally times it's just not possible to look away. Another ScienceBlogger brought up a piece on the Huffington Post by a well-meaning lady…
sb admin | April 30, 2009by Kas
Joe Biden was on NBC earlier saying, âI would tell members of my family -- and I have -- I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now.â As examples of confined places, he mentions planes and subways.
Mr. Vice President, would you ride the train to Delaware tonight? Say it ainât so, Joe. We know that you live in D.C. now and that your daily commute in that âconfined placeâ has been eliminated for the time being. But, what about the rest of us? Who uses the âconfined placesâ of public transportation the most? Who is inside those âconfined placesâ classrooms? And how do these…
sb admin | April 30, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
A student once complained that no horse was too dead for me to stop beating it. Long time readers are familiar with that here. Over the years I have said that the best way to prepare for a pandemic -- or any other grave threat to our communities -- is to strengthen its public health and social service infrastructures. While some progress along those lines have been made (the additional training and upgrading of the national laboratory system is what allows us to find swine flu cases), in the main public health and social services have continued to…
cortex | April 30, 2009There's no way in hell I deserve to be on the stage at this incredible event, but I'm so honored to be included:
Yo-Yo Ma performs the world premiere of Self Comes to Mind, a musical composition by Bruce Adolphe, composer in residence at the Brain and Creativity Institute and resident lecturer of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, based on an evocative exploration of the evolution of human consciousness written especially for this collaboration by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at University of Southern California, and author of…
pharyngula | April 30, 2009It looks like trouble, and some ministers are defending the proposed blasphemy law — you people aren't going to let this violation of civil rights pass, are you?
We have some more details on the law, too: it authorizes fines up to €100,000, and gives the police the right to seize blasphemous materials from your home. If you're reading Pharyngula right now on your home computer, you may have broken that law, and they can come take your computer away…and then they'll notice all those books by Hitchens and Harris and Dawkins and so forth on your bookshelves, and next thing you know, you're…
cortex | April 30, 2009Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan finds a fascinating review of recent books on the history of the senses. He highlights a short section of medieval theories of perception, which hypothesized that the eyes actively sent out "rays" that illuminated what we saw. (This view of visual sensation is what made the "evil eye" possible - people were infecting you with their sight.)
In 1492, learned debates also influenced how the world was perceived. As medical historians Nancy Siraisi and James T. McIlwain, also a neuroscientist, point out, medieval scholars would have located sensory perception in the…
grrlscientist | April 29, 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) blog carnival is seeking your recently published blog entries (within the previous 60 days) about science, nature and medicine for inclusion in its upcoming edition on Monday, 4 May 2009. To send submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right. Be sure to include the URL or "permalink", the essay title and, to make life easier for the host, a 2…