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pharyngula | January 28, 2009Richard Dawkins will be speaking in Northrup Auditorium at the University of Minnesota on 4 March, at 7pm. Get your tickets now!
There will also be a post-lecture pub event. I'll post more information on that as it comes available.
For those of you who are pining for a visit from Richard Dawkins, here is his calendar. It looks like we Minnesotans are among the fortunate few.
gregladen | January 28, 2009The rightful place of science is moving, never staying in one place, ever dancing and watching, on the always shifting sociopolitical landscape.
A team of white coated eggheads can solve any problem with enough science. We need to get rid of the Jews, and we don't have enough bullets, so let's get the eggheads to figure out a way to do that. We need to take the Americans out of the Pacific, but we have insufficient resources but a lot of pilots. Let's get the engineers to come up with a one-way airplane. We need to get rid of the Nazis and Imperialist Japanese, and we hear the Eggheads…
sb admin | January 28, 2009Weâre delighted to learn that The Pump Handleâs own David Michaels has won the John P. McGovern Science and Society Award from Sigma Xi, the international honor society of research scientists and engineers. The award honors people who are highly visible and prominent spokespersons for the public understanding and appreciation of science.
Our regular readers probably already know that David champions the use of science to protect public health, whether the hazard is a butter-flavoring chemical or a drug. Heâs known for exposing how product defense firms, sequestered science, and manufactured…
cortex | January 28, 2009Via Marginal Revolution, comes this interview with Warren Buffett, where he makes the case for the current stimulus package. I highlight this excerpt not to argue for the bill, but to highlight one of Buffett's many excellent mental habits, which we should all attempt to imitate:
SG: But there is debate about whether there should be fiscal stimulus, whether tax cuts work or not. There is all of this academic debate among economists. What do you think? Is that the right way to go with stimulus and tax cuts?
WB: The answer is nobody knows. The economists don't know. All you know is you throw…
cortex | January 28, 2009Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan has a typically wonderful post on the "maternal impression" theory, which suggested that a psychological trauma inflicted on the pregnant mother would lead to profound defects in the unborn child. As Vaughan notes, this crude 19th century theory slowly faded away, as it became clear that birth defects had nothing to do with the mental state of the mother. But then, Vaughan says, the Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939, and that all began to change.
The quickly assembled Finnish force was vastly outnumbered and ominously outgunned but, unlike their Soviet…
grrlscientist | January 28, 2009
Image: Orphaned. Contact me so I can provide proper attribution.
I am still catching up with myself and all my commitments -- amazing how these things happen when you work for free, isn't it? Below the fold is the list of what I've been working on, and the progress I've made;
putting the finishing touches on my OpenLab2008 essay and emailing that to the editor. Yes, I am terribly late! Done! And OpenLab is going to press at this very moment.
writing six book reviews. Yes, I am terribly behind on this too, unfortunately!
writing three guest blog essays, also late. One is finished…
mspringer | January 28, 2009Consider the turntable of an old record player. Or equivalently, a CD affixed to a player so that it may spin freely. We'll pretend there's no friction, though as always reality will manage to generate some. Now stretch your imagination a bit further and imagine that you shrink yourself down to a height of about 6 inches or so and stand on the turntable/CD. You look around, and having decided that now's as good a time as any to get started on your exercise routine, you start walking laps around the disc.
Conserving angular momentum, the surface will begin to rotate under you in the…
sb admin | January 28, 2009by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
Even as the the peanut cum salmonella recall spreads (sorry, couldn't resist), we learn that the Peanut Corporation of America plant in Blakely, Georgia thought to be its source has a history of "problems":
The plant in Georgia that produced peanut butter tainted by salmonella has a history of sanitation lapses and was cited repeatedly in 2006 and 2007 for having dirty surfaces and grease residue and dirt buildup throughout the plant, according to health inspection reports. Inspection reports from 2008 found the plant repeatedly in violation of…
pharyngula | January 28, 2009An essay by Dennis Overbye makes an important point: if you want a source for good values, look to science.
Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety,…
awild | January 27, 2009Cicindela has been playing with scanners and saturniid moths, to great result:
The original file must be huge! Â Worth noting that Cicindela is taking a lead from Joseph Scheer, who first perfected the technique.
jwilbanks | January 27, 2009Science Commons got picked up on reddit this week. It was surreal - we hit the top of the charts for about 24 hours, got way more web traffic than usual, and the SC/Dylan video got almost 4000 views. Wacky.
And now our logo's embedded on the reddit logo on the home page.
This is neat. We've spent years toiling away at Science Commons and save one or two articles, mainly which tend to focus on me personally, we don't get a lot of attention. I was surprised and gratified to see this happen, organically, from a lot of folks who I wouldn't have expected to give a hoot about us.
I'll address a…
grrlscientist | January 27, 2009Okay, what's happening here, you guys? It seems that yet another blog carnival, Oekologie, has gone the way of the passenger pigeon. And I even volunteered to host this blog carnival by leaving a message on the site, but my message was discarded. I am happy to help rescue science-y blog carnivals, but I need some help, and some of that help can come in the form of (1) ASKING me and others to host the carnival when the host list has diminished to less than three future hosts, (2) not ignoring people who are actually coming out of their basement lairs to volunteer to host a particular carnival…
sb admin | January 27, 2009The influential left-wing blog Daily Kos has been running a series called "Flu and You" by health blogger DemFromCT, and this week's installment features an interview with one of the reveres from Effect Measure, who often cross-post here. The whole thing is worth reading (as are the first and second parts of the series), but I wanted to highlight a couple of sections that echo back to the Progressive Public Health series that the reveres wrote last month as a call to the public health community to look critically at where we're going.
First, here's something about the difficulty of trying to…
cortex | January 27, 2009John Updike died today. He was one of my favorite writers, although I didn't fall in love with his work until I lived for a few years outside of America. It was then that I first read the complete Rabbit series, from "Rabbit, Run" to "Rabbit Remembered" and became rather obsessed with his short stories. In the dank dark of an Oxford winter, I repeated one of my favorite Updike lines to myself several times a day: "America is a conspiracy to make you happy."
Perhaps more than any other writer, Updike's sentences have a way of getting stuck in my consciousness, so that I think of his words when…
mspringer | January 27, 2009In the comments of yesterday's post about the output of the sun, Carl Brannen brought up a good point:
By the way, in comparing your audience to cows and compost heaps is there some sort of message here? It's been 25 years or so but I recall that there was a certain time of year around which I'd pretty much had my fill of grad school. The worst was towards the end of the 3rd quarter of a 3 quarter year. About that time, the Santa Anna winds reverse. The result is a wanderlust breeze off the ocean.
Aw Carl, you and the rest of my readers rock. I only mean that in terms of power output, the…
j7uy5 | January 27, 2009On 26 January 2008, major employers in the USA announced 60,000 jobs
would be lost. The market responded positively, as it often
does. The S&P 500 gained 0.56%.
Clearly the best thing that businesses could do would be to fire
everyone. A quick Google search indicates that there are about
150 million jobs in the USA. If everyone lost their jobs, the
S&P should gain 1,400%.
At that point, anyone with just $35,000 in a retirement fund could
retire tomorrow with a half-million dollars, assuming their fund did as
well as the S&P 500.
Oh, but if nobody were working, that…
drorzel | January 26, 2009
We Need a Civilian GI Bill :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
"Unlike the original bill, which rewarded service, this new bill would be a rescue measure.
As in the past, a primary goal would be to decrease pressure on what today is a shrinking job market and limit growing unemployment rates. But another equally important goal would be to prepare the more educated labor force the nation needs for economic development and global competitiveness at a time when a dwindling number of jobs are available to individuals without a college education and its…
jwilbanks | January 26, 2009In the first post, I talked about how factual data aren't creative works, and how compiling them into collections doesn't make them creative - at least in the US.
This aspect of data rips away the core "incentive" provided by copyright law to creators: the right to sue people who make copies. It also has a second aspect, which is that the international treaties that govern copyright don't apply. Whatever one may think of those treaties, they do a fair amount to normalize the laws worldwide - a copyright on a Britney Spears tune applies in much the same way in wildly different countries. For…
mspringer | January 26, 2009The power output of the sun is often talked about in awe-inspiring terms. You'll be told that it's like a continuous thermonuclear blast, or that a tiny fraction of the tiny fraction of power that happens to hit the earth would support humanity's energy needs. It's all true. The light and heat from a campfire can make you uncomfortable from a few feet away, while the light from the sun can scorch deserts from almost a hundred million miles distant.
Let me quantify this, since it's what we physicists compulsively do. The total power output of the sun is something in the vicinity of 3.8 x…
cortex | January 26, 2009The NY Times reports on a fascinating new study showing that Obama's election has improved the test scores of African Americans, at least in this one very small study which has yet to undergo peer-review:
Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama's nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.
The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome…