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grrlscientist | September 30, 2008The NYC millionth comment party has been scheduled! ScienceBlogs has rented out the top floor of the Delancey and will be providing pizza and a bar tab up to about $600 (drinks over that amount will not be covered) -- FREE! The Delancey will be suspending their usual cover charge, just for us.
ScienceBlogs' NYC area Millionth Comment party:
Date: Tuesday, 7 October 2008
Time: 7pm ET until ???
Location: the top floor of The Delancey Bar and Nightclub, 168 Delancey Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side [map]
SciBling hosts: ME and some of my ScienceBlogs colleagues, PhysioProf and Jake Young,…
gregladen | September 30, 2008You'll need two/three cases of beer, three/four bottles of wine, a few friends, and understanding neighbor. Do not watch this video if you intend to drive.
And now, How to remove red wine stains from your carpet:
cortex | September 30, 2008Over the next few days, lots of people are going to be poring over their investment portfolio, trying to figure out which stocks to keep and which stocks to sell. Unfortunately, many of these investors will make the exact same mistake, causing them to lose vast sums of money over the long term.
The problem is loss aversion. Kahnemanandtversky stumbled upon loss aversion after giving their students a simple survey, which asked whether or not they would accept a variety of different bets. The psychologists noticed that, when people were offered a gamble on the toss of a coin in which they…
gregladen | September 30, 2008It is a cartoon power point-like thingie about the current financial crisis. Click the picture.
mspringer | September 30, 2008In physics, you come up with an idea, formulate it mathematically, find the theory's predictions about the real world, and test those predictions by experiment. This works because God is subtle, but not malicious (to borrow Einstein's words). In more concrete language, the laws of physics fit well together and make sense as a coherent, testable experimental whole.
Mathematical truths are not so easily verifiable. Because mathematics in some sense encompasses a much wider spectrum of possibilities, experimental tests can't cover all the needed ground in most cases. The laws of physics are…
pharyngula | September 30, 2008A recent survey in New Zealand reveals that only 40% of the people believe in a god, and 10% do but have doubts. Only 52% believe in an immortal soul, and 80% accept evolution. I marvel at that — a country where I would not be a member of a rare minority, where I could start a conversation with a stranger and reliably encounter someone who wasn't barking mad, where the populace doesn't believe in angels? Next you'll be telling me the streets are paved with gold.
It's not perfect. There are still lots of conspiracy theorists and UFO buffs and lucky number innumerates, but man, it's just that…
gregladen | September 30, 2008Thirty Days Hath September, which means that tonight I'll be compiling the Carnival of Evolution. I'll actually be putting it up during the day tomorrow, and can probably take late submissions even through the early AM. Either way, please send me your blog posts on Evolution and stuff, or submit them here.
mspringer | September 29, 2008Update: I seriously feel guilty for writing politics in a physics blog. I personally sometimes get annoyed at reading politics on other non-political blogs, and I imagine you do too. That's why I happily encourage you not to read anything I write tagged with politics unless you like that sort of thing. The election's only a month or so off. I promise after that the politics will be few and far between, and until then I'll still try to keep it to only an occasional thing.
The bailout is dead. As congressional acts often do, it may come back to life at a later date. But for the moment, it…
cortex | September 29, 2008The hypocrisy is dazzling. Charles Murray (of Bell Curve fame) just wrote a book arguing that the vast majority of American college students shouldn't actually be attending college, since they lack the cognitive ability to "deal with college-level material." Instead, he argues that these people should become skilled laborers. ("There are very few unemployed first-rate electricians...") He also insists that "the future of America depends on "the gifted," or those who are genetically blessed with above-average intelligence.
I certainly don't agree with Murray's argument, but I understand that…
gregladen | September 28, 2008These parodies are getting better and better . This one is hysterical:
gregladen | September 27, 2008... of the blog Highly Allochon ... Highly Allochthon ... no, wait, .. Got it Highly Allochthonous.
gregladen | September 27, 2008 Not only is our universe expanding, but with the LHC online we may even find the elusive Higgs Boson soon.
Tune in this Sunday for a discussion about the very small and very large in our universe with two prominent physicists:
Keith Olive, Physicist at the U of M's Theoretical Physics Institute, and Jim Peebles, Albert Einstein Professor of Science Emeritus, Princeton University will be guests on the show, broadcast live on AM 950 KTNF on Sunday at 9 to 10 AM central.
Professor Keith Olive is a distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota. His research areas…
gregladen | September 27, 2008
Carnival of Feminists #65
Carnival of Education, #190
Announcement: New Book Review Blog Carnival
Social Media Blog Carnival - September 24, 2008
Carnival Of The Liberals, #74
Working at Home Blog Carnival-104th Edition
Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival
Carnival of Eastern European Genealogy - First (Given) Names
Carnival of Cinema: Episode 94 - The Blog Ultimatum (as featured on FOX!!!11!!!
grrlscientist | September 27, 2008Today is a very special day because I will be helping ScienceBlogs to celebrate our one millionth comment at a party they are hosting in Seattle! Yes, I am in beautiful Seattle at this moment, and I will be at the ScienceBlogs party, along with some of my Seattle pals, and also some of my birding pals, as well as the Seattle Skeptics and later (around 630pm), some people from the Pacific Science Center will also be there! As a token of our appreciation to our readers, Seed Media Group has given us a budget so we can pay for the food and for the first few rounds of drinks -- regardless of what…
gregladen | September 27, 2008
(BTW: It does not "straddle both France and Switzerland" ... it straddles the border.)
Totally stolen from ABATC
mspringer | September 27, 2008The debate? Didn't watch it. I'm keeping my "not watching the debates this year" record spotless. Not because I don't want to keep myself informed but because modern TV debate formats don't let anyone do anything but go for the best soundbites, zingers, and gotchas. That said I'll probably read the transcript, but I can't bear to actually waste the time to sit through watching it live. I'd personally like candidates to debate Lincoln-Douglas style including cross-examination, unmoderated except for a guy with a timer. That I would watch. Anyway, both sides seem to be more or less…
gregladen | September 26, 2008If confirmed, a recent finding may be one of the more interesting outcomes of cosmological research in quite some time. Possibly interesting enough to keep everyone busy while they are retooling the Large Hadron Collider.
First a bit of background. Assume the big bang happened. When we look out at galaxies near and far we find that they are all moving apart in exactly the way we would expect them to be moving if the entire universe was expanding. The nature of this expansion is a bit spooky, and there is more than one way to describe it (not necessarily alternative ways). But the bottom…
gregladen | September 26, 2008The file drawer effect works like this: Numerous studies are done and the results are random. But because they are random, a small number have, randomly, strong effects that are interesting and that in isolation support some interesting hypothesis. All the results that fail to confirm the interesting (or fund able) expectation are filed away .... in the file drawer. Only the results that seem to show what the researchers want to show are made public.
In areas where research is cheap and often done as part of undergraduate and graduate training, (like certain areas of psychology and…
mspringer | September 26, 2008Mean-spirited reactionary politics below the fold. If you're a kind-hearted liberal here for the physics, you might want to skip this post, have a nice tea instead, and calmly meditate on Obama's recent rise in the polls.
I've had several conversations with people over the past few days about the cause of the current financial crisis. One common refrain is that deregulation regulation pushed though by heartless free marketers is the cause. "Ok", I ask them, "what regulation specifically?" And I generally don't get an answer. The reason is that the crisis is due to loans not being repaid…