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mspringer | September 23, 2008How about a quick little circular motion exercise, since that's what I'm teaching in my recitation at the moment? We know the force equals mass time acceleration, so how about we put the force of gravity on the right side and the force required for uniform circular motion on the left:
And we'll solve that for the velocity:
That's the velocity you need to reach in order to attain circular orbit at a distance r above the earth's center. M is the mass of the Earth (or whatever you happen to be orbiting, and m is the mass of the thing in orbit. Of course m cancels anyway. But what if we…
cwilcox | September 23, 2008Just because we're uber-smart doesn't mean we're foolproof. Sadly, even scientists make mistakes. The most recent case of unfortunate events comes to us from Mallorca, where the captive breeding of the Mallorcan Midwife Toad, on the verge of extinction, has infected them with a fungus that might wipe them out.
According to the paper recently published in Current Biology, the Mallorcan Midwife Toad was on the brink of extinction until a captive breeding program sought to boost the amphibian's population. Then, just as the toad populations were growing, the captive-bred toads got infected with…
mspringer | September 22, 2008Richard Feynman once said of large numbers that "astronomical" was no longer the best adjective. "Economical" was. There are more dollars in the national debt than there are miles in a lightyear.
Today we're getting a some exposure to one of those numbers: $700 billion. It's the size of the bailout of the various failing banks. People like to trot out the Iraq war (if I may link to an anti-war site so you can be sure the cost is not biased downward) when discussing how federal money could be better spent, so let me do the same thing. The five years of the Iraq war have cost more than $…
gregladen | September 22, 2008At 1st Ave. (Twin Cities Area)
On September 23, First Avenue/7th Street Entry nightclub in Minneapolis will be the venue for a star-studded musical and dance benefit for Cuban hurricane relief.
In the past weeks, Cuba has suffered tremendous damage from Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. Close to one million people were evacuated and more than 300,000 houses and other structures have been destroyed or damaged, and the United Nations estimates losses of between $3 and $4 billion. The U.S. government's offer of $100,000 in aid to Cuba is cruel and insulting; because of the U.S. embargo, ordinary…
grrlscientist | September 22, 2008Here's a few new blog carnivals for you to enjoy;
Brain Blogging, 39th edition. This blog carnival is all about the brain and neuroscience.
Carnival of Cinema. I know these are serious times, but this is even more of a reason to go to the movies, right?
cortex | September 22, 2008Last week, I had a short article in Play, the NY Times sports magazine. It was on how quarterbacks make decisions and why the Wonderlic is such a waste of time:
Three and a half seconds: that's how long, on average, a quarterback has to make a decision about where to throw the ball. So, how does he make sense of his options in such a short amount of time, while a swarm of humongous, angry men attempt to pancake him? (Imagine skeet shooting while running for your life, and you get a sense of what it's like to stand in the pocket during a blitz.) At first glance, the answer seems obvious: a…
cortex | September 22, 2008I'm now officially the most annoying backseat driver ever. I was annoying before, but ever since I read Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic (a great book) I've turned into a Mr. Know It All, offering pearls of wisdom on everything from how to merge (be selfish) to the ideal type of intersection (the roundabout). I've even started dispensing parking advice, which caused my girlfriend to kick me out of the car in the supermarket parking lot this weekend:
In the Wal-Mart parking lot, there was something else interesting about the two groups of parkers. More women opt to adopt the "cycling" strategy [this…
mspringer | September 22, 2008Several places in the Bible, there's long lists of genealogies. The first chapter of Matthew, for instance, looks pretty much like this: ...and Asa begat Josaphat; and Josaphat begat Joram; and Joram begat Ozias; and Ozias begat Joatham; and Joatham begat Achaz; and Achaz begat Ezekias... and so on. There's a point to it. Ancestry and tribal lineage were a big deal to ancient peoples, and lists of genealogy were how people kept track of ancestry.
Extreme talent in the sciences is rarely hereditary. Great physicists tend to be extreme outliers and regression to the mean tends to reduce…
gregladen | September 22, 2008Inspired by this, I thought we would try this:
You know the Chuck Norris Facts meme, right? With items such as:
Jesus walked on water, but Chuck Norris swam through land
or
The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain.
Well, an (all too quick, possibly) Google search has revealed that the Chuck Norris (oh, you do know that Chuck is a creationist, right?) has not been translated into a PZ Myers meme. And if it has, we're gonna do it again.
So, ferinstance:
So, what does PZ Myers have behind his beard?
A chin? No! He has another argument against religion behind his beard! Ha!
But…
cwilcox | September 22, 2008Ever since scientists began experimenting with embryonic stem cells the blood of pro-life and other activists has been boiling, and a major ethical debate has ensued. Stem cell research could lead to some of the biggest medical breakthroughs since penicillin, but the destruction of embryos to attain the cells themselves has many up in arms. Thankfully, researchers at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC have found a new, omnipotent cell line that may be able to replace embryonic cells, allowing research to continue without crossing ethical lines.
Pittsburgh researchers, led by Bruno…
grrlscientist | September 21, 2008My colleague, Tara, is feeling lonely. She asked all of us SciBlings if we would ask our readers whether any of you will be attending her Cedar Rapids/Iowa City area Millionth Comment Science Blogs Party? It's going to happen tomorrow and she will be watching the film, A Flock of Dodos at 7pm in Kollros auditorium (Biology Building East, room 101). After the movie, she plans to retreat somewhere (location TBA) for drinks and discussion. Remember that the food and drinks are FREE -- how can you pass that up?? Especially all you college peeps!
If you are going to attend, please leave a comment…
mspringer | September 20, 2008Has anyone checked out ScienceBlogs' new election site, A Vote for Science? It's nominally about science issues in the presidential and congressional elections, but of course in practice it's a pretty standard near-self-parody of the ultraviolet end of the political spectrum. Well, I've got an account there as well. Haven't used it yet, but I think I probably will at some point. My own nutty borderline minarchist politics will be decidedly in the minority, but it's no fun if everyone agrees with you anyway.
Moving on, a couple of links. Here is Dr. Frank Close of Oxford University…
pharyngula | September 19, 2008The cracker incident has had yet more fallout.
I just learned that one of you generous readers did more than send a letter of support — they actually sent a nice sum of money to the university that is being transferred to the biology discipline, and which we will be using to support biology instruction. Thanks very much, whoever you are!
cortex | September 19, 2008David Foster Wallace on the increasing specialization of knowledge, or what I call the acronym boom:
Things are vastly more compartmentalized now than they were up through, say, the Renaissance. And more specialized, and more freighted with all kinds of special context. There's no way we'd expect a world-class, cutting-edge mathematician now also to be doing world-class, cutting-edge philosophy, theology, etc. Not so for the Greeks--if only because math, philosophy, and theology weren't coherently distinguishable for them. Same for the Neoplatonists and Scholastics, and etc. etc. (This is a…
cortex | September 19, 2008Wall Street sure is moody. Forty-eight hours ago we were on the verge of a financial apocalypse. Now, traders are engaging in record breaking market surges. While there certainly has been lots of news that helps explain these dramatic shifts, I wonder if a significant part of the movement is actually rooted in the raw emotions of investors.
In 2001, MIT professor Andrew Lo wanted to shed some light "on the longstanding controversy in economics and finance of whether financial markets are governed by rational forces or by emotional responses." He wired 10 currency speculators and stock…
gregladen | September 18, 2008The Carnival of Evolution is a new carnival, the second edition of which is here at Evolution Blog!
The next issue, issue nuber 3, will be hosted HERE. No, not there, here, right here on this blog you are looking at now.
Pleas send me your blog posts about your favorite topic, which is evolution, so I can put them in the carnival! Send them here, or use the Blog Entry Form here.
I'd like to post the carnival on October 15th, so please get me your submission by the 14th.
thescian | September 18, 2008No, no. This isn't from the tasteless blurb on the cover of a Creationist book. This is about research on the evolution of anus published at Nature Magazine.
"The very simple question is how to get from one opening to two," says Detlev Arendt, a researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. The question may be obvious, but it is not easy to answer. Punching a new hole on the opposite end from the mouth is unlikely from an evolutionary standpoint, says Arendt. So he and others have suggested that over time, the mouth elongated and then separated into a mouth…
jjacquet | September 18, 2008Today, Cornelia Dean at the New York Times reports on the latest findings from Costella et al. in Science about the use of individual transferable quotas in fisheries. In her article (and the study), Privately Owned Fisheries May Help Shore Up Stocks, the premise is that "allocating ownership shares of a particular fishery to individuals, cooperatives, communities or other entities gives them a reason to nurture the stock." In other words: privatize public goods. Ken Weiss at the L.A. Times also reports on the findings with a little more space. He includes quotes from Andy Rosenberg at…
cwilcox | September 18, 2008I've often been referred to as a nerd, dork, geek, etc, so I thought I ought to own up to it right away. I wouldn't want to give the impression that this blog is going to be written by someone with immaculate fashion sense and a keen eye for shoes. But which, pray tell, am I really? A nerd, a dork, or a geek? It turns out that the three don't exactly mean what I thought they did, and after extensive Wikipedia research (which we all know is the end-all-be-all of thorough research technique) I've settled on Nerd. Why?
Well, for one, I'm not a Geek. While the definition of Geek is up for…