worldsfair | July 26, 2006
Uncertain Principles (link)
PHYSICS ENVY AMONG BIOLOGISTS: FACT OR FICTION?
Physicists often state their belief that all biologists would rather be physicists, but became biologists only because they were not very good at math. As evidence for this, they point to such findings as the fact that the vast majority of published studies in virology, cell biology, endocrinology, and even microbiology, use few if any partial differential equations or elements of number theory, and only one paper written by a biologist in the past 25 years (in the field of neurophysiology) has ever used tensor…
worldsfair | July 25, 2006Well, I'm on vacation as of today and thought now was as good a time as any to show off my primary online love affair. That is, the Science Creative Quarterly of which I am the editor. For the next week or so, I've chosen a piece on the SCQ that I think fits well with a particular blog on the scienceblog consortium. Overall, that means 43 pieces for 43 different blogs presented over the next seven days. Look out for the duck.
In the meantime, here is a general description of the Science Creative Quarterly.
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- A WORTHY CAUSE INDEED -
Dear Reader,
On most mornings, somewhere in the…
bcohen | July 24, 2006A: Probably.
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DN: So Ben, what's up with those mountain tops?
BRC: They're fewer than there used to be, that's what I know.
DN: Less places to ski and stuff?
BRC: But many more places to golf, apparently.
DN: Ben, is that for real? Mountain top removal for coal, for golf, for kicks, apparently? When I first asked, I was actually referring to a scene in the new Superman movie, but this I'm guessing is non-fiction. Why on earth are they doing this? It seems like an awful lot of effort.
BRC: It is, my Canadian co-blogger, for real. But it's less work than hiring a bunch of West…
worldsfair | July 24, 2006The question posed this time:
Are there any children's books that are dear to you, either as a child or a parent, and especially ones that perhaps strike a chord with those from a science sensibility? Just curious really. And it doesn't have to be a picture book, doesn't even have to be a children's book - just a book that, for whatever reason, worked for you.
- SCIENCEBLOGGER ANSWERS -
Dave, World's Fair
So, today is the last day of the Children's book workshop, and it's been a nice change of pace for sure. The instructor, Susan Juby, was excellent and the content generally helpful and did…
worldsfair | July 24, 2006A few months ago, I attended a conference called Writing Home, Science, Literature, and the Aesthetics of Place, which had a nice byline written by Gary Geddes. It read:
"Philosophy," Novalis said, "is really homesickness, it is the urge to be at home everywhere." The home-place assumes many different guises. A physicist or mathematician may sometimes feel at home amongst, and speak of the beauty or elegance of, ideas, concepts, formulas, even shapes such as the ellipse. Writers, too, have always struggled with the problem of place and its literary evocation, even after Oscar Wilde declared…
worldsfair | July 23, 2006It's ironic but having just answered a scienceblogger question about preservation, I'm aware of a personal predicament that addresses some of the same ideals. Namely, I've got a critter in my backyard. This is what I saw on my lawn this morning:
This isn't so surprising in itself, since we live next to a farm. Lots of other fauna inhabit around and about our surroundings. But see, these are mole hills and they are wrecking my lawn. And short of doing some targeted gene therapy to coerse them into prefering my neighbour's habitat, I'm a bit stuck about what to do.
Googling mole, of course…
worldsfair | July 22, 2006I've been so busy writing about children's books, putting up silly lists, and presenting puzzles that I feel the need to write about one of the things I'm most comfortable with - that is, genetics:
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The price of cloning your beloved pet cat recently dropped from $50,000 to $32,000. If you're still undecided, it might help to know that this includes a free video.
Rodney Dangerfield sadly passed away before he was able to fully utilize the supposed human cloning techniques offered by the Raelians, a French Canadian love cult from outer space (or something like that).
A biotech company is…
bcohen | July 21, 2006Having been asked as a Science Blogger the following:
If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?...
I say: Mid-Eighteenth Century France or Thereabouts (with Scottish and Swedish and American colleagues, sure)
Diderot, D'Alembert, Condillac, Condorcet, Rousseau, Voltaire, Lavoisier, David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Linnaeus, let's put him in there too. Just think about D & D's L'Encyclopedie alone: The tree of knowledge, great plates about everything (heads, mineralogy, artisan workshops), and it just goes on.
That…
worldsfair | July 21, 2006So I'm a teacher type right? And what do I think of powerpoint? Well, it's certainly convenient, although to be honest, I'm partial to good old real time pen and projector or chalk and blackboard lectures (a good way to pace yourself). Anyway, I've had ongoing requests to put up some of the powerpoint slides I've presented previously, so I figured maybe this blog is a good place to bank some of my more interesting slides.
In the meantime, this has to be one of the funniest uses of powerpoint I seen in a while. Good song too (from Wholphin, song by Cantinero, video/powerpoint by Mad…
bcohen | July 21, 2006"On Evidence"
(and in reference to the on-going, yet still unsolved Puzzle Fantastica #1)
Since this is a science blog and scientists and engineers are all about evidence and experiments and so on, we broach the subject of evidence. Namely, what kinds of evidence have we offered, and how has that evidence been interpreted?
Some commenters have gone for an analysis of numbers. Others are seeking common patterns. Few are treating the clues as accruing, while many are picking out minor features of each clue, interpreting the "real" clue to be a visual subset of the main clue. Some consider…
worldsfair | July 21, 2006- - -
Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids!
I disagree. Figure skaters are mean sons-of-a-bitches.
Whoa! We're halfway there! Whoa! Livin' on a prayer!
And I would've gotten away with it, if it wasn't for those pesky kids!
You got me. Here's your scratch-n-sniff sticker.
You know. I do feel like chicken tonight.
But this one goes to eleven.
bcohen | July 20, 2006For centuries we've languished in the abyss of not-knowing what science is. An abyss so deep and so languishable, that we didn't even know we didn't know. A true Rumsfeldian dilemma, with mixed metaphors to boot. What accounts for scientific excellence and credibility? Why do we trust scientists? Is it because they are so serious? We just never knew.
But now we do: how can we define science? what does it take to *be* scientific? Just ask Penn's Chemistry Department and their new building.
The answer: Flemish Bond Brickwork. And it was right there in front of our faces all along!
This…
worldsfair | July 20, 2006Looks like an appropriate time to put this one up on the blog. I have to say that this was the one of the easiest pieces I've ever written. It's also the only one that got published at McSweeney's with no additional editing whatsoever.
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IT'S A LUCKY THING FOR STEM-CELL RESEARCH THAT THE FOLLOWING PASSAGES AREN'T IN THE BIBLE.
The petri plate is the work of Satan. How does God know what a petri plate is in this ancient time before the advent of scientific achievement? It is because he's God, which is really handy for that sort of thing.
Go forth my children and use the word "embryo"…
bcohen | July 19, 2006Dave's recent thread on the Creationist Science Fair brought to mind other examples of internet-circulated satirizations of knowledge and the public. These are, to me, issues of science and society, because they are about argument, reasoning, persuasion, and sources. They are also thus about credibility -- whose sources? for example, as with the anti-abortion posting that was using The Onion as a source -- and argumentative rigor -- how is the argument framed and rebutted? (and there's probably an easier way to phrase that, since argumentative rigor has, what, seven syllables? and now I've…
worldsfair | July 19, 2006Someone passed on this link to the National Film Board of Canada lately, and I've spent a good twenty minutes checking the site out. It doesn't have the "Cosmic Zoom" animation, which is one I've been after for the longest time (it's the one that goes from boy on a boat and zooms out to universal proportions, and then zooms back in, until you start seeing atoms), but it does offer 50 other short animation films which are excellent to watch if you're into that sort of thing.
One, in particular, had a good environmental angle. It's called "Air!" and has the following write-up:
"Although only…
worldsfair | July 19, 2006Recently, I took out three of my colleagues for lunch. These were folk who were brave enough to take the plunge and participate in an opportunity to travel to Nigeria. Here, they would teach a course on molecular genetics to burgeoning Ph.D students, Faculty and the like in the vicinity of Lagos. Although, the collaboration between the institutes in Nigeria, and my own lab is informal at best, it's something that I felt a lot of responsiblity towards, particularily to these three individuals, so basically I had that breath of relief when they recently returned to Canada. It's funny, they'…
worldsfair | July 18, 2006A little late on this one, but the scienceblog question of the week (of last week), reads:
"Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?..."
If you take the question at face falue - that is in an empirical sense - then the answer is of course not. You could, I suppose, say it would be nice to at least give everything a fighting chance, especially so far as how our own human ecological footprint comes into play. But the fact of the matter is that even if we embarked on a "preservation of all kick," the reality would be that it would be done under a human…
bcohen | July 18, 2006The book Rebuilt, by Michae Chorost, and the documentary Sound and Fury, by Josh Aronson, here re-considered. (This is a Bookshelf #1 revisitation and expansion.) ((No reason for mentioning Jerry Falwell, by the way. That was a typo.))
I finished Rebuilt, about cochlear implants and technology-society relationships and deaf culture and the Bionic Man and cyborg philosophy. Here are some tidbits.
Rebuilt is about cochlear implants. They put a thing in your head, behind your ear. You can then hear. Or have sounds transmitted to your brain, through the device. "You can then hear." Some…
worldsfair | July 18, 2006This use to be circulating the web back in 2001. Never did figure out if it was real (it was presented at http://objective.jesussave.us/creationsciencefair.html), but good for a laugh or looks of disgust anyway.
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2001 Prize Winners:
Elementary School Level:
1st Place: "My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)"
Cassidy Turnbull (grade 5) presented her uncle, Steve. She also showed photographs of monkeys and invited fairgoers to note the differences between her uncle and the monkeys. She tried to feed her uncle bananas, but he declined to eat them. Cassidy has conclusively shown that…
worldsfair | July 17, 2006Here presented is the final clue in our little experiment. It being the start of a story, a novel to be precise. In fact, we're getting tingles just thinking how lovely it all comes together, and the challenge, of course, is to see whether you can break our mystery. We will present the answer soon enough - maybe next week, the week after that, or maybe because it's always one of those two weeks, we'll deliberately wait until the third.
If you have the answer, or any answer (and we've seen brilliance in those before [1,2]), please say so below in the comments. Or better yet, post something…