Physical Sciences
oracknows | December 8, 2006Ever since I started Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) back in June, I had always intended that someday I wanted to expand this loving deconstruction of various forms of woo beyond just medical woo and quackery. True, having a little fun with woo that claims to treat disease or restore health is something that I've gotten pretty good at. You may wonder why I would want to move beyond medicine occasionally. After all, there's no shortage of medical woo to deal with every Friday, and I'll almost certainly return to it next week.
Sometimes a skeptic needs a change of pace, and this is one of…
sarahdasher | December 7, 2006Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) was a professor at the London School of Economics and among the most influential philsophers of science of the 20th century. Among his other projects, Popper dealt with the question of what is, and what is not, science.
Popper proposed that what separates scientific theory from non-science is empirical falsifiability: that is, whether an idea can be disproven by observation and experimental testing. God's existence, for example, cannot be called a scientific theory because no observation can falsify the existence of God. A logical corollary to this idea…
clock | December 3, 2006Sandra Porter is having fun collecting all the new-fangled biological subdisciplines that end with "-omics". The final product of each such project also has a name, ending with "-ome".
You have all heard of the Genome (complete sequence of all the DNA of an organism) and the Genomics (the effort to obtain such a sequence), but there are many more, just look at this exhaustive list! In my written prelims back in 1999, I suggested that sooner or later there will be an organismome...until someone whispers that the term "physiology" already exists.
There are a couple of things that strike me…
mixingmemory | December 2, 2006Let's step into the wayback machine and talk about some research that even the psychologists among us might not be aware of (I certainly wasn't). It seems that at the turn of the 20th century, many psychologists and psychophysicists (including the father of psychophysics, Gustave Fechner) were interested in aesthetics. Out of this interest came the idea, inspired by the work of Helmholtz and others, that geometrical figures had a certain "energy," which influenced the subjective quality of their combinations. For some reason, this idea reminded one psychologist, E. Bullough1, of what he…
oracknows | November 28, 2006Remind me to mark April 10 down on my calendar. I never realized it was such an important day, and, in any case, I wouldn't want to miss it. Nor should the rest of the skeptical blogosphere. Why? It's World Homeopathy Day, "celebrated" (or, if you're a fan of evidence-based medicine, as I am, lamented) in "honor" of Samuel Hahnemann, the originator of homeopathy, who was born on April 10, 1755.
Oh, joy. (On the other hand, I'm sure I can think of some sort of blog fun to have next April 10.)
Homeopathy, as you may recall, is the "alternative" medical therapy in which, it is postulated, a…
clock | November 25, 2006Pot may be good and bad, researchers propose:
The truth about marijuana might be more complex than either its opponents or its champions suggest, some scientists argue.
We're more genetically diverse than thought:
Research has found that at least one in 10 human genes vary in the number of copies of certain DNA sequences.
A step toward quantum computers:
Physicists say they've taken a step toward making computers that work at blinding speeds thanks to the weird realities of quantum physics.
One cell makes almost any heart tissue, study finds:
New research could be a stride forward for therapy…
clock | November 22, 2006Who is going to blog serious stuff over the holidays? It's time to eat and drink and be merry. So, a silly meme is in order. Seen on Cyberspace Rendezvous (and a couple of other science blogs) (under the fold):
1. In two words, explain what ended your last relationship?
I moved 13000 miles away.
2. When was the last time you shaved your legs?
Never.
3. What were you doing this morning at 8am?
Sleeping
4. What were you doing 15 minutes ago?
Writing a blog post and eating brownies.
5. Are you any good at math?
Used to be, 15 years ago.
6. Your prom night?
It is different in Yugoslavia, but…
oracknows | November 21, 2006I tried not to do it. I really did.
I tried to resist the temptation to respond to Deepak Chopra's latest incursions into woo as he flailed futilely at Richard Dawkins' arguments for science. Fortunately, PZ Myers and MarkCC have been around to take down his idiocy. But then I thought about it Why should they have all the fun? Besides, the discussion I've been having over the last week or so about the infiltration of pseudoscientific woo into the nation's medical schools and its promotion by medical students is just way too depressing. I needed to switch topics, although I'm not sure that…
goodmath | November 19, 2006One of the more pathetic examples of bad math from the creationist camp is an argument based on the
claim that the sun is shrinking. This argument has been [thoroughly
debunked](http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE310.html) by other folks, so I haven't bothered to
add my two cents here at GM/BM. I hadn't heard anyone mention this old canard until
recently, when a reader wrote to me to ask if I could comment on it. I *hate* to disappoint
my readers, and this is *such* a great example of flaming bad math, so I figured what the heck. So hang on to your hats, here it comes!
There are a lot of…
oracknows | November 19, 2006A couple of days ago, I wrote a criticism of the increasing tendency to teach woo in American medical schools and then later followed up with a post questioning the contention that teaching woo has the benefit of improving the doctor-patient relationship. A physician going by the 'nym Solo Practitioner took umbrage:
As a physician, I find the anger with which this blog is written disturbing. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine was created by the NIH to provide grant money and motivation for research to be performed in these fields in order to apply evidence-based…
jlynch | November 17, 2006Larry Moran says it well:
I am not a Darwinist, just as most of my colleagues in the Department of Physics are not Newtonists, and most of my friends who study genetics are not Mendelists. All three of these terms refer to the ideas of famous men (Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel) who made enormous contributions to science. But in all three cases, the modern sciences have advanced well beyond anything envisaged by their founders.
Call me an evolutionary biologist.
Darwin's genius was to provide the first workable naturalistic mechanism for evolution (that is, natural selection).…
goodmath | November 15, 2006As [PZ](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/11/chopra_go_play_with_steve_ir…) pointed out, Deepak Chopra is back with *yet another* of his clueless, uninformed, idiotic rants. This time, he's written [an article trying to "prove" that there is an afterlife](http://www.intentblog.com/archives/2006/11/what_happens_af.html). Normally, when PZ comments on something like this, I have nothing to add; he does such a good job fisking
credulous morons. But this time, I actually have something to add.
We'll start with the trivial, and move on to the egregious:
>Thousands of patients have died,…
thusspakezuska | November 10, 2006What are the best pickup lines for scientists and science-savvy folk?...
I think I can best answer this Ask A Science Blogger question by quoting myself.
So:
Suzanne Franks, in her fabulous essay Suzy the Computer vs. Dr. Sexy: What's A Geek Girl To Do When She Wants To Get Laid? which you can now read in the available for purchase She's Such a Geek! Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff, writes:
When I got to college, I found frat parties dominated the social life, and I suspected that smarts might not be a high-value attribute in that scene. Nevertheless, I trotted…
tlambert | November 5, 2006Christopher Monckton has a lengthy article in the Daily Telegraph where he attempts to debunk the notion that there is significant anthropogenic global warming. The main problem with his article is that he doesn't know what he's writing about it. He offers up an untidy pile of factoids, some of which are true but out of context, some of which are not at all true, and some of which he seems to have conjured up out of thin air. What they all have in common is that they support his position. Monckton seems to be unable to separate the wheat from the chaff. My favourite factoid is this one:…
mixingmemory | November 2, 2006What is psychology? If you were asked to define it, could you? In the 12 years that I've been studying psychology, I've been asked no more than 5 times what psychology is, and each time, I struggled and ultimately failed to come up with a definition. To be honest, though, that doesn't bother me in the least. If there's one thing psychology has taught me, it's that definitions aren't worth a whole hell of a lot anyway. And given how few times the issue has come up, despite the fact that I've been surrounded by psychologists for the entirety of my adult life, I never really thought it bothered…
jstemwedel | October 26, 2006We're just past the midpoint of National Chemistry Week, so I thought I'd share a "classic" post (from last year's National Chemistry Week) about how studying chemistry can nourish one's human yearnings.
What's so great about chemistry? Of course, if you're a kid, chemistry has the allure of magic -- something might explode! (For those averse to permanent damage, there are plenty of cool chemistry activities that are much safer than whatever my brother did with his store-bought chemistry set to scorch the hell out of our parents' card table.) But I suspect it's real charm for students, at…
drorzel | October 26, 2006Lots of people are jumping on Gregg Easterbrook for his remarks on the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq. In particular, fellow ScienceBlogger Tim Lambert blasts him for saying:
The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of American action. The study uses extremely loose methods of estimation, including attributing about half its total to "unknown causes." The study also commits the logical offense of multiplying a series of estimates, then treating the…
tlambert | October 21, 2006I guess that the next time a new physics study comes out Science will ask epidemiologists what they think of it. You see, John Bohannon, the reporter for Science, decided that opinions from a couple of physicists and an economist were more important than getting comments from experts in epidemiology.
Bohannon report on the Lancet study (subscription required) states:
Neil Johnson and Sean Gourley, physicists at Oxford University in the
U.K. who have been analyzing Iraqi casualty data for a separate study,
also question whether the sample is representative. The paper
indicates that the survey…
jrosenhouse | October 20, 2006As several other SB'ers have already noted, physicist Brian Greene offers this defense of string theory in today's New York Times. He concludes:
I have worked on string theory for more than 20 years because I believe it provides the most powerful framework for constructing the long-sought unified theory. Nonetheless, should an inconsistency be found, or should future studies reveal an insuperable barrier to making contact with experimental data, or should new discoveries reveal a superior approach, I'd change my research focus, and I have little doubt that most string theorists would too.…
oracknows | October 19, 2006Well, this is encouraging to see: A scientific journal publishing an article debunking pseudoscience, in this case the pseudoscience of homeopathy. (Grrrlscientist might object to the use of Hogwarts in the title, in essence comparing homeopathy to the wizardry of Harry Potter's world. So would I, actually. Such a comparison is an insult to Hogwarts.) In any case, I thought it'd be a nice little tidbit, a warmup for tomorrow's Your Friday Dose of Woo, if you will, to discuss it briefly.
It starts out with a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes:
Do you think I don't understand the hydrostatic…