General Science
evolvingthoughts | April 9, 2007
John Hawks links to Greg Laden's blog in which he points out that Nisbet and Mooney misused the notion of framing. It seems (I am not that familiar with it, except via secondhand stuff about Lakoff's views, which Laden notes is derivative of the work of Goffman) that framing doesn't mean what they think it means, as Inigo Montoya might have said if they were Sicilian.
Or does it?
Words do not always mean the same thing as their theoretical contexts imply or define. Take "paradigm". Kuhn used it in a context (later deconstructed by Margaret Masterman into 21 distinct senses, some subtly…
evolvingthoughts | April 7, 2007
Rarely has science been as much a public issue as in the past 30 years. Sure, people have queried the wisdom of this or that science or technology in the past, like the use of nuclear power or for weapons. But apart from anti-vaccination movements since the late nineteenth century, very little public attack was made on the science itself, and, when it was, it was rarely taken seriously. Sometime in the past few years, things changed. Why?
This is merely my impression, but I think that science began to be treated as equivalent to personal opinion some time in the 1970s, with the New Left…
evolvingthoughts | April 3, 2007
Don Metcalf, who I have mentioned before here, has been awarded the American Association for Cancer Research Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research.
Donald Metcalf receives American Association for Cancer Research Lifetime Achievement Award
PHILADELPHIA – Donald Metcalf, M.D., the physiologist renowned as "the father of hematopoietic cytokines" for his pioneering work on the control of blood cell formation, will receive the American Association for Cancer Research Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research.
The award will be presented on Monday, April 16, 2007 during…
evolvingthoughts | April 3, 2007
Etiology is the study of the causes of things (usually diseases). In my own personal lexicon, etiobiology is the study of the causes and origins of biological processes. Usually, the search term is "origins of life", and recently some new papers have reinvigorated the field.
One is the rerunning of the Miller-Urey experiment done in the 1950s by Stanley Miller. Miller had assumed, based on the work of his advisory, Harold Urey, that the early earth had a reducing atmosphere, in which there is little or no oxygen. This is now thought to be wrong, so some (creationists, OK?) said that…
evolvingthoughts | April 2, 2007
Revere at Effect Measure has an update and discussion of the Elsevier arms trade issue that is worth reading for its measuredness (natch!).
evolvingthoughts | March 30, 2007
There will no doubt be many April Fool's gags and hoaxes tomorrow. None will have the cachet of the Spaghetti Harvest, or the discovery of Homo micturans, because you can't get the wood, you know, but they will all be worthwhile relief from the inanity and insanity of our present society.
But there is a hoax doing the rounds that, while not an April Fool's gag, is a gag about April the 1st.
The story is this:
Hooray For That Judge In Florida, an atheist became incensed over the preparation for Easter and Passover holidays and decided to contact the local ACLU about the discrimination…
evolvingthoughts | March 27, 2007
Slashdot is reporting that an aircraft from Lan Chile was nearly hit by flaming space junk on a trip from Chile to New Zealand recently. I can attest to how spectacular and potentially dangerous that might be, as I saw some come falling down one night myself.
We (Die Familie Wilkins) were coming into Melbourne at about 2.30am from the north. The rest of the Familie were asleep, so only I saw it happen. A very bright light, one that illuminated the landscape for kilometers around and was subjectively bright as the sun for a brief second or two, flashed directly in front of me, and as it…
evolvingthoughts | March 23, 2007
Grrlscientist just pointed out that MDs are threatening to boycott The Lancet, because Reed Elsevier, the publisher, supports weapons fairs, including manufacturers of cluster bombs.
This is a worry. Elsevier publishes around 40 journals that have a philosophy component. Perhaps philosophers, who are after all supposed to be consistent on principles, should also boycott those journals. I list some of the major ones under the fold.
Cognition
Cognitive Systems Research
Endeavour
Historia Mathematica
History of European Ideas
International Journal of Law and Psychiatry
International Review…
evolvingthoughts | March 21, 2007
OK, I recently recommended Medlar Comfits, but I thought I'd mention a few other blogs and sites I've come across lately.
George Bristow's Secret Freezer is a bird watcher's site of great grace and interest. Martin Collinson, near Aberdeen, does history, morphology (beautiful plumage!) and all kinds of nice stuff. A bit like an old bookshop that does natural history.
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog discusses the forgotten aspect of biodiversity - the crops and animals we rely upon, and their wild relatives.
The Ranger's Blog has interesting snippets about environmental and…
evolvingthoughts | March 20, 2007
Some more or less random links that I am grouping under the epistemology of philosophy of science.
For those who have not reached Level 9 or higher in the Illuminati, "epistemology" has nothing to do with getting drunk, but with how knowledge is acquired (episteme means "understanding, skill or knowledge of some field").
First, Medlar Comfits has a nice essay on what science is compared to the sort of "believe authority" view of creationists. Also, this is a really nice blog I hadn't previously seen, with for instance articles on the use of English to communicate by ESL writers. Well…
evolvingthoughts | March 20, 2007Parents, don't let your kids drink soft drinks (except root beer):
Root beer may be 'safest' soft drink for teeth
Exposing teeth to soft drinks, even for a short period of time, causes dental erosion—and prolonged exposure can lead to significant enamel loss. Root beer products, however, are non-carbonated and do not contain the acids that harm teeth, according to a study in the March/April 2007 issue of General Dentistry, the AGD's clinical, peer-reviewed journal. That might be something to consider during the next visit to the grocery store.
Consumers often consider soft drinks to be…
evolvingthoughts | March 20, 2007
And can somebody explain in non-mathematical terms, why E8 is so important?
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2007
Courtesy of Moselio Schechter's blog Small Things Considered, is a new report, downloadable in PDF, from the National Institutes of Health, together with the American Society for Microbiology, on research into bacteria, entitled Basic Research on Bacteria. The Essential Frontier.
The money quote?
“...research on topics like evolution and ecology has a direct impact on the advancement of human health.”
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2007
I have an ambivalent relationship with the medical profession. On the one hand - my left - I lost a finger because a general practitioner refused to investigate a wart, that turn cancerous. On the other, I think medicine is one of this civilisation's greatest achievements, at least when it is made available to people.
But I don't think highly of medical practice. So it comes as a great pleasure to read a medical practitioner saying:
So I was very happy to read an article in The Boston Globe today entitled, The mistakes doctors make by Dr. Jerome Groopman. Unfortunately, the online…
sb admin | March 18, 2007
We've got four contests this time, with competition fierce and passions running high. Speak for which science concepts deserve to go to the next round! Get your votes in by 10PM Eastern Time on Tuesday, March 20. Results will be posted shortly after that.
The contests:
Newton's Second Law vs. High-Speed Internet: are the basic mechanics of the real world, or the substrate of cyberspace, more important?
Euler Angles vs. Particle: is the basic particle description of matter, or the Euler Angles as a parameterization of rotations, more important to science?
General Relativity vs.…
evolvingthoughts | March 15, 2007
After the sermon comes, as we all know, the benediction. I just wanted to say that I welcome religious believers here. I want you to read me, and the other Science Bloggers, whether they are aggressively atheist or assertively theist, bored, or just good mannered, because discussion is what it's all about. So come forth... err, go into the blog... whatever, look forward to hearing from you.
Chris at Highly Allochthonous (I just love typing that name) calls this a "robust exchange of views". Where I grew up, the phrase "robust exchange of views", or "full and frank exchange" basically meant…
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2007
Is the plant [Thalictrum lucidum] sufficiently distinct from T. flavum? It seems to me a daughter of time. [Planta, an satis distincta, a T. flavo? Videtur temporis filia. Species plantarum 1753]
"The Daughter of Time" (Josephine Tey)" was also the title of a wonderful detective story.
My new motto: Videtur temporis filia...
[Quoted in Ramsbottom, John. 1938. Linnaeus and the species concept. Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London 150 (192-220): 201.]
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2007
OK, day 4, and I'm still not smoking (Hi, I'm John... Hi John). This is attempt number 247 or so, but one thing that has motivated this attempt is the danger of passive smoking to my as yet unsullied son, who lives with me (and has a sensible attitude to smoking - it's bad, and you should stop it Dad).
But the published evidence on passive smoking is equivocal. Or is it? In Nature this week is a report that funding from tobacco companies was given to a study on passive smoking (concluding against the claim that passive smoke is harmful) that is methodologically challenged.
Given the…
evolvingthoughts | March 12, 2007
Here's an interesting paper: it suggests that major catastrophes need not always lead to immediate extinction pulses, but that there can be a lag of as much as 2 million years (in the case of the rise of the Panama isthmus).
In hindsight this is not so surprising. Ecosystems generate a lot of their own resources as by products of autotrophic organisms (basically, photosynthesisers and lithotrophs), and so as long as there is a sufficient influx of energy into the system, an ecosystem might be able to persist for some time, buffered by the productivity of the ecosystem itself, if it is rich…
evolvingthoughts | March 12, 2007
No, not the methodological stuff. That's boring (which is why I have a grant application out right now on that topic).
This. A roundup and prospectus on what the degradation of biodiversity is leading us to.
Also, see the interview with Peter Raven, here.