General Science
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2008
A recent New Scientist article poses the often-posed question in the title. The answer is mine. Forgive me as I rant and rave on a bugbear topic...
OK, I know that we live in the "information age" and far be it from me to denigrate the work of Shannon, Turing and von Neumann, but it's gotten out of hand. Information has become the new magical substance of the age, the philosopher's stone. And, well, it just isn't.
In the article linked, physicist William Bialek at Princeton University argues that there is a minimum amount of information that organisms need to store in order to be alive."…
evolvingthoughts | January 15, 2008
Anyone who knows the film The Princess Bride knows what happens next. Westley gets hit hard by a rodent about the size of a pitbull. However, it seems that ROUS's (Rodents of Unusual Size) actually may have existed, in Uruguay. Nature reports that the skull of one has been discovered, and the animal itself may have weighed a tonne (2200lbs) or so.
Next, we'll discover that there are miracle men...
evolvingthoughts | January 13, 2008
TR Gregory at Scientific Blogging asks why advisors would encourage their students to publish. One of the reasons is:
Most of the graduate and undergraduate students with whom I have worked directly have been quite excited by the possibility of seeing their names in print on a high quality piece of work.
I agree with this. I was encouraged by David Hull, who marked my MA thesis, to publish some of it, and as a result I got my first paper, ten years ago. I still recall the thrill of seeing the reprints arrive in the mail. That was my name there. I did a little dance.
Even now, seeing a…
evolvingthoughts | January 10, 2008
One of my colleagues just raised a point I hadn't thought of vis á vis Special Relativity.
I had always thought that an observer on a photon would not experience time. My colleague suggests that each frame of reference - the fast moving and the "stationary" - would experience time as "normal" but see the other FoP FoR as having stopped. I don't know enough to be more than mildly dangerous. Can anyone resolve this?
Anti-Einsteinians will be summarily deleted from the responses.
evolvingthoughts | January 5, 2008
...said Charles Darwin, more than any man ever has. He should have, too - he spent seven years of his life working up the first encyclopedic monograph on the group. But that pales into insignificance compared to Alan Southward, who died last year.
The Other 95% has a very nice roundup post on Southward's work on barnacles, including a just-published paper, which you should immediately go read. And some nice pictures of my favourite historical invert, the Gooseneck Barnacle that gave rise to the myth of the Barnacle Goose.
evolvingthoughts | January 3, 2008
Microsoft Word’s “Track Changes” and Endnote are synthetic lethals.
From The Futile Cycle. "A synthetic pair of genes are two gene variants that alone are fine, but when combined into the same organism, cause it to die."
Why? When you have Endnoted a paper and send it to a friend or coauthor, and they make changes that are Tracked, and this includes reformatting the bibliography, all the bibliographic references become marked as changes (the workaround is to turn off Track Changes when you reformat, then turn it back on again. But this is a computer, folks, so why should you need to do…
evolvingthoughts | December 29, 2007
Henry Gee reviews the Golden Compass, and comes up with largely the same conclusions I would have had I been as insightful as he. A quote:
It’s a long time since I read the book, The Northern Lights, on which the film is based, so perhaps it’s a problem with the script. The bottom line is this – the whole Good vs Evil schtick is unconvincing because the baddies (the Authority and the Magisterium – that’s God and the Church, geddit? No? Oh, go back to sleep) are so unrelentingly monolithic.
And not only that, we learn so little about them. Why are they so hellbent on doing in their…
evolvingthoughts | December 29, 2007
One of the things about being a Mac user, for 20-odd years now, is that you just like your corporate hero. Sure, they stuffed up on a number of hardware releases, and their delay in getting a multitasking OS out the door is only redeemed by the quality of the OS they did release, but by and large, they have been a pretty good graven idol, especially since the Holy St Steve returned to guide them.
But now...
... a local developers' site has noted that Apple have patented a DRM daemon like Windows Genuine Advantage, which as everyone knows is a genuine advantage to Microsoft and nobody…
evolvingthoughts | December 24, 2007
OK, so today is Christmas day, December 25. On this day* a man was born who changed the world. He affected a growing tradition that has left no part of the world untouched, for good or ill. He revealed the workings of the universe. He spent his life teaching us to understand ourselves, and was constantly predicting the end of the earth, based on revelation. His piercing gaze made many quail before him, and he suffered hypocrisy not at all, but was generous with those of good faith. He fought his Adversary unceasingly, and is remembered also for his ideas about coins.
The reason for the…
evolvingthoughts | December 22, 2007
Okay, so the Eighth Day Inventism calendar as rolled around to coincide our Holy day with one of yours. We Inventists are open minded people and often try to reach out to you heathen irreligious puppy grinding moral monsters. Because that's what you are, you know, if you don't exactly believe and do what we Inventists do.
So to try to save you from your moral malaise of happy lives and families, meaningless rituals that you perform on turkeys several times a year, and other abominations that you make more or less simultaneous with the summer solstice (did I mention that Inventists use God'…
evolvingthoughts | December 19, 2007
As I mentioned earlier, I love a good book review if it excoriates a stupid book. Norman Levitt, of Rutgers University, has an absolutely lovely piece of critical invective for Steve Fuller's defense of Intelligent Design here. Fuller is a sociologist philosopher* of science who seems to dislike science intensely, unless he does it. At the Dover Trial, he got a lot of money to write a fairly incoherent defense of ID, which seemed only to exacerbate the judge's final decision, and it seems he is cashing in again by putting out a book based on his "expert witness". Read Levitt's deflation of…
evolvingthoughts | December 10, 2007
Let's suppose there is a game, say, baseball. This game is named and described for the ways that adult humans with bats, balls, and fields, behave normatively, as written up in an authoritative manual. Everybody knows what baseball is, or can point to an example of it.
Along comes someone, however, who notes that there is a formal resemblance between baseball and what some ants do in some hitherto undiscovered nest. So, they start to call it "ant baseball". So far, no harm. Then someone else comes along and starts making inferences about what ants do in terms of the rules of the game as…
evolvingthoughts | December 5, 2007
I love a good academic stoush, so long as I'm just watching and not involved either as an antagonist or as collateral damage. Recently, Steven Pinker published a book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, which was subsequently reviewed by Patricia Churchland, in Nature. Unfortunately, Churchland ascribed a hypothesis to Pinker, which Pinker was, in fact, attacking. Now Pinker has responded. I trust Nature won't mind my reproducing it here:
Patricia Churchland's review of my book The Stuff of Thought ('Poetry in motion' Nature 450, 29–30; 2007) says virtually…
evolvingthoughts | November 24, 2007
... a book was published that changed the way we thought of biology.
evolvingthoughts | November 4, 2007
[A guest post by palentologist and geologist Chris Nedin]
It's taken the best part of 50 years but it's finally here! 50 years after the International Geophysical Year (1957-8) that took a global geophysical view of the globe, one of the outcomes of that global geophysical view has just been published – the Digital Magnetic Anomaly Map (Korhonen et.al. 2007) (the BBC has the story and an annotated copy of the map here).
The map shows magnetic intensity readings of crustal rocks from around the world, combined on a single map for the first time.
Magnetic intensity is what's left after…
evolvingthoughts | November 3, 2007
Oh, I just know this is going to get enmeshed in arguments about framing, but I don't care.
A new movement in the UK, home of democracy as we know it, involves scientists getting out there and active in public engagement. So what? I hear you ask. This is old stuff. But what is new here is that it is the scientists who start the debates, before the public has a chance to react and set up the framing issues, to ensure that a reasonable and informed debate is had. It is called upstream public engagement.
I think this might be a useful modus operandi for other public intellectual domains;…
evolvingthoughts | October 30, 2007
Here is an article in Harvard Magazine on bacteria and other wee beasties that make up the bulk of the living world, that is worth reading. It's called "The Undiscovered Planet". Hat tip to Jason Grossman.
evolvingthoughts | October 29, 2007
The above are icons to be used when blogging on actual peer-reviewed research (as opposed to popular reports or kookery). I had a marginal involvement in this (I made some passing comments early on) so it is with great pride... no, actually, it's all down to Dave Munger, who was a champion. I had nothing useful to do with it.
Here's what Dave said:
We're pleased to announce that BPR3's Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research icons are now ready to go! Anyone can use these icons to show when they're making a serious post about peer-reviewed research, rather than just linking to a news article…
evolvingthoughts | October 5, 2007
On Monday night last, Jason Grossman, a philosopher form the Australian National University rang me with an idea. He was coming to my university to give a talk entitled "How to Feyerabend", arguing that Feyerabend was a dadaist rather than an anarchist. I'd tell you more about his talk, but I can't, for reasons that will become obvious.
He wanted to do the talk as a dadaist performance. How can I help? I enquired. That was my mistake.
Well, he said, I want us to give a simultaneous presentation. What, in turn? I asked. No, at the same time. With music. And Allison (his partner) folding…
evolvingthoughts | September 20, 2007
Jason Rosenhouse, of Evolutionblog, has posted a rather snarky review of a book review by the historian and philosopher Ian Hacking that was published in The Nation. Jason titled his comment "How not to defend evolution". Here's my take on it.
Jason thinks that Hacking was pretentious, that he was not careful in his use of language, and that he was wordy. The essay was 4600 words long. Jason's response is 1520 words of part one of a two parter. Hmm...
The problem as I see it lies in the attitude of the sciences (and yes, I include mathematics amongst that tribe) to the humanities, and in…