Science
oracknows | August 5, 2010I hate science press releases.
Well, not exactly. I hate science press releases that hype a study beyond its importance. I hate it even more when the investigators who published the study make statements not justified by the study and use the study as a jumping off point to speculate wildly. True, it's not always the fault of the investigators, particularly if they don't have much experience dealing with the press, but all too often scientists fall prey to the tendency to gab glibly and give the reporter what he or she wants: Pithy, juicy quotes that relate the results to what the reporter…
jrosenhouse | August 4, 2010I can't quite believe I am writing this, but the HuffPo religion section actually has not one, but two, good posts up. The first is from Victor Stenger talking about some of the daffier misapplications of quantum mechanics. It makes a nice follow-up to Monday's post about Michael Shermer's essay.
In short, a physical object isn't either a particle or a wave. These are just two alternative descriptions of the same object. You do not have to measure one property or the other exclusively. Observing a beam of light with appropriate apparatus, you find that localized photons are always present…
pharyngula | August 4, 2010
I have no idea how this stuff gets published. I've been sent a new paper that tests the effect of prayer, and I was appalled: it's got such deep methodological problems that nothing can be concluded from it, but that doesn't stop the authors, who argue that they're seeing that Proximal Intercessory Prayer improves vision and hearing in people in Mozambique.Proximal Intercessory Prayer (PIP) is their very own term for what they do, to distinguish it from distant prayer. What is it, you may ask? Here is their protocol.
Western and Mozambican Iris and Global Awakening [two evangelical/…
drorzel | August 4, 2010I had the tab open and everything, and still somehow forgot to include a link to John Baez's blog post reporting on a talk by Tony Leggett which directly addresses some of the questions asked about yesterday's superconductivity post. It's about a talk called "Cuprate superconductivity: the current state of play" ("state of play" apparently being a favorite phrase of Leggett's), and directly addresses what's weird about high-temperature superconductors and why they haven't been explained theoretically.
These are notes from a talk, and thus somewhat compressed, but it's a good summary of the…
pharyngula | August 3, 2010
This past weekend, I attended my 35th high school reunion. It's a strange phenomenon to be meeting people you haven't seen since you were 18, and further weirdness ensues when we discover that most of them are already grandparents. There have been a lot of life changes in 35 years. Saddest of all, though, is the ritual listing of the deceased…and I learned that one of my former classmates died in her late 40s of emphysema, a progressive and irreversible lung disease that leads to the near complete loss of lung function. The only cure right now is a lung transplant, and patients who've been…
drorzel | August 3, 2010There's a great post at NeuroDojo on the Heffernan business this weekend, and what the take-away ought to be:
Yeah, let's criticize that she didn't get past the first impression of science blogs. We should expect Heffernan to look before leaping - she writes for the Times, after all, which still has a certain reputation as a paper of record and quality. But let's not pretend that her impression ain't shared by anyone else.
For instance, she took heat for recommending a climate denialist blog. But that's not the first time that blog got recommended by people who ought to know better. That…
drorzel | August 3, 2010In the reader request thread, Brad asks about superconductors:
Why is a room temperature superconductor so hard? Why do things have to be cold for there to be no resistance (I can guess, but my knowledge of super conductors consists of the words "Cooper pairs" which does not get me very far.)
Since next year will mark 100 years since the initial discovery of superconductivity in mercury by Heike Kammerlingh Onnes, this is a good topic to talk about. Unfortunately, it's a bit outside my field, but I can give you what I know from my not-much-better-than-layman's understanding of the field, and…
jrosenhouse | August 2, 2010Michael Shermer has has an excellent essay responding to Deepak Chopra's “quantum flapdoodle.”
Chopra's use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which consists of stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience. But the world of subatomic particles has no correspondence with the world of Newtonian mechanics. They are two different physical systems at two different scales, and they are described by two different…
oracknows | August 2, 2010...Scientopia, a new science blogging collective that just opened shop today.
You'll note that several of its founding members are refugees from right here at Sb, including White Coat Underground, Good Math, Bad Math, Adventures in Ethics and Science, The Questionable Authority, This Scientific Life, and Thus Spake Zuska. There are also several other intriguing-looking blogs there with which I'm not familiar. I might have to check them out.
Hmmm. The entire collective looks rather promising...
drorzel | August 2, 2010Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings gets credit for inspiring two posts today with his proposed Murphy's Law experiment and this one, about an unrelated issue in quantum measurement. This is an analogy suggested by a colleague a couple of years ago, comparing the projection of a quantum wavefunction in the measurement process to the lottery.
The classic example of this problem is something like the double slit experiment with single particles. You have some position-sensitive detector that we can imagine as being made up of a large number of pixels, each having some probability of detecting a…
drorzel | August 2, 2010Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau proposes an an experimental test of Murphy's Law using the lottery. While amusing, it's ultimately flawed-- Murphy's Law is something of the form:
Anything that can go wrong, will.
Accordingly, it can only properly be applied to situations in which there is a reasonable expectation of success, unless something goes wrong. The odds of winning the lottery are sufficiently low that Murphy's Law doesn't come into play-- you have no reasonable expectation of picking the winning lottery numbers, so there's no need for anything to "go wrong" in order for you…
drorzel | August 2, 2010Avi Steiner emailed me with a set of questions that are too good not to turn into a blog post:
Being a math/science major at a small liberal arts college, I unfortunately never get the "full" experience of a math/science talk. Since I do plan on eventually attending grad school, I thought it might be beneficial to get an idea as to what the aforementioned "full" experience is. Therefore, I present to you and your readers the following questions:
1. At what point in a group's/individual's research will they choose to give a talk?
2. What sort of questions are asked?
3. Are there any recurring…
oracknows | August 2, 2010About six months ago, I applied my usual brand of not-so-Respectful Insolence to what I termed unforgivable medical errors. These are errors that are so obviously harmful and lethal that there is no excuse for not putting systems into place to prevent them or so egregiously careless that there is, quite simply, no excuse for them to occur. As I mentioned before, there are a handful of such "unforgivable" errors in surgery. Although not all surgeons would necessarily agree on the specific identities of all of them, there are some upon which nearly all surgeons would agree. Examples such as…
rallain | August 1, 2010Chasing Mummies is kind of like a cross between the reality showness of Deadliest Catch and History's Mysteries. I like these kind of shows. My kids like these shows. It's win-win.
The basic idea of this show is to follow this dude, Zahi Hawass- he is like in charge of all the Egyptian museums. Here is a youtube clip that gives a pretty good overview.
However, I do have a beef - well maybe it is just a small quibble. At the beginning of one show, Zahi is all pumped up about some new discovery. They found some tombs near the great pyramids that seem to be the tombs of workers that did…
oracknows | July 31, 2010Two days ago, I posted my utter contempt for the idea of a science section in that cesspit of pseudsocience, New Age woo, and quackery, The Huffington Post. Part of the reason for my scoffing at the very idea that a science section in HuffPo would not rapidly degenerate into yet another outlet for more of the same.
Another aspect of the HuffPo culture that is utter anathema to good science blogging is its culture of deleting critical comments. There's even been a whole blog, Banned from HuffPo, dedicated to discussing and publicizing HuffPo's offenses against free speech. The blogger, Red Dog…
drorzel | July 31, 2010A lot of Twitter energy was soaked up Friday afternoon by a half stupid article by Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times. Sparked by Sodamageddon, she takes a look at ScienceBlogs for the first time, and doesn't like what she sees:
Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that's not what's bothersome about them. What's bothersome is that the site…
drorzel | July 30, 2010Commenter miller asks:
It's often said that virtual particles can "borrow" energy, as long as it's for a short enough time to be compatible with the uncertainty principle. This never made sense to me, because the uncertainty principle says that product of uncertainty in energy and uncertainty in time is greater than h-bar over 2, not less than. Please explain.
The relevant equation is in the graphic at the top of this blog, just to the right of the title-- the one with ΔEΔt. It's easy to get turned around with this, due to the slightly unfamiliar business of working with inequalities.
The…
pharyngula | July 30, 2010Spiegel has a wonderful interview with Venter. The more I hear from Venter, the more I like him; he's very much a no-BS sort of fellow. He's the guy who really drove the human genome project to completion, and he's entirely open about explaining that its medical significance was grossly overstated.
SPIEGEL: So the significance of the genome isn't so great after all?
Venter: Not at all. I can tell you from my own experience. I put my own genome on the Internet. People had the notion this was the scariest thing out there. But what happened? Nothing.
There really was a lot of hysteria in the…
drorzel | July 30, 2010There's some good stuff in yesterday's post asking what physics you'd like to read more about. I'm nursing a sore neck and shoulder, so I'll only do one or two quick ones today, starting with James D. Miller in the first comment:
1) Is it true that our understanding of quantum physics comes from studying systems with only a small number of particles and there is a good chance our theories won't hold in more complex systems.
It all depends on how you define your terms-- what counts as a "small number" of particles, and what counts as not holding?
It's certainly true that most of the…
pharyngula | July 30, 2010The 10th anniversary of the journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is being celebrated by making all of the articles in a special review issue entirely free for download…for the month of July. It's almost over! Grab those pdfs while you can!