Science
drorzel | July 23, 2010The Dean Dad is worried about remedial math:
In a discussion this week with someone who spends most of her time working with students who are struggling mightily in developmental math, I heard an argument I hadn't given much thought previously: students who have passed algebra and even pre-calc in high school frequently crash and burn when they hit our developmental math, because the high schools let them use calculators and we don't.
[...][P]art of me wonders if we're sacrificing too much on the altar of pencil and paper. It's great to be able to do addition in your head and long division on…
pharyngula | July 22, 2010
I'm one of those dreadful animal-centric zoologically inclined biologists. Plants? What are those? Fungi? They're related to metazoans somehow. Lichens? Not even on the radar. The first step in fixing a problem, though, is recognizing that you have one. So I confess to you, O Readers, that my name is PZ, and I am a metazoaphile. But I can get better.
My path to opening up to wider horizons is to focus on what I find most interesting about animals, and that is that they are networks of cells driven by networks of genes that generate patterned responses of expression by cell signaling, or…
drorzel | July 22, 2010Over at A Most Curious Planet, Alexandra Jellicoe offers a story with the provocative headline Is Science Sexist?, which spins off an anecdote from astronomy:
I was listening to Radio 4 a few months ago and the discussion about gender intelligence lodged in the deeper recesses of my brain unthought-of until recently when I went to see Jocelyn Bell Burnell talking of her 'Eureka' moment. She discovered the existence of neutron stars called Pulsar's in 1967 and I think she can safely be considered one of England's most pioneering and gifted scientists. I was struck by her comments that she…
drorzel | July 21, 2010Here's a picture of the ornamental pond we have in our back yard, showing the fountain that we run to keep the water circulating so it's not just a mosquito ranch:
You can see the brick that we have sitting on top of the pump housing to keep it submerged (it tends to tip over otherwise-- the filter box is a little top-heavy), and also the spray of water shooting up into the air.
You can't tell without some reference, but the pond level is actually a little lower than I like it at the moment. The lining leaks slowly, and every so often I need to put more water in. How do I judge the level,…
drorzel | July 21, 2010If you're in the UK, you may very well be thinking "You know, I love the idea of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, but I find American idiom very intimidating. If only there were an edition just for people like me..."
Well, hypothetical UK person, your prayers have been answered:
This is the cover for How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, coming this fall from Oneworld books to a bookshop on the high street near you. With "yard" changed to "garden," and other minor linguistic tweaks to make it more comprehensible in Merrie Olde England and other such places. Also, an index, which the…
rallain | July 20, 2010I don't hate math, that is just the title of the post - notice that I put it in quotes.
As you may know, I teach this physics course for elementary education majors (using Physics and Everyday Thinking - which is awesome). The curriculum has very little math in it. That is not necessarily a good thing, but it helps the students understand science and the nature of science without bringing in this mental block they have for math. One of the activities has them look at the energy efficiency of different devices. At the end of the activity, they are asked:
A fluorescent bulb is 25% efficient…
drorzel | July 20, 2010Yesterday's post about how nobody cares about condensed matter physics produced a surprising number of comments of the form "I was really hoping you would post about topological insulators," which surprised me a bit. Anyway, since people asked for it, I'll give it a shot. The important caveats here are that 1) this isn't my field, and 2) I have not read a great deal of the primary literature on this, so my understanding is not that deep.
We'll do this in Q&A format, as that's been working well for ResearchBlogging posts lately.
So, what's a "topological insulator," anyway? You make a…
grrlscientist | July 20, 2010
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The most recent edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) -- "Scientia Pro Publica 35" -- was just published at the buttcrack of dawn today by John at Kind of Curious.
To share yours, or others', writing, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (be aware that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is nonfunctional, and ALWAYS check your email/spam filter for your submission receipt to be sure it was sent properly). Alternatively,…
oracknows | July 19, 2010I can't believe it.
I really can't believe it.
I really, really, really can't believe it.
Bora has left ScienceBlogs.
Readers of just this blog probably don't know what a body blow that is to the ScienceBlogs collective. Readers of multiple ScienceBlogs probably realize that Bora was the proverbial heart and soul of ScienceBlogs. It's news that's left Isis the Scientist speechless and GrrlScientist "deeply upset." Even ScienceBlogs' big macher PZ Myers has pointed out how Bora compared the situation here to to Bion's Effect, where the departure of a few people at a party triggers a sudden end…
drorzel | July 19, 2010I had planned to spend some time this weekend trying to make sense of this new result on topological insulators, and maybe even write up the relevant paper for ResearchBlogging. Family life intervened, though, and I didn't have the time. I get enough of it to understand the basics of what's going on, but there's a whole lot I don't understand about topological insulators generally, so I'd need to do a bunch of reference chasing to get to something I can understand well enough to work back up to this week's Nature paper.
And, to put it bluntly, there just isn't that much reward for the work…
drorzel | July 19, 2010Over at Jeff Vandemeer's blog, Rachel Swirsky has a series ofm guest posts (start here if you prefer direct post links) about the recently completed Launch Pad workshop. this is a NASA funded workshop bringing a group of writers together for six days of lectures on modern astronomy from working astronomers. From the workshop web site:
Launch Pad is a NASA-funded education/public outreach effort supplementing Mike Brotherton's space-based astronomical research. Our budget allows us to provide a workshop that is essentially free to participants. Our primary goal is to teach writers of all…
grrlscientist | July 18, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…
drorzel | July 17, 2010There are lots of reasons why Josh Rosenau is one of the few writers blogging about science-and-religion issues that I still read. This morning's post on what you ought to do to determine effective approaches is an outstanding example:
Rather than looking at national polls, which are crude instruments and can miss shifts within small subpopulations, I'd think that it would be more useful to do lab work, and to look at the broader literature on communications. Daniel Loxton did a nice roundup of a few useful studies in this realm, and Mike McRae looked at a wider sampling in the context of…
grrlscientist | July 16, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Since I've been preoccupied with the PepsiCo fiasco, I've not been promoting Scientia Pro Publica as I should be doing. So here's the most recent edition; "Scientia Pro Publica 34", published by Denis at This View of Earth. Let's all head out to Denis's blog to read the carnival and leave some warm fuzzies in the comments thread, then read the linked essays and leave your comments on at least one of those essays, either telling those authors what they did well, or…
ably | July 16, 2010It's summer and Seed's running a few classic articles online. This weekend, read about "So"...
The language of science, with its specialized vocabulary and clipped rhythm, has a distinctive architecture.
The functional elegance of this rarefied speak is uniquely captured in one of its most inconspicuous words: "so." This isn't "so" the intensifier ("so expensive"); it's not the "so" that joins two clauses. This is the "so" that introduces a sentence, as in "So as we can see, modified Newtonian dynamics cannot account for the rotation of any of the three observed galaxies."
This "so" is key to…
drorzel | July 16, 2010Back in one of the communications skills threads, Karen comments about science and humanities:
It's easy enough for a humanities major to avoid doing much science in school. The converse is not true. It strikes me that for those earlier scientists who attended univeristy, both their early education and university years were more suited to focusing on the science.
This relates to the communication issue as this often means that the science inclined are often put in a position of being evaluated on their communication in area that are areas of weakness for them, those areas where communications…
catdynamics | July 15, 2010quick: how do you pronounce "unionized"?
well?
is it: Uhn-Eye-On-EyeZed or You-Njuhn-Ized?
pharyngula | July 15, 2010
Sometimes, I really hate fossils. I hate them with the passion of a spurned lover, one who is consumed with desire but knows that he will never, ever be satisfied. They drive me mad.
Right now we're at a point in our technology where we can take a small sample from a living organism and break it down into amazing detail — we can extract every gene, throw them into a computer, and compare them with every other gene that has been similarly sampled. We can look for the scars of evolution, we can analyze and figure out where on the tree of life this cell resides, we can even figure out what…
grrlscientist | July 15, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Since I've been preoccupied with the PepsiCo fiasco, I've not been promoting Scientia Pro Publica as I should be doing. So here's the most recent edition; "Scientia Pro Publica 34", published by Denis at This View of Earth. Let's all head out to Denis's blog to read the carnival and leave some warm fuzzies in the comments thread, then read the linked essays and leave your comments on at least one of those essays, either telling those authors what they did well, or…