Science
pharyngula | October 4, 2014William Dembski spoke at the University of Chicago in August, and a video of the talk is available. I tried to watch it, I really did, but I ended up skipping through most of it (one of the advantages of seeing it on youtube!). Here's my rather stream-of-consciousness monolog as I was flicking like a damselfly over the stagnant pond of his words:
"Get to the point, Bill. Skip. No biology. Skip. No biology yet. Skip. Wait, that model is anti-biology…evolution doesn't work like that. Watches a short segment. Nope, nonsense. Skip. No biology, skip. Oh, "specified complexity"…does he define it?…
drorzel | October 4, 2014The exciting news of the week: Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist has gotten a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Woo-hoo!
They've said nice things about my previous two books, but getting the star is a big deal. And it's a really good capsule description of the book, with a great pull quote in the last sentence:
This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe.
Really, I can't ask for better than that.
I found out this was coming at the end of last week, where it was an absolute life-saver after some sanity-threatening stuff…
drorzel | October 2, 2014In a weird coincidence, shortly after I wrote a post about "quantum leap" as a metaphor, I was looking up some stuff about John Bell and ran into mentions of a paper he wrote called "Are There Quantum Jumps?" Bell is borrowing a title from Schrödinger, who wrote a pair of articles (really, one article in two pieces) for the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in 1952 expressing his discontent with the entire idea of "quantum jumps" between states. Bell even opens his paper with a quote from Schrödinger: "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever…
pharyngula | October 1, 2014That same bozo who sent me the Hitler quote sent me another image in reply:
Fair enough. Darwin got a lot of things wrong. I'm actually going to be lecturing my intro biology students on where Darwin screwed up in a few weeks, focusing mainly on his bad genetics, but I'll toss that quote into the mix, too. To be perfectly fair, I'll also include the more complete quote below the fold…and no, nothing in the larger context excuses it.
The quote is from the Descent of Man, and not only is it a sexist comment, he throws in some casual racism, too.
Difference in the Mental Powers of the two Sexes…
drorzel | October 1, 2014Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist has officially been sent to the printers, so we're at the phase of things where I don't have anything to do but think about publicity. There are some reviews forthcoming, at least one of which I'm very happy about, but I'll share more about that when it becomes public. I've also picked up some nice blurbs from very smart folks:
"I know, I know, you think you're just not smart enough to be a scientist. Chad Orzel might convince you otherwise with Eureka. Drawing on basketball, stamp collecting, Angry Birds, Iron Chef, and Antiques Roadshow among his…
drorzel | September 30, 2014Two language-related items crossed in the Information Supercollider today: the first was Tom's commentary on an opinion piece by Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber, the second Steven Pinker on the badness of academic writing.
All of them are worth reading, and I only have small dissents to offer here. One is that, unlike Tom and Crease and Goldhaber, I'm actually just fine with the popular usage of "quantum leap" for a particularly dramatic change. Yes, I realize that the canonical "quantum jump" is the smallest possible change, but I think that's putting too much emphasis on only one aspect…
oracknows | September 29, 2014
One of the things you can say to someone who is antivaccine that will really tick them off is to “call it like you see it” and call them antivaccine. Sure, there are a few antivaccine activists who are unashamed of being antivaccine, but most antivaccinationists, sensing that society in general quite correctly takes a dim view of people who threaten to allow the return of dangerous vaccine-preventable diseases. Indeed, as I’ve pointed out many times before, that’s why antivaccine activists try to hide behind claims that they are “vaccine safety advocates,” often signified by saying, “I’m…
drorzel | September 29, 2014On Twitter Sunday morning, the National Society of Black Physicsts account retweeted this:
Using Lasers to Lock Down #Exoplanet Hunting #Space
http://t.co/0TN4DDo7LF
— ✨The Solar System✨ (@The_SolarSystem) September 28, 2014
I recognized the title as a likely reference to the use of optical frequency combs as calibration sources for spectrometry, which is awesome stuff. Unfortunately, the story at that link is less awesome than awful. It goes on at some length about the astronomy, then dispenses with the physics in two short paragraphs of joking references to scare-quoted jargon from the…
pharyngula | September 25, 2014The ever-charming Sam Harris has smarmily connected me to Deepak Chopra, so now I'm getting a flood of both smug, superior cluelessness from the Vulcans of Planet Sam, and the spacey vacuous nonsense of the Chopralites. Thanks, Sam! Although, I must say, so far Chopra freaks are doing a better job of actually saying something. Which isn't saying much.
They seem to be impressed with this fatuous defense of dualism from Chopra. I'm going to skip virtually all of the noise to focus on one point that I found particularly annoying.
In the case of brain science, there will be much better knowledge…
oracknows | September 25, 2014Ever since the latest outbreak of Ebola viral disease in West Africa, there has been panic that’s metastasized to the US, even though the risk of a major outbreak here is very low. Unfortunately, whenever there’s panic over a disease, whatever the disease is, there soon follows quackery in response to that panic, from quacks who are either looking to make a buck or who are true believers (or both). For instance, I’ve seen high dose vitamin C touted as an Ebola remedy. I’ve also written about deluded homeopaths claiming that homeopathy can be used to treat Ebola. One particularly deluded…
drorzel | September 25, 2014My Gen Ed relativity course has mostly been me lecturing about stuff to this point, so on Wednesday I decided to shake things up a bit and convert a chapter of David Mermin's It's About Time. The idea was to get students up and moving around a bit, and actually making some measurements of stuff.
Mermin's scenario as adapted for class is this: you have two trains of six cars passing in opposite directions. Each car contains a narrow window through which the other train can be seen, a clock facing the window, and an observer with nothing better to do than note the readings of the clocks in the…
drorzel | September 23, 2014Modern media being what it is, I should get out in front of this, so: I am guilty of putting words in Einstein's mouth. I mean, go watch my TED-Ed video on particles and waves, or just look at the image up top-- that very clearly shows Einstein saying words that he probably never said. And it's my fault.
Well, OK, I didn't actually put those words in his mouth-- the animator did that. What I wrote is "Einstein himself described [the photoelectric effect] as the only truly revolutionary thing he did." Which isn't really a quote, but a paraphrase. And it's really a paraphrase of something…
oracknows | September 22, 2014
Quackery has been steadily infiltrating academic medicine for at least two decades now in the form of what was once called “complementary and alternative medicine” but is now more commonly referred to as “integrative medicine.” Of course, as I’ve written many times before, what “integrative medicine” really means is the “integration” of quackery with science- and evidence-based medicine, to the detriment of SBM. As my good bud Mark Crislip once put it, “integrating” cow pie with apple pie does not make the apple pie better. Yet that is what’s going on in medical academia these days—witha…
drorzel | September 22, 2014I get a fair number of books to review, but I'm often pretty bad about writing them up in a timely manner. Of course, most of them are well over 70 pages long, which is why I've managed to turn around Roberto Trotta's The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is in the course of a weekend.
As you can probably get from the title, this is a book about astronomy written in Up Goer Five style, using only the thousand most common English words (which are helpfully listed near the start of the book, in case you want to check whether he cheated...), plus proper names. And there'…
drorzel | September 19, 2014After a long absence due to travel (some of which is discussed), Uncertain dots returns!
Rhett and I talk about recent travels, how people going into internet-based physics outreach these days would probably do better to make videos than blog, physics in science fiction, celestial navigation, and as always, our current courses.
Some links:
-- Our Eratosthenes measurement from 2012.
-- Divided by Infinity, the best Many-Worlds story ever.
-- Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" isn't legitimately available online, but there's a spoilery Wikipedia page about it.
-- An old post where I talk about…
drorzel | September 18, 2014The London School of Economics has a report on a study of academic refereeing (PDF) that looked at the effect of incentives on referee behavior. They found that both a "social incentive" (posting the time a given referee took to turn around the papers they reviewed on a web site) and a cash incentive ($100 Amazon gift card for meeting a 4-week deadline) worked to increase the chance of a referee accepting a review request, and improved the chances that they would meet the deadline. The effect of cash was a little smaller for tenured faculty, but they were slightly more susceptible to the…
drorzel | September 17, 2014There was a article in Scientific American about diversity in STEM collecting together the best demographic data available about the science and engineering workforce. It's a useful collection of references, and comes with some very pretty graphics, particularly this one, showing the demographic breakdown of the US population compared to the science and engineering fields:
Demographic breakdown of general population vs. science and engineering, from the Scientific American post.
This is a very professionally made graphic, but also misleading in the worst way. When I first looked at this, I…
drorzel | September 16, 2014The second one of the TED-Ed lessons I wrote about quantum physics has now been published: What Is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This is, again, very similar to stuff I've written before, specifically this old blog post and the relevant chapter of How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog.
As usual, I tried but probably failed to do justice to other interpretations in the "Dig Deeper" references I sent; outraged Bohmians should feel free to comment either here or there with better explanations.
Again, it's really fun to see the images the animators found to put to my words. I love…
drorzel | September 15, 2014My TED@NYC adventure last fall didn't turn into an invite to the big TED meeting, but it did lead to a cool opportunity that is another of the very cool developments I've been teasing for a while now: I've written some scripts for lessons to be posted with TED-Ed. The first of these, on particle-wave duality just went live today.
The content here is very similar to my talk last fall, which is, in turn, very similar to Chapter 8 of Eureka: a historical survey of the development of quantum physics. I did the script for this, which was then turned over to professional animators, who did a great…
drorzel | September 15, 2014Steven Pinker has a piece at the New Republic arguing that Ivy League schools ought to weight standardized test scores more heavily in admissions. this has prompted a bunch of tongue-clucking about the failures of the Ivy League from the usual suspects, and a rather heated concurrence from Scott Aaronson. That last finally got me to read the piece, because I had figured I would be happier not reading it, but I wanted to see what got Scott so worked up.
Sadly, my first instinct was correct. It starts off well enough, taking down an earlier anti-Ivy League piece by William Deresiewicz for being…