Science
oracknows | September 11, 2014
ORAC NOTE: I’ve added the links to the video segments, which are now up at the Dr. Oz website. I also did a screen grab of a certain really stupid thing that I noticed when I watched the segment but, because I was watching it on DVR, didn’t have the ability to show you. It’s near the end. Enjoy.
When last we left “America’s doctor,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, in June, he was having his posterior handed to him by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in a Senate hearing about the deceptive marketing of supplements in which his over-the-top promotion of supplements like Garcinia gambogia, green coffee bean…
pharyngula | September 11, 2014You know I'm a bit sour on the whole artificial intelligence thing. It's not that I think natural intelligences are anything more than natural constructions, or that I think building a machine that thinks is impossible -- it's that most of the stories from AI researchers sound like jokes. Jon Ronson takes a tour of the state of the art in chatbots, which is entertaining and revealing.
Chatbots are kind of the lowest of the low, the over-hyped fruit decaying at the base of the tree. They aren't even particularly interesting. What you've got is basically a program that tries to parse spoken…
oracknows | September 9, 2014
There are some myths, bits of misinformation, or lies about medicine that I like to refer to zombie quackery. The reasons are obvious. Like at the end of a horror movie, just when you think the myth is finally dead, its rotting hand rises out of the dirt to grab your leg and drag you down to be consumed. Of course, the big difference between zombies and these bits of zombie quackery is that in most stories a single shot to the brain will kill the zombie. The same is not true of zombie quackery. You can empty clip after clip of reason, science, and logic into the “head” of the zombie…
pharyngula | September 8, 2014You've just got to love the word "thrip".
David Jones
Thrips of California
drorzel | September 8, 2014The new academic year starts this week-- first day of classes is Wednesday-- and I'm dealing with the usual chaos associated with the influx of a new class of students. Who now look to me only a tiny bit older than SteelyKid and the Pip in the above picture (and if you think that sharing that extremely cute photo is part of the motivation for this post, well, you're not wrong...).
This year, the madness of the new term is complicated by having been away for essentially all of August, and by the fact that I'm teaching an entirely new class this term: Astronomy 052: Relativity, Black Holes, and…
pharyngula | September 4, 2014JBS Haldane is said to have responded to a question about how evolution could be disproved by saying, "A Precambrian rabbit". What was meant by this, of course, is any substantial discovery that greatly disrupted the evidence for the chronological pattern of descent observed in Earth's life. That pattern of descent is one of the central lines of evidence for evolution, so creationists would dearly love to find something that wrecked it -- this is why they send expeditions to Africa to find a living dinosaur, Mok'ele-mbembe, or more conveniently, to Canada in search of a plesiosaur, Manipogo.…
drorzel | September 3, 2014I've posted this before, but a reminder can't hurt: We're hiring two tenure-track faculty this fall. The targeted research fields:
We invite applications for two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions starting in September 2015, one in any area of theoretical physics or astrophysics, the other with a strong preference for biophysics or soft condensed matter (either experimental or theoretical). We encourage applications from interdisciplinary scientists and those who could make use of the college’s shared instrumentation resources (including AFM, SEM, micro-Raman and micro-FTIR…
drorzel | September 3, 2014Having just returned from a long trip where I gave three talks, one of the first things I saw when I started following social media closely again was this post on how to do better presentations. The advice is the usual stuff-- more images, less text, don't read your slides, and for God's sake, rehearse the talk before you give it-- and it's generally very good. Given the two very different types of presentation I gave over the last few weeks, though, I think it's important to add one note about the design of the visuals, which is this: when you're putting a talk together, keep the final…
drorzel | September 2, 2014If you're making your weekly check of the ebook editions (Kindle, Nook) of my quantum book (I'm not the only one who regularly looks at these, right?), you may have noticed a change: they're no longer sporting the original black cover you'll see in the right sidebar, but a new cover based on the smash hit UK edition. This isn't a database glitch, but a new release, with a new cover and adding the word "Quantum" to the title.
I've made allusions on Twitter a few times to having exciting news I wasn't ready to share-- this is one of those things. The original edition sold reasonably well and…
drorzel | September 2, 2014I didn't write a summary of the third day of "Quantum Boot Camp" to go with my Day One and Day Two summaries for a simple reason: I would've needed to do that on Saturday, and I spent Saturday in transit back to the US. More than that, though, it was harder to summarize than the other two days, because my talk was the middle of three, and thus I spent most of the first talk fiddling with my slides and fretting, and most of the third fighting off the post-talk adrenaline crash.
Happily, Sedeer at Inspiring Science offers a summary of the first two talks, namely Larus Thorlacius from Nordita…
drorzel | August 28, 2014The second day of the "Quantum Boot Camp" was much lighter on talks. The only speaker was Ray Laflamme from the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, who gave a nice introduction to quantum technologies. While he did spend a bit of time at the start going through Shor's algorithm for factoring numbers (following up a discussion from Wednesday), he mostly focused on ways to use quantum physics to improve sensors of technological interest.
So, for example, he talked about how efforts to develop techniques for error-correcting codes in liquid state NMR quantum computing led to the…
pharyngula | August 28, 2014Sometimes, people email me with good questions. Here's one.
When I was a kid, my own visualization of evolution was Lamarckism.
But I didn't know it. In reading Dawkins and others, I know it doesn't exist. But it seems this article is claiming it does to some extent. Can you comment? I'm curious as to the current consensus as I've been reading a lot about genes that can be turned on and passed to offspring. Can you take a look?
This is a fairly common question. Looked at naively, developmental plasticity seems to be Lamarckian -- we're talking about organisms responding with…
catdynamics | August 22, 2014Bárðarbunga is arguably the scariest of the 30 or so active volcanoes in Iceland.
Extreme volcanoes don't always have extreme eruptions, but they are scary because they have the capability for extreme events, uniquely so.
Bárðarbunga - under the ice cap at the top left - from Google maps
It is not the most active, it is not the tallest, it may possibly be the biggest in some sense, but it is the volcano which gave us the largest eruption on Earth since modern humans started trying to get organized: the Þjórsárhraun eruption about 8,500 years ago.
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drorzel | August 21, 2014OK, the photo above is a recent picture of me-- yesterday, in fact. But the spiral-carved rock I'm standing next to was carved that way a bit more than five thousand years ago, so that ought to count as a throwback...
We've been in Dublin the last few days, and on Thursday we took a bus tour out to Newgrange. this is one of the things I wanted to make sure to see while we were here, as I make reference to it in the forthcoming book, and at least two classes that I teach. And it is, indeed, spectacular; the reconstructed white wall might be historically dubious, but the interior passage and…
pharyngula | August 20, 2014Susan Blackmore always lectures entertainingly -- really, if you get a chance to hear her, you should -- so I can guess how surprised she was when students claimed offense and walked out on her talk. They were religiously indoctrinated, and simply shut down their brains when the word "evolution" came up, and when she started presenting rational and secular explanations for the existence of religion, just forget it -- there were a lot of students who thought you could only quote the Bible and Koran with unstinting reverence, accepting their divine claims at face value.
It is sad to see young…
oracknows | August 20, 2014As I happened to be out last night at a function for my department, I didn’t have the time necessary to lay out a 2,000 word bit of Insolence. I did, however, have time to note that yet another practitioner unhappy with being criticized over his scientifically questionable treatment, in this case, Dr. Frank Arguello, has expressed grave, grave unhappiness with science-based criticism over his atavistic chemotherapy, so much so that he’s threatening to sue over it even though he really has no case. In fact, this guy is a bit more—shall we say?—over the top than the average subject of criticism…
carlyo | August 19, 2014The USA Science & Engineering Festival is proud to announce the return of Lockheed Martin as its 2016 Founding and Presenting Host and expanded outreach activities to engage our nation's youth in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
"The USA Science & Engineering Festival provides an essential introduction and gateway to the exciting world of STEM," said Dr. Ray O. Johnson, Lockheed Martin senior vice president and chief technology officer. "It's an exhilarating event not only for the students, but also for the parents, teachers, and professionals like me to get hands-on…