Science
drorzel | May 7, 2012Some time back, I reviewed a cool book about Fermi problems by Aaron Santos, then a post-doc at Michigan. In the interim, he's taken a faculty job at Oberlin, written a second book on sports-related Fermi problems, and started a blog, none of which I had noticed until he emailed me. Shame on me.
Anyway, his new book is just out, and he's running an estimation contest with a signed copy as the prize. So, if you're the sort of person who enjoys Fermi problems, read his post then grab a convenient envelope and start estimating on the back. You have until June 1.
pharyngula | May 7, 2012Vertebrates are modified segmented worms; that is, their body plan is made up of sequentially repeated units, most apparent in skeletal structures like the vertebrae.
Arthropods are also modified segmented worms. Look at a larval fly, for instance, and you can see they are made up of rings stacked together.
So here's a simple and obvious question: can we infer that the last common ancestor of vertebrates and arthropods was also a segmented worm? That is, is segmentation a common ancestral trait, or did arthropods and vertebrates invent it independently? At first thought, you might assume they…
drorzel | May 4, 2012Enough slagging of beloved popularizers-- how about some hard-core physics. The second of three extremely cool papers published last week is this Nature Physics paper from the Zeilinger group in Vienna, producers of many awesome papers about quantum mechanics. Ordinarily, this would be a hard paper to write up, becase Nature Physics are utter bastards, but happily, it's freely available on the arxiv, and all comments and figures are based on that version.
You're just obsessed with Zeilinger, aren't you? All right, what have they done this time? The title is "Experimental delayed-choice…
drorzel | May 3, 2012I was tremendously disappointed and frustrated by this book.
This is largely my own fault, because I went into it expecting it to be something it's not. Had I read the description more carefully, I might not have had such a strong negative reaction (which was exacerbated by some outside stress when I first started reading it, so I put it aside for a few weeks, until I was less mad in general, and more likely to give it a fair reading). I'm actually somewhat hesitant to write this up at all, for a number of reasons, but after thinking it over a bit, I think I have sensible reasons for being…
drorzel | May 3, 2012A few more links that have turned up of people talking about either How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog:
Andrew Johnston has a review of the UK edition, praising it because "it's bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex areas like decoherence, entanglement and quantum teleportation," which I like to see because that's one of the things I especially wanted to do.
Natasha Zaleski, a grad student, has a review of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, which is good but not great, because it hit the usual failure mode: the…
drorzel | May 2, 2012A week or so ago, lots of people were linking to this New York Review of Books article by Steven Weinberg on "The Crisis of Big Science," looking back over the last few decades of, well, big science. It's somewhat dejected survey of whopping huge experiments, and the increasing difficulty of getting them funded, including a good deal of bitterness over the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider almost twenty years ago. This isn't particularly new for Weinberg-- back at the APS's Centennial Meeting in Atlanta in 1999, he gave a big lecture where he spent a bunch of time fulminating…
drorzel | May 2, 2012I've been busily working on something new, but I'm beginning to think I've been letting the perfect be the enemy of the good-enough-for-this-stage, so I'm setting it aside for a bit, and trying to get caught up with some of the huge number of things that have been slipping. Which includes getting the oil changed in my car, hence, I'm sitting in B&N killing time, which is a good excuse to do some ResearchBlogging.
Last week was a banner week for my corner of physics, with three really cool experiments published. Two of those are on the arxiv, which means I can use images from the paper (…
carlyo | May 1, 2012The 2012 USA Science and Engineering Festival was a huge success this past weekend! More than 150,000 attendees battled the rain, traffic and crowds to celebrate science at the Convention Center!
The Festival would not have been possible without the hard work of our amazing volunteers! Over 750 volunteers dedicated their valuable time and showed incredible patience and enthusiasm during their shifts at the Festival. We are so grateful to ALL of you! We received wonderful feedback about our exhibitors and the amazing hands-on activities. Exhibitors made each person feel welcome and…
pharyngula | May 1, 2012The latest Carnival of Evolution is at Evolving Thoughts, hosted by that guy Wilkins who usually covers the philosophical beat…but we'll let him out of that cage this one time.
The Carnival of Evolution 48 will be held right here, on Pharyngula. You can submit entries via the carnival widget; get them in before 1 June, or I'll ignore them and they'll be passed on to the next carnival host, who doesn't exist. And therefore doesn't have a blog. Which means your carefully crafted science post will be shipped off to dev:null. So you might also consider volunteering for the hosting duties some…
drorzel | April 30, 2012I'm about a week late talking about this, but I've mostly resigned myself to not doing really topical blogging these days. Anyway, there was a lot of excitement last week over the announcement that an all-star team of nerd billionaires is planning to do commercial asteroid mining. (The post title is a reference to the Sean Connery movie, not the post-Bloom County comic.) I find it kind of amusing that this made the news while I'm doing retrospective blog posts (the next of which is coming), which have turned up a bunch of old posts where I say skeptical things about space in general. So I…
drorzel | April 27, 2012This is apparently my day to be annoyed at the reporting of pieces about gender differences in STEM, because a bunch of people are linking to this PBS NewsHour article about women in engineering, which is linked to an interview with Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd College, who I ran across a few weeks back thanks to a New York Times profile/article. While the general thrust of the piece is very good, there are a couple of areas where the reporting really breaks down, in a way that is pretty annoying.
One of these is just the usual breakdown whenever anything remotely quantitative comes up in media…
drorzel | April 27, 2012Somebody on Twitter linked this article about "brogrammers", which is pretty much exactly as horrible as that godawful neologism suggests. In between descriptions of some fairly appalling behavior, though, they throw some stats at you, and that's where it gets weird:
As it is, women remain acutely underrepresented in the coding and engineering professions. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics study, in 2011 just 20 percent of all programmers were women. A smaller percentage of women are earning undergraduate computer science degrees today than they did in 1985, according to the National…
drorzel | April 26, 2012I've been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn't mean I'm not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I'm too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places:
The most significant, in terms of probable impact on sales, is this excerpt at BoingBoing, which is the text for the dog dialogue from Chapter 8. This is the same dialogue that became the "Looking for the Bacon Boson" video, and, indeed, they were nice enough to include the video in the post, too. Woo-hoo…
carlyo | April 26, 2012The 2nd USA Science & Engineering Festival has finally arrived! The Expo will take place this weekend at the Walter E Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. The hours are Saturday from 10-6 and Sunday from 10-4. Evening shows are also scheduled for the weekend including the Stargazing Party with Bill Nye and Featured Author Panel Discussion- Science Stories in Society & School: Using Narrative to Bridge the Gap.
The Festival will be packed with entertainment for the whole family with 3,000 amazing hands-on exhibits and over 150 incredible stage shows. This FREE event is…
pharyngula | April 25, 2012A while back, I told you all about this small piece of the biochemistry of the fly eye — the pathways that make the brown and red pigments that color the eye.
I left it with a question: if even my abbreviated summary revealed considerable complexity, how could this pathway evolve? Changing anything produces a failure or change in the result. Before I answer, let's make the problem even harder, because I love a challenge (although actually, I'm cheating — it's going to turn out that complexity is not a barrier, but an opportunity).
The pigment pathways above are far downstream: they operate…
drorzel | April 25, 2012For something I'm working on, I'm trying to come up with good examples of interdisciplinarity making a difference in science. Specifically, I'm looking for cases where somebody with training in one field was able to make a major advance in another field because their expertise let them look at a problem in a different way, and bring a different set of techniques to bear on it.
I can think of a decent number of examples within physics-- techniques from NMR being adopted by atomic physicists, atomic physics techniques being used to address problems in condensed matter, the whole Higgs boson…
drorzel | April 24, 2012Over in Twitter-land, there's a bunch of talk about how this is National Physics Day. I don't know how I missed that, what with all the media coverage and all.
I have too much other stuff to do to generate any detailed physics content today, so we'll settle for an informal poll to mark the occasion:
Who is your favorite physicist, other than Einstein, Newton, or Feynman?
The qualifier is just to knock out the too-obvious answers, and force a little more thought. Everybody likes Einstein and Newton and Feynman, but we hear about them all the time. For a major holiday like Physics Day, let's…
drorzel | April 23, 2012Via Joerg Heber on Twitter, a great post on gender divisions in STEM by Athene Donald:
As children try to work out their personal identities, the difference between 'boy' and 'girl' is as fundamental and omnipresent as it gets - and they receive the clear messages that collectively society gives out about the attributes implicitly associated with that distinction. Inevitably they are likely to 'hear' the message that boys are noisy, into everything and generally vigorous and enquiring, whereas girls are 'expected' to be good, docile, nurturing and passive. Parents may do all they can to…
carlyo | April 20, 2012Thank you to Blogger Amy from DC Metro Mom for a wonderful post on the USA Science and Engineering Festival!
Read all of DC Metro Mom's Post here.
Spark An Interest in Scientific Discovery at the USA Science & Engineering Festival!
By Amy from DC Metro Mom
The 2nd Annual USA Science & Engineering Festival is a super-charged series of public events and school programs with a mission to "re-invigorate" children's interest in science, technology, engineering and math. The Festival kicked off this week with over 150 FREE events for the public and Greater Washington, DC schools leading…
carlyo | April 19, 2012Imagine the opportunity for your kids to chat one-on-one with some of the nation's top scientists, engineers and other professionals in such fields as medical research, the CIA, oceanography, microbiology, and technology intellectual property law!
They'll get the chance at the finale Expo at the end of this month when the Festival, in association with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), hosts its Meet the Scientists/ Engineers sessions. These informal gatherings, part of the Festival's STEM Career Pavilion initiative, will allow students to conduct in-person interviews with a wide…