Science
carlyo | April 18, 2012
By Larry Bock
Founder and organizer, USA Science & Engineering Festival
Similar to what the legendary Woodstock Festival did in gathering and celebrating the best and the brightest in the world of rock, the 2nd USA Science & Engineering Festival hosted by Lockheed Martin, the nation's largest celebration of science and engineering, has assembled some of the country's top innovators, celebrities and innovations in the realm of science and engineering to wow visitors at the Festival's upcoming Expo celebration.
The Expo -- set for April 28-29 at the Walter E. Washington Convention…
drorzel | April 18, 2012Yesterday's post on applying intro physics concepts to the question of how fast and how long football players might accelerate generated a bunch of comments, several of them claiming that the model I used didn't match real data in the form of race clips and the like. One comment in particular linked to a PDF file including 10m "splits" for two Usain Bolt races, including a complicated model showing that he was still accelerating at 70m into the race. How does this affect my argument from yesterday?
Well, that document is really a guide to fancy fitting routines on some sort of graphing…
drorzel | April 17, 2012Over at Grantland, Bill Barnwell offers some unorthodox suggestions for replacing the kickoff in NFL games, which has apparently been floated as a way to improve player safety. Appropriately enough, the suggestion apparently came from Giants owner John Mara, which makes perfect sense giving that the Giants haven't had a decent kick returner since Dave Meggett twenty years ago, and their kick coverage team has lost them multiple games by giving up touchdowns to the other team.
Anyway, one of Barnwell's suggestions invoked physics, in a way that struck me as puzzling:
Idea 3: The receiving team…
carlyo | April 16, 2012The Kavli Science Video Contest has wrapped up with over 260 entries! Now it's time for the People's Choice Vote, in advance of the awards ceremony on April 29, in Washington, DC, as part of the USA Science & Engineering Festival. Voting is easy, just view the videos on YouTube and click 'like" for your favorites. Click here to view the videos.
We have been highlighting the Top 20 Finalists on our blog for the past two weeks. In today's blog get to know the remaining Top 20 Finalists:
SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST: TOP 20 FINALISTS
Entrant: Jenna Mason, 17
Entry: Ubiquitous…
drorzel | April 16, 2012My Google vanity search for my name and the book titles is really frustratingly spotty, often missing things in major news outlets that I later find by other means. For example, I didn't get a notification about this awesome review in the Guardian, from their children's book section:
I am a ten year old who likes Physics. What is Physics, you might ask! Well, Physics is the science of pretty much everything around you. It asks big questions like where did we come from? How long ago was the Big Bang? Quantum Physics is the part of physics which talks about atomic and sub atomic particles,…
oracknows | April 13, 2012You know, I really, really hate the way quacks abuse molecular biology. I know, I know. I've said it before, but certain quacks have a way of willfully misunderstanding the latest advances in genomics, molecular biology, and biology in general. Of course, this isn't limited to just medicine, unfortunately. After all, we have Deepak Chopra and his quantum woo, which abuses physics and quantum theory in the name of "proving" mind-body dualism, a bastardized version of "intelligent design" creationism that is based on Eastern mysticism rather than Christianity, and, of course, a "conscious…
drorzel | April 12, 2012I'm re-instituting the quota system for the moment-- no blogging until I make some substantive progress on the current work-in-progress-- but I'll throw out a quick post here to note a media appearance: Physics World has a podcast about books on quantum physics up today:
Since its inception in the early part of the 20th century, the theory of quantum mechanics has consistently baffled many of the great physicists of our time. But while the ideas of quantum physics are challenging and notoriously weird, they seem to capture the public imagination and hold an enduring appeal. Evidence of this…
drorzel | April 11, 2012A passing mention in last week's post about impostors and underdogs got me thinking about Michael Faraday again, and I went looking for a good biography of him. The last time looked, I didn't find any in electronic form, probably because the Sony Reader store has a lousy selection. I got a Nook for Christmas, though, and this time, Alan Hirshfeld's 2006 biography, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday was right there, so I picked it up and read it over the weekend.
It was a fast read, both because this is a short popular biography-- 250-odd pages-- and because Faraday's life story makes for…
drorzel | April 11, 2012I've had limited success with this query on Twitter, probably because not that many people were reading late last night when I posted this, but I can give a little more context here, so it's worth repeating:
As part of something I'm working on but won't talk about yet, I'm interested in learning something about the context in which Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species.... For that reason, I'm looking for a recommendation of a book about the book, as it were: ideally something fairly concise that talks about the antecedents of Darwin's work. I'm sort of dimly aware that there were other…
drorzel | April 10, 2012Between unpleasant work stuff and the Dread Stomach Bug wiping out the better part of five days, I only got my student evaluation comments for my winter term class last week, and I'm only getting around to writing the post-mortem now. This was, for those who may not have been obsessively following my course reports, a "Scholars Research Seminar" class with the slightly cute title "A Brief History of Timekeeping," which is intended to introduce students to scholarly research and writing. The topic for my SRS was timekeeping, specifically the development of various timekeeping technologies and…
oracknows | April 9, 2012As you might be aware, I'm (almost) always willing to help a blogger out, particularly when that blogger is a regular commenter here who's gotten down and dirty battling antivaccine pseudoscience in the trenches of the comments right here on this very blog. Regular readers might have noticed that I rarely comment much on my own posts. The reason is that it takes a lot of time and effort to produce these daily pearls of Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful. Similarly, it takes a lot of effort to swat away the turds of pseudoscience flung into the comments by the monkeys of woo. I…
carlyo | April 9, 2012The Kavli Science Video Contest has wrapped up with over 260 entries! Now it's time for the People's Choice Vote, in advance of the awards ceremony on April 29, in Washington, DC, as part of the USA Science & Engineering Festival. People's Choice Voting begins April 2 and closes April 13. Voting is easy, just view the videos on YouTube and click 'like" for your favorites. Click here to view the videos.
We have been highlighting the Top 20 Finalists on our blog for the past two weeks. In today's blog get to know the next five of the Top 20 Finalists:
SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST…
drorzel | April 9, 2012 I'm trying not to be Neurotic Author Guy and obsessively check online reviews of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog every fifteen minutes. I've actually been pretty successful at it, so successful that I didn't notice the first posted review at Amazon until my parents mentioned it to me. It's a really good one, though:
I'm at the point know where I could answer some of the most basic questions that his dog has, but I remember a time when I couldn't and when the questions the dog asks would've been exactly the questions that I would have had. Pretty much every time a statement by the author…
oracknows | April 8, 2012About a year ago, I addressed what might seem to the average reader to be a very simple, albeit clichéd question: If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we cure cancer? As I pointed out at the time, it's a question that I sometimes even ask myself, particularly given that cancer has touched my life. Three years ago, my mother-in-law died of a particularly nasty form of breast cancer. Even though I am a breast cancer surgeon, I still wonder why there was nothing that could save her (and still is nothing that could have saved her if it existed then) from a decline over several months…
carlyo | April 6, 2012The Kavli Science Video Contest has wrapped up with over 260 entries! Now it's time for the People's Choice Vote, in advance of the awards ceremony on April 29, in Washington, DC, as part of the USA Science & Engineering Festival. People's Choice Voting begins April 2 and closes April 13. Voting is easy, just view the videos on YouTube and click 'like" for your favorites. Click here to view the videos.
We will be highlighting the Top 20 Finalists on our blog for the next two weeks. In today's blog get to know the next five of the Top 20 Finalists:
SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST:…
drorzel | April 6, 2012I want a story. The story about one little pig, and the wolf.
I'll need you to help me with it, OK?
Yeah.
OK, once upon a time, there was one little pig, and he... What did he do?
He built a house out of straw.
Right. He was a little bit silly, so he built himself a house out of straw. Which is a terrible material to build a house out of.
So, then, one day, a big wolf came along, and said [scary wolf voice] "Little pig, little pig, let me in!"
But he was a NICE wolf.
Right, so he said [scary wolf voice] "Little pig, little pig, let me in! I'm a nice wolf, but I sound like this because this…
oracknows | April 6, 2012Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times, and it doesn't help that it's a holiday week plus a week I was traveling. So I dug way back into the archives, back to five years ago, for a little gem that reminds me that I really should write about evolution more. As the AACR meeting showed me this year, it's actually highly relevant to cancer research. Besides, if you haven't been reading at least five years, it's almost certainly new to you!
Well, well, well…
drorzel | April 5, 2012Over in Scientopia, SciCurious has a nice post about suffering from Impostor Syndrome, the feeling that everyone else is smarter than you are, and you will soon be exposed as a total fraud. Which is nonsense, of course, but something that almost every scientist suffers at some point. The post ends on a more upbeat note, though, when she thinks about fighting it:
The more I thought about ways to combat imposter syndrome, either by myself or in academia in general...the more I came up with nothing. Until today, when I was working out.
I'm doing circuit training, and as I worked my way through…
drorzel | April 5, 2012Two things I was forwarded or pointed toward this week, that interact a little oddly. First chronologically is from the New York Times, which has a story about how Harvey Mudd College has boosted the number of female computer science majors, by committing serious resources to reforming the intro course (which is required of all students there):
Known as CS 5, the course focused on hard-core programming, appealing to a particular kind of student -- young men, already seasoned programmers, who dominated the class. This only reinforced the women's sense that computer science was for geeky know-…
oracknows | April 5, 2012I have a soft spot for pareidolia, as regular readers know. It amuses me to no end to see Jesus and Mary popping up on freeway underpasses, tacos, toast, pieces of sheet metal, Lava Lamps, and the like. I thought that I had seen it all--until now:
His image has been seen on rocks, windows - even a tortilla as recently as Ash Wednesday.
Now, in the days leading up to Easter Sunday, it appears yet another strange image of Jesus has emerged.
Erika Scheldt, 24, claims she photographed a stingray with a glistening depiction of Christ on its back after it washed ashore a South Carolina beach on…