Science
oracknows | November 17, 2011When it rains it pours, as they say.
Yes, sometimes there's so much going on that I can't possibly blog about it all, particularly now that I've cut back a bit. This week seems to be turning into one of those weeks. Yesterday, I couldn't resist having a bit of fun with the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher when she released a seriously hypocritical and silly press release whining about how mistreated she thinks her organization, the Orwellian-named National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) has been because the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) had the audacity…
oracknows | November 14, 2011As a skeptic and a blogger, my main interest has evolved to be the discussion of science-based medicine and how one can identify what in medicine is and is not based in science. Part of the reason for this is because of my general interest in skepticism dating back to my discovery that there actually are people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, which led to a more general interest in pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and other non-evidence-based and non-science-based viewpoints that now includes quackery, anti-vaccine nonsense, 9/11 "Truth," creationism, and anthropogenic global warming…
drorzel | November 12, 2011Someone from the American Astronomical Society ran across the Project for Non-Academic Science posts here, and is looking for someone to participate in a career panel at their upcoming meeting in Austin, TX:
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) Employment Committee is hosting a panel discussion at our annual AAS winter meeting in Austin on current issues related to the postdoc job market, with a focus on the increase in post-doc type positions without a corresponding growth in potential permanent academic positions. The session will be on Wednesday, January 11th from 10-11:30 am. They are…
drorzel | November 10, 2011I've been incredibly busy this term, but not so busy I couldn't create more work for myself. Specifically, by writing an opinion piece for Physics World about the FTL neutrino business, that just went live on their web site:
The result quickly turned into one of the most covered physics stories of the year, with numerous articles in magazines, newspapers and on television asking whether "Einstein was wrong". Just as quickly came numerous physicists denouncing the media frenzy, with Lawrence Krauss from Arizona State University and Cambridge University cosmologist Martin Rees both calling the…
pharyngula | November 9, 2011It's his birthday. If you were hoping to celebrate by making an apple pie from scratch, as is customary, I hope you remembered to start your universe preheating well ahead of time. It takes over 13 billion years, you know.
If you forgot, that's OK. Watch him on youtube or read one of his books, instead.
(Also on FtB)
oracknows | November 7, 2011Believe it or not, sometimes I rather miss Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey. Although McCarthy is still nominally the head of the anti-vaccine group Generation Rescue, she's really faded to a rather low profile over the last year or so. Indeed, the last time I even remember her spouting off about vaccines was way back in January when she defended Andrew Wakefield and, even more amazingly, during Autism Awareness Month (April) this year I don't recall seeing her on the major media anywhere. It used to be an annual thing that she'd show up on Larry King Live! or some other TV show. True, it's…
oracknows | November 7, 2011Ever since starting my blog nearly seven (!) years ago, I've concentrated mainly on skepticism in medicine, in particular examining various implausible medical claims that proliferate on the Internet and in our media like so much kudzu choking out science and reason. The reasons are two-fold. First, it's what I'm interested in. Second, it was at the time an "underserved" blogging niche that allowed me to align my skeptical interests with a niche that allowed me to establish myself as a blogger. Ultimately, I became interested in the anti-vaccine movement and somehow found myself becoming one…
jrosenhouse | November 1, 2011David Barash has a short, but interesting post about consciousness. Responding to someone who asked him about the most difficult unsolved problem in science, Barash writes:
I answered without hesitation: How the brain generates awareness, thought, perceptions, emotions, and so forth, what philosophers call "the hard problem of consciousness."
It's a hard one indeed, so hard that despite an immense amount of research attention devoted to neurobiology, and despite great advances in our knowledge, I don't believe we are significantly closer to bridging the gap between that which is physical,…
drorzel | November 1, 2011This coming June will mark ten years since I started this blog (using Blogger on our own domain-- here's the very first post) and writing about physics on the Internet. This makes me one of the oldest science bloggers in the modern sense-- Derek Lowe is the only one I know for sure has been doing this longer than I have, and while Bob Park's "What's New" and John Baez's "This Week's Finds" have been around longer, they started out as mailing lists, not true weblogs.
As such a long-term denizen of the Internet, I'm pretty much contractually obliged to have an opinion about Michael Nielsen's…
cevans | October 28, 2011"I read this book. It's pretty good even if they made it in a week. Worth the fifty bucks, easy."
Bruce Sterling
In February of this year, I had the distinct pleasure of being invited to the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a zygote of an institution nestled between departments at Carnegie Mellon University, to work on a strange collaborative project called a "booksprint." A booksprint, I discovered, is a fairly new practice, derived from the world of open-source software "codesprints." In this version, a group of writers work exhaustively for a week on a shared project, which is then made into…
krandall | October 27, 2011By Dr. Gerry Harp, Senior Astrophysicist, Center for SETI Research, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs
Trained as a quantum mechanic, Dr. Gerry Harp was deeply interested in possibilities for using the multiple telescopes of the Allen Telescope Array to generate steerable "beams" on the sky -- beams that could be far smaller than any single antenna could produce. Such beams don't emit anything, but work in reverse by capturing only energy that comes from the sky in a certain direction. Gerry joined the SETI Institute in 2000, practically at the telescope's inception and uses the telescope for…
drorzel | October 26, 2011
"I work around the clock-- 1043 Planck times per second-- providing the gravitational attraction to hold this galaxy cluster together. And some baryonic cosmologist wants to explain me away as a modification of Newtonian gravity?
"I have been silent for 13.7 billion years, but no more.
"I AM THE 96%"
(Original Pandora Cluster image from NASA)
pharyngula | October 26, 2011This is an article about cephalopods and eye evolution, but I have to confess at the beginning that the paper it describes isn't all that interesting. I don't want you to have excessive expectations! I wanted to say a few words about it, though, because it addresses a basic question I get all the time, and while I was at it, I thought I'd mention a few results that set the stage for future studies.
I'm often asked to resolve some confusion: the scientific literature claims that eyes evolved multiple times, but I keep saying that eyes show evidence of common origin. Who is right? Why are you…
catdynamics | October 25, 2011Less than a losing football coach, apparently:
DaveInTokyo investigates using UC public data
"UC Berkeley top 10 earners
Jeff Tedford HEAD COACH 5 $2,338,409.39
Michael J. Montgomery HEAD COACH 5 $1,606,588.82
Joanne Boyle HEAD COACH 5 $658,691.22
Teck Hua Ho PROFESSOR-ACAD YR-BUS/ECON/ENG $556,764.38
Anne Saunders Barbour ATHLETICS MANAGER 4 $470,017.06
Robert J. Birgeneau CHANCELLOR $428,712.84
Andrew M Isaacs ADJ PROF-ACAD YR-BUS/ECON/ENG $399,582.00"
From above:
George Akerlof, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2001. 2007 salary (higher than 2009 so I used that):$266,359 - Salary rank at…
drorzel | October 23, 2011It's been a while since I posted anything science-y, and I've got some time between flipping pancakes, so here's an odd thing from the last few weeks of science news. Last week, there was an article in Nature about the wonders of string theory applied to condensed matter physics. This uses the "AdS/CFT" relationship, by which theorists can take a theory describing a bunch of strongly interacting particles in three dimensions (such as the electrons inside a solid), and describe it mathematically as a theory involving a black hole in four dimensions. This might seem like a strange thing to do,…
illconsidered | October 21, 2011As most of AFTIC readers will know by now, the Berkley Earth Surface Temprature project has pre-released its set of four studies that are still pending peer-review and publication. Bombshell news: the earth has warmed pretty much exactly as all the other analyses have indicated. UHI and micrositing issues do not explain away the measurements.
I don't have much to add to the dialogue, but here is a good place for locals to discuss and share links.
Watch the cllimate evolve here:
Update: here are a few relevant links:
Primary sources are here
The Economist gets there first
Muller has an op…
pharyngula | October 20, 2011In my previous post, I described the misguided approach Gauger and Axe have taken to criticizing evolution, and one of the peculiarities of their criticism is that they cited another paper by a paper by Carroll, Ortlund, and Thornton which traced (successfully) the evolutionary history of a class of proteins. Big mistake. As I pointed out, one of the failings of the Gauger/Axe approach is that they're asking how one protein evolved into a cousin protein, without considering the ancestral history …they make the error of trying to argue that an extant protein couldn't have directly evolved into…
catdynamics | October 18, 2011From Grauniad, via A.
Research on Cat Physics
Improbable, but true.
Followed by: "Extreme Medicine: Reconstructing Physicists After Feline Fury", Nature Medicine
drorzel | October 16, 2011In a lot of ways, the OPERA fast-neutrino business has been less a story about science than a story about the perils of the new media landscape. We went through another stage of this a day or two ago, with all sorts of people Twittering, resharing, and repeating in other ways a story that the whole thing has been explained as a relativistic effect due to the motion of GPS satellites. So, relativity itself has overthrown an attack on relativity. Huzzah, Einstein! Right?
Well, maybe. I'm not quite ready to call the story closed, though, for several reasons. First and foremost is the fact that…
drorzel | October 12, 2011Tuesday was the last day of the fifth week of classes (out of ten; for reasons that passeth all understanding, we started on Wednesday, so all the week-based deadlines fall on Tuesday). Accordingly, it seems like a decent time for an update on the active learning stuff I've been doing in my classes.
Each class has had one exam at this point, and a handful of labs. In the regular intro class, we're in Chapter 5 of Matter and Interactions, about to do curving motion, and in the integrated math-physics class, which only does half a term of physics, we're just dealing with non-constant forces,…