Science
oracknows | August 23, 2011About a week ago, there appeared a story in the New York Times about recent discoveries in cancer research written by George Johnson and entitled Cancer's Secrets Come Into Sharper Focus. Overall, it was a better-than-average article for the lay press about recent discoveries in cancer research that go beyond just the cancer cell and just oncogenes. I must admit, however, that certain aspects of it irritated me, not the least of which is that it appeared to buy into one of the most cliched of tropes about medicine and science in spinning the story along the lines of "everything you know about…
drorzel | August 22, 2011A few people last week were linking to this press release from Fermilab, which probably says more about the state of American particle physics than anything else: it's about an experiment that they expect to be approved in 2012, to break ground in 2013, and start running in 2016. I guess with the Tevatron shutting down and nothing noteworthy from the LHC yet, this is what you have to talk about.
The experiment in question is an update of an experiment from Brookhaven in 2001, which measured the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. The value they get differs from the best theoretical value…
drorzel | August 21, 2011A physics story makes the front page of the New York Times today. Sadly, it's with the headline Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear. Sigh.
The key technological development, here, is that General Electric has been playing around with a laser-based isotope separation technique. This is an idea that's been around for a long time, with lots of different people working on it. GE's technology is based on an idea from some Australians back in the 1990's, and they appear to think they can scale it up to industrial scale. Predictably enough, there's a stark difference of opinion about the…
pharyngula | August 21, 2011Jerry Coyne is mildly incensed — once again, there's a lot of
recent hype about epigenetics, and he doesn't believe it's at all revolutionary. Well, I've written about epigenetics before, I think it's an extremely important subject central to our understanding of development, and…I agree with him completely. It's important, we ought to spend more time discussing it in our classes, but it's all about the process of gene expression, not about radically changing our concepts of evolution. I like to argue that what multigenerational epigenetic effects do is blur out or modulate the effects of…
drorzel | August 19, 2011Back in June, when I was headed to DAMOP, I got email telling me that they had an official Android app. I installed it, and in with the meeting program and maps and things was a "Social Media" section, that included an official hashtag: #apsdamop.
I posted a few things using it, but it rapidly became clear that there was only one other person at the meeting using it. I happen to know him, so when I ran into him later at the poster session, I commented on how we were the only people at the meeting using the official Twitter hashtag. Someone else nearby looked baffled, and we had to explain.…
drorzel | August 19, 2011As a follow up to Wednesday's sad balloon post, the repair that lofted it back to the ceiling was a temporary reprieve, unsurprisingly. After 24 hours, more or less, it had sunk back down to the point where the ribbon was just barely touching the floor.
On the one hand, it looks kind of pathetic again. On the other hand, though, this is a chance to do some more physics. See, I know how much ribbon I clipped off the end to get it to lift off again, and if it's fallen back to where it's just touching the floor, that means that the buoyant force due to the displaced air has decreased by an…
drorzel | August 18, 2011I've moved on to the second of three academic writing projects I wanted to work on this summer (yes, I know I'm rapidly running out of summer...), which is a sort of review article on which I will be the only author. This creates an awkward situation in the introductory material, because it just feels wrong to use the first-person singular pronoun in an academic context. This is not a new problem for me-- my advisor pointed out that the only place I used "I" in my Ph.D. thesis was in the acknowledgements-- and other people have the same issue, so this seems like a perfect topic for a poll:…
drorzel | August 18, 2011I'm not much of a baseball fan, but we're edging our way toward football season, so I flipped to ESPN radio a couple of days ago, in time to hear Mike and Mike discussing Jim Thome's 600th home run. They were questioning how much meaning we should attach to home run records any more, given how many players were using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. In support of the record being a big deal, they played a clip of ESPN analyst Bobby Valentine pointing out that even with the steroid-inflated batting numbers, not that many guys are making a serious run at this particular milestone…
stoat | August 17, 2011
Shamelessly stolen from mt.
[Yes, I've been on holiday, but I'm back now. Prepare to be bored by my holiday snaps!]
Refs
* Vilnius mayor crushes car parked in cycle lane
drorzel | August 17, 2011My birthday was two months ago, and SteelyKid's was the weekend before last, so we've had balloons running around the house for a good while now. Meaning that when I came into the library yesterday, I saw the sad little image on the right: a half-deflated Mylar balloon floating at about chest height.
Now, the first thought of a normal person on seeing this would be "Why didn't we throw this away a while ago?" My thought, since I've been on a bit of an everyday physics kick for a little while now, was "Hey, physics!"
"What do you mean?," you ask. "What physics is there in the sad balloon? It…
drorzel | August 16, 2011Over at io9, they have a post on the finances of running a research lab at a major university. It's reasonably good as such things go, but very specific to the top level of research universities. As I am not at such an institution, I thought it might be worthwhile to post something about the finances of the sort of place I am at: a private small liberal arts college.
I'll follow the io9 article's format, but first, one important clarification:
Do you really do research at a small college? Yes, absolutely. At the upper level private liberal arts colleges, faculty are expected to be active…
drorzel | August 15, 2011Over in Twitter-land, Josh Rosenau re-tweeted a comment from Seattle_JC:
It is a bad sign when the promotion of science and science education has been reduced to a grassroots movement in this society.
It's a nice line, but it doesn't entirely make sense. When I hear the term "grass-roots movement," I think of something that has widespread popularity among the public at a low level, with that public support forcing political elites to take notice. Things like organized labor back in the day, or antiwar activism in the Vietnam era.
That's almost the opposite of how the term is used here. If we…
pharyngula | August 14, 2011This is one beautiful plesiosaur, Polycotylus latippinus.
(Click for larger image)
(A) Photograph and (B) interpretive drawing of LACM 129639, as mounted. Adult elements are light brown, embryonic material is dark brown, and reconstructed bones are white. lc indicates left coracoid; lf, left femur; lh, left humerus; li, left ischium; lp, left pubis; rc, right coracoid; rf, right femur; rh, right humerus; ri, right ischium; and rp, right pubis.
The unique aspect of this specimen is that it's the only pregnant plesiosaur found; the fore and hind limbs bracket a jumble of bones from a juvenile…
catdynamics | August 12, 2011Not infrequently, I get asked what it is I do, anyway, as a scientisty sort of person.
I blogged it, of course, but that was a "typical day" - during term time and filled with paperwork and class prep and general rushing about.
This morning I woke up and found the Sb Overlords had frontpaged this quote:
"I think I need to go back and think about adaptive load balancing block solving of sparse, nasty almost diagonal matrices; that and whether kinetic energy turbulence really affects sound wave propagation (duh, of course it does, but how much...)?"
Huh?
Ah, Particle Physics snark...
So, how…
drorzel | August 12, 2011I am an inveterate driver of "back ways" to places. My preferred route to campus involves driving through a whole bunch of residential streets, rather than taking the "main" road leading from our neighborhood to campus. I do this because there are four traffic lights on the main-road route, and they're not well timed, so it's a rare day when I don't get stuck at one or more of them. My preferred route has a lot of stop signs, but very little traffic, so they're quick stops, and I spend more time in motion, which makes me feel like I'm getting there faster.
That's the psychological reason, but…
oracknows | August 12, 2011A week ago, I took someone who has normally been a hero of mine, Brian Deer, to task for what I considered to be a seriously cheap shot at scientists based on no hard data, at least no hard data that he bothered to present. To make a long, Orac-ian magnum opus short, Deer advocated increased governmental regulation of science in the U.K. based apparently on anecdotes like that of Andrew Wakefield. Worse, rather than presenting even the limited data that exist regarding the prevalence of scientific fraud, he chose instead to devote too much of his limited word count to characterizing…
drorzel | August 12, 2011I'm sending a little pedagogical paper off to a journal today, and spent a while yesterday re-formatting it to meet their standards. This was particularly annoying for the references, as I had to go find a bunch of information that I don't usually write down. Which seems like a good topic for a poll:
A citation in a list of references should include:
Please note that the writing of papers is a classical phenomenon, and thus you may choose only one of these options.
My default answer, for the record, is the first choice. This is because my grad school training involved writing exclusively for…
drorzel | August 12, 2011Shockingly, it does not seem to involve right-wing politics in any way. It's this explanation of why swirling wine in your glass clockwise produces different effects than swirling it counter-clockwise. a sample:
Like all living things wine cells have a magnetic polarity, just like humans and the Earth. The positive pole is more highly charged, just like the North Pole of the Earth, which is why there are Northern Lights in the Arctic Circle, but not Southern Lights in the Antarctic. This polarity tends to keep wine cells generally upright, spinning on their axis when they are being swirled.…
catdynamics | August 11, 2011Last year, Brad deLong did a most excellent dissection of the lecture, how it came to be, and why universities need to rethink the whole approach to learning concept before they get eaten by technology development providing even cheaper content delivery.
I've been meaning to editorialize on this for a while, and then Chad planning for start of classes prodded me into action, doubly so when Chad posted a link to jolly nice resource for active learning in physics at Learnification
Now, others have provided expositions on how to teach wellgreat...
So I guess it is up to me to risk the wrath of…