Science
pharyngula | June 26, 2011It looks like I missed my chance — I think this place was only a few blocks from the hotel where I stayed in Brighton a few weeks ago. An artist has put together a montage of 400 casts of women's personal bits, called The Great Wall of Vagina. It's impressive and rather pretty.
You know, I've been planning some research on natural variation in populations, and I've been looking into variation in limb morphology as an easy assay…but man, I'm looking at that and thinking there's an even bigger reservoir of natural varieties right here in the human population. Somebody ought to do a study on…
jrosenhouse | June 25, 2011Writing in The New York Times, Tim Kreider wonders if the immediate availability of information has robbed us of the romance of not knowing:
Instant accessibility leaves us oddly disappointed, bored, endlessly craving more. I've often had the experience of reading a science article that purported to explain some question I'd always wondered about, only to find myself getting distracted as soon as I started reading the explanation. Not long ago the Hubble telescope observed that Pluto's surface is changing rapidly, and noticeably reddening. It's not a bland white ball of ice, but the color of…
pharyngula | June 25, 2011It's like talking to a brick wall: MacLatchie is appallingly obtuse. When last I argued with him, I pointed out that the major failing of his entire developmental argument against evolution was that it was built on a false premise. As I said then,
I can summarize it with one standard template: "Since Darwinian evolution predicts that development will conserve the evolutionary history of an organism, how do you account for feature X which doesn't fit that model?" To which I can simply reply, "Evolution does not predict that development will conserve the evolutionary history of an organism,…
peconomy | June 24, 2011I am just now recovering from last week's Art of Science Learning conference in San Diego. For something that lasted just one-and-a-half days, there was an almost overwhelming amount of great presentations, great information sharing and exchange, and -- above all -- great people dedicated to moving the idea of the Art of Science Learning forward.
When I first made plans to attend, I did so as an observer. However, soon after the presentations began on the first morning of the conference, I became an active and engaged participant. Each presentation provided me with a deeper understanding of…
drorzel | June 24, 2011I kicked off the week with a grumpy post about the Guardian's flawed list of great non-fiction, so let's end the week with a slightly more upbeat take on the same basic idea. The New York Times did a slightly lighter list, asking their staff to pick favorite nonfiction. The lack of consensus is pretty impressive, but the list is still heavy with books that are famous-- even if you haven't read them (I mostly haven't), you'll recognize the titles.
So, famous works of non-fiction are pretty well covered. Which leaves non-famous non-fiction as a decent bloggy topic. So:
What are some of your…
drorzel | June 24, 2011(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of S.M., a Canadian government employee who would prefer not to be identified by name. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I work for one of Canada's three federal granting agencies (one, two, three). We get money from the federal government which we give to university resesearchers (i.e. professors). We…
oracknows | June 23, 2011Remember Michael Egnor?
I bet many of you do. If you were reading this blog three or four years ago, Dr. Egnor was a fairly regular target topic of my excretions of not-so-Respectful Insolence. The reason for that was, at the time, I was quite annoyed that a fellow surgeon could so regularly lay down such incredible blasts of pseudoscientific nonsense in the defense of his "intelligent design" creationism views. Back then he did this as a semi-regular blogger for a blog that is a propaganda outlet for the crank ID propagandists at Discovery Institute in much the same way that Age of Autism is…
drorzel | June 23, 2011A scientific theory hasn't really arrived until the cynical and unscrupulous find a way to use it to extract money from the credulous and gullible. This has posed a significant obstacle for general relativity, dealing as it does with gravity, which requires really gigantic masses to produce measurable effects. That makes it a little difficult to sell wacky general relativity-based schemes to people.
Until now, anyway-- recent advances in atomic clocks have made it possible to see relativistic effects on a human scale. There was a really nice talk on this experiment in the fundamental symmetry…
drorzel | June 23, 2011(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Carl Knutson, who works for a company making online learning systems. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
am the physics content project manager for an online homework and
learning environment provider, Sapling Learning, located in Austin,
TX. We offer online homework and tutorials for undergraduate…
drorzel | June 22, 2011p>(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Brad Holden, of the University of California Observatories (which, OK, is affiliated with an academic institution, but this is not a traditional faculty-type job). The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I am an astronomer at an observatory, specifically the University of California Observatories. Our…
drorzel | June 21, 2011Josh Rosenau has a post about the supernatural, spinning off recent posts about a recent Calamities of Nature webcomic. Josh makes a point that I think is valid but subtle:
The issue with the supernatural is not whether it's part of the universe, but whether it is bound by the same laws as all the other elements of the universe. The bizarre claim about ghosts is that they somehow obey some laws but not others, for no obvious reasons.
Something supernatural could, in principle, interact with the universe sometimes but not at others. If it is operating outside of natural laws, that doesn't…
pharyngula | June 21, 2011Animal Aid, one of those mindless animal rights organizations, has just called on everyone in the UK to stop donating to specific medical charities, because they sponsor research that uses animals. I can sympathize with the goal of minimizing suffering in animals, but this is ridiculous: the subjects of these research programs simply can't be approached without using animal models.
The charities targeted are Cancer Research UK, the
British Heart Foundation, the
Alzheimer's Society and
Parkinson's UK. If you're in the UK, make a special effort to donate to these worthy organizations, to…
drorzel | June 20, 2011While I was off at DAMOP last week, the Guardian produced a list purporting to be the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time. Predictably, this includes a tiny set of science titles-- five in the "Science" category, two under "Environment," and one each under "Mathematics" and "Mind." And that's being kind of generous about the boundaries of science.
This sort of thing is so depressingly common that it's almost hard to be outraged about it any more. Almost. Because, really, your list has room for Herodotus, but not Galileo or Newton? The modern world owes vastly more to the early…
catdynamics | June 17, 2011Ruh-roh.
Katla is rumbling a bit.
Historically, Katla tends to erupt 1-2 years after any eruption in Eyjafjallajökull.
Katla eruptions are also, historically, very nasty, very dangerous and likely to have wide (continental scale) impacts.
But not always.
Katla is the primary motivator for Iceland's rather excellent Civil Defence System.
From vedur.is
Earthquakes in last 48 hours under Mýrdalsjökull.
Definitely something stirring under there.
Will need to keep an eye on that, could go burp.
Or not.
h/t Lára Hanna
PS: Jón Frímann is local and on it
drorzel | June 17, 2011Alternate, More-Interesting Post Title: Attack of the Vampire Physicists.
I realized today that the only time I have been outside during daylight hours on this trip to Atlanta was during the brief walk down the platform to the airport entrance. This is only a little unusual for a DAMOP-- the Marriott Marquis is connected to a small mall by an enclosed walkway, so it was possible to leave the hotel and grab lunch in the food court without having to set foot outside. Other than that, I only left the hotel to go to dinner Tuesday and Wednesday, and that was on the late side, and hardly counts.…
drorzel | June 15, 2011Tuesday at DAMOP was dominated by my talk. Well, in my mind, at least. I suppose people who aren't me saw other interesting things.
OK, fine, I did go to some other sessions. I would link to the abstracts, but the APS web site is having Issues this morning.
In the Prize Session that always opens the meeting, Gerry Gabrielse from Harvard gave a really nice talk about his work on measuring the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. This is the "g-factor" that I've cited before in calling quantum physics the most precisely tested theory in the history of science. Gabrielse is the guy behind…
drorzel | June 14, 2011That's the title of my talk this morning at DAMOP, where I attempt the slightly insane feat of summarizing a meeting with over 1000 presentations in a single 30-minute talk. This will necessarily involve talking a little bit like the person reading the legal notices at the end of a car commercial, and a few of the guide-to-the-meeting slides will have to flash by pretty quickly. Thus, for the benefit of those who have smartphones and care about my categorization of talks, I have put the slides on SlideShare in advance, and will embed them here:
What's So Interesting About AMO Phyiscs?…
oracknows | June 13, 2011Remember Deepak Chopra?
He's the physician (yes, physician) whose grasp on real science is so tenuous and whose ability to abuse multiple scientific disciplines, ranging from quantum physics to astronomy to genetics to medicine, simultaneously in the service of woo is so amazing that a few years ago I once coined a term representing the only word you ever need to use to refer to Chopra's blather: Choprawoo. Yes, I realize that the term "Choprawoo" is completely redundant if you're a skeptic and realize just how full of pseudoscientific nonsense Chopra's blather is. On the other hand, for the…
drorzel | June 13, 2011You may or may not have noticed that I've been making a concerted effort to do more ResearchBlogging posts explaining notable recent results. I've been trying to get at least one per week posted, and coming fairly close to that. I've been pretty happy with the fake Q&A format that I've settled into, and while they're time-consuming to write, they're also kind of fun.
This past week, alas, was kind of brutal, as I was doing a ton of reading in preparation for my DAMOP talk tomorrow, which, in retrospect, is kind of insane, and SteelyKid's day care being closed for two days didn't help (…
drorzel | June 13, 2011Right around the time I sent in the manuscript for my own book explaining relativity to Emmy, I got an email offering me a review copy of The Manga Guide to Relativity, part of a series of English translations of Japanese comic books explaining complicated concepts in a friendly way. That was clearly too good a wind-down read to pass up.
Like other books in the series, this sets up a manga-type plot that just happens to require introducing relativity. In this case, on the last day of school at Taigai Academy, headmaster Rase Iyaga makes a surprise announcement: that he will throw a dart at…