Science
drorzel | May 12, 2011The title is a .signature line that somebody-- Emmet O'Brien, I think, but I'm not sure-- used to use on Usenet, back in the mid-to-late 90's, when some people referred to the Internet as the "Information Superhighway." I've always thought it was pretty apt, especially as I've moved into blogdom, where a lot of what I spend time on involves the nearly random collisions of different articles and blog posts and so on. It's also as good a title as any for this tab-clearing post, which consists of pointing out two pairs of articles that, in my mind at least, seem to have something to say about…
oracknows | May 12, 2011Recently, there have been grumblings in the ranks of Orac-philes. All is not entirely well. Or, at least, all is less well than usual. Even more unusual, I feel your pain. I really do. We've been enduring a stretch when the anti-vaccine movement has been unusually busy for an unusually long time, leading vaccines to take over and dominate as the main topic of this blog for more than the last week. This has led not only to my getting tired of the topic, but to some of you apparently becoming tired as well of the sheer burning stupid that only the anti-vaccine movement can lay down with such…
catdynamics | May 11, 2011Caltech strikes again!
The Legends of Caltech record many pranks, some of which were really quite excellent.
I am happy to report that the spirit of the Rose Bowl lives on!
At this rate they will have to do a Real Genius sequel!
TTardis Project 6: The Prank
Tardis Project 1: Explaining the Project
Tardis Project 2: The Official Prank Club
Tardis Project 3: Why We Love Doctor Who
Tardis Project 4: What is a Tardis
Tardis Project 5: On the Road
h/t io9
Tardis Project 7: Success
Tardis Project 8: Good Fan Fiction
Tardis Project 9: Liz and the Doctor
Tardis Project 10: Prank Club is Born…
bioephemera | May 11, 2011
Earth Spirit, 2010
Enrique Gomez de Molina
Reader Laura alerted me to this iO9 post I missed on taxidermy artist Enrique Gomez de Molina, whose work would be written off as bad Photoshopping - except it's real sculpture.
The artist says,
The impossibility of my creatures brings me both joy and sadness at the same time. The joy comes from seeing and experiencing the Fantasy of the work but that is coupled with the sadness of the fact that we are destroying all of these beautiful things.
See a video of a sculpture in progress - a rhino covered with peacock feathers and thousands of individual…
drorzel | May 11, 2011While Kenneth Ford's 101 Quantum Questions was generally good, there was one really regrettable bit, in Question 23: What is a "state of motion?" When giving examples of states, Ford defines the ground state as the lowest-energy state of a nucleus, then notes that its energy is not zero. He then writes:
An object brought to an absolute zero of temperature would have zero-point energy and nothing else. Because of zero-point energy, there is indeed such a thing as perpetual motion.
This is really the only objectionable content in the book, but he certainly made up in quality what it lacks in…
drorzel | May 10, 2011When I was looking over the Great Discoveries series titles for writing yesterday's Quantum Man review, I was struck again by how the Rutherford biography by Richard Reeves is an oddity. Not only is Rutherford a relatively happy fellow-- the book is really lacking in the salacious gossip that is usually a staple of biography, probably because Rutherford was happily married for umpteen years-- but he's an experimentalist, and you don't see that many high-profile biographies of experimental physicists.
When you run down the list of famous and relatively modern scientists who have books written…
oracknows | May 10, 2011As hard as it is for me to believe sometimes, I've been at this blogging biz a long time--well over six years now. However, I've been engaged, in one form or another, in combatting pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and crankery online since the late 1990s. Although I try hard not to fall into the same cognitive traps that a certain pediatrician to the stars does, namely considering my own anecdotal experience to be superior to controlled studies, that is not to say that personal experience is without value. At least, that's what I was thinking when I came across Steve Novella's post A failure to…
drorzel | May 9, 2011While I've got a few more review copies backlogged around here, the next book review post is one that I actually paid for myself, Lawrence Krauss's Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, part of Norton's Great Discoveries series of scientific biographies. I'm a fan of the series-- past entries reviewed here include Richard Reeves's biography of Rutherford, Rebecca Goldstein's biography of Goedel, and David Foster Wallace on Cantor's work on infinity (which is less of a biography than the others). I'm not a huge reader of biographies, but I've liked all the books from this series that…
drorzel | May 9, 2011A little while back, Jonah Lehrer did a nice blog post about reasoning that used the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky, The Hot Hand in Basketball (PDF link) as an example of a case where people don't want to believe scientific results. The researchers found absolutely no statistical evidence of "hot" shooting-- a player who had made his previous couple of shots was, if anything, slightly less likely to make the next one. Lehrer writes:
Why, then, do we believe in the hot hand? Confirmation bias is to blame. Once a player makes two shots in a row - an utterly unremarkable event…
oracknows | May 9, 2011One theme that I keep revisiting again and again is not so much a question of the science behind medical therapies (although certainly I do discuss that issue arguably more than any other) but rather a question of why. Why is it that so many people cling so tenaciously to pseudoscience, quackery, and, frequently, conspiracy theories used by believers to justify why various pseudoscience and quackery are rejected by mainstream science and medicine? Certainly, I've touched on this issue before on several occasions, for example, with respect to the anti-vaccine movement, the claim that abortion…
drorzel | May 8, 2011The folks at Harvard University Press were nice enough to send me an advance copy of Ken Ford's new book, 101 Quantum Questions: What You Need to Know About the World You Can't See a few months ago. I've been too busy working on my own book to read any other physics books, though, so the actual book made it into print before my review. Better late than never, though.
As the title promises, this is a book about modern physics written in Q&A format. It's presented as a list of questions about physics, such as "1: What is a quantum, anyway?" and "6: Why is solid matter solid if it is mostly…
catdynamics | May 7, 2011Keeps on Rolling - but where.
Is this the year Ole Miss decides to break loose?
Back in '08 I noted that conditions were lining up for a risk of the Mississippi breaking out of its path, but that it was a low probability scenario/
Well, 2011 is looking much worse and there is now low probability that the lower Mississippi will not break out of its historic path...
So, the issue is the Atchafalaya River, a distributary of the Mississippi, which is tangent to the Mississippi at Red River Landing.
The Mississippi would like to break out of its current channel and move west to a shorter path to…
bioephemera | May 7, 2011
Thanks moms! Slightly more than half of everything we are we owe to you. :)
Song by cadamole - late of the St. Patrick's Day song.
bioephemera | May 6, 2011An absolutely beautiful hummingbird illustration by paperfashion, AKA Kathryn Elyse:
According to the etsy listing, it's pencil, ink and watercolor. That tickles me, because yes you can get those bold colors in watercolors, but few people do, and I thought it might be digital. As you can see from her etsy shop (where you can buy a print), the artist predominantly does fashion illustration -- but then, this hummingbird looks like it's wearing bird haute couture. It positively glows.
Painting by Kathryn Elyse, based on an original photo by Jose Yee. (The photo is on a velvety black field, so…
bioephemera | May 6, 2011Daniel Margulies of the NeuroBureau, an open neuroscience community, shared this opportunity:
The Brain-Art Competition 2011
Submission Deadline: 11:59PM CDT, Sunday, June 5th, 2011
Award Notification: June 28th, 9PM at the Cirque du Cerveau Gala (OHBM Annual Meeting), Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec.
In order to recognize the beauty and creativity of artistic renderings emerging from the neuroimaging community, we are launching the first annual Brain-Art Competition. Countless hours are devoted to the creation of informative visualizations for communicating neuroscientific findings…
drorzel | May 6, 2011In comments to yesterday's post about precision measurements, Bjoern objected to the use of "quantum mechanics" as a term encompassing QED:
IMO, one should say "quantum theory" here instead of "quantum mechanics". After all, what is usually known as quantum mechanics (the stuff one learns in basic courses) is essentially the quantization of classical mechanics, whereas QED is the quantization of classical electrodynamics, and quantum field theories in general are quantizations of classical field theories. I think saying "quantum mechanics" when one talks about something which essentially has…
drorzel | May 5, 2011An academic email list that I'm on has started a discussion of lab writing, pointing out that students in some lab classes spend more time on writing lab reports in a quasi-journal-article format format than they do taking and analyzing data. This "feels " wrong in many ways, and the person who kicked off the discussion did so by asking for alternatives to the journal-article style lab report.
This is a recurring discussion in physics education, because everybody who teaches lab courses struggles with this issue (guess what I'm procrastinating from grading right now...). It's made much worse…
drorzel | May 5, 2011NASA held a big press conference yesterday to announce that the Gravity Probe B experiment had confirmed a prediction of General Relativity that spacetime near Earth should be "twisted" by the Earth's rotation. A lot of the coverage has focused on the troubled history of the mission (as did the press conference, apparently), but scientifically it's very impressive.
The shift measured is very, very small-- 0.04 arcseconds over the course of a year, or 0.000011 degrees-- but agrees nicely with the predictions of relativity. I'm not sure whether to try to work this into the book-in-progress as I…
oracknows | May 4, 2011I see I've managed to attract another anthropogenic global warming denialist in the comments again, I figured that now is as good a time as any to post this video. True, it's over a year old, but it does as good a job of describing the multiple interlocking strands of evidence supporting the concept that the climate is warming and that human activity is causing it.
In particular, I like how this video sums up multiple lines of evidence supporting AGW. The same sort of reasoning applies to every major scientific consensus, be it evolution, the germ theory of disease, the scientific consensus…
drorzel | May 4, 2011It's been a hectic day here, so I haven't had time to do any substantive blogging. I did want to quickly note a couple of stories presenting marked improvements in experiments I've written up here in the past:
1) In the "self-evident title" category, there's Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds, which extends last year's antihydrogen trapping to times a factor of 6000 longer than the previous record. That's very good, and a good sign for plans to do precision spectroscopy and other such experiments. As always, Physics World offers a nice write-up.
2) As noted in the comments of Monday…