Science
drorzel | March 23, 2011I am less enthralled by the "molecular gastronomy" thing than someone with my geek credentials ought to be. As a result, I was a little disappointed when I clicked the link (from Jennifer Ouellette on Twitter) to this Wired story about a new tv show called Marcel's Quantum Kitchen. Because, you know, there are much more fun things that the combination of "Quantum" and "Kitchen" could evoke:
A kitchen whose dishes all come in discrete and indivisible portions. You can't eat half and take the other half home-- it's all or nothing...
You can either know what you're making, or how long it will…
drorzel | March 22, 2011Kevin Drum re-posts a chart on wind power made by Stuart Staniford showing that the number of new wind power plants installed in 2010 was way lower than in 2009 or 2008:
This is meant as a starting point for discussion about the big economic issues that might've caused this. One of the many, many reasons I'll never make it as a political pundit, though, is that when I see a graph like this, I'm inexorably drawn to speculating about aspects of it that really have nothing to do with the intended point. In this particular case, I look at this graphic and ask myself "Why are there so many wind…
pharyngula | March 22, 2011The BBC is reporting the imminent extinction of religion. This is an end result to be hoped for, which just makes me all the more critical, and I have to say up front that this is the work of mathematicians, engineers, and physicists modeling sociology. It's interesting stuff that looks at the very biggest picture without addressing the details, and it could very well be entirely true, but I'm always going to be a little bit suspicious of academics crossing boundaries that much. Sociologists are not stupid people; I'd like to see more of them pick up on this mode of analysis, and then I'll…
catdynamics | March 21, 2011It will probably be some years before we get the full story of what happened at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex after the earthquake.
Information has not exactly been put out coherently or comprehensively, but we can make some inferences from the data that is out there.
It is likely that one or two reactor vessels were breached with release of fuel and radioactive ash into the containment vessel.
There are a lot of nuclear agencies in Japan:
the JAEA - Japan Atomic Energy Agency - whose online environmental radiation monitors are now online (Oarai is the interesting one, between…
pharyngula | March 19, 2011I made this post a few years ago, and I'm updating it now because my family back home in the Seattle-Tacoma area has a tradition: every year they join the Relay for Life to raise money for cancer research, in honor of my sister-in-law, Karen Myers, who died of melanoma. That's my family listed there, doing good. If anyone wants to chip in to help out, that would be nice — I'm planning to donate to my mother's page, since I like her best, but they're all nice people and it's a great cause. Or if you'd prefer to donate to the one who'll probably expend the most energy running around the track,…
pharyngula | March 19, 2011I have to call your attention to this article, Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data: Searching for, Discovering, and Interpreting Novel, Deep Branches in Marker Gene Phylogenetic Trees, just published in PLoS One. It's cool in itself; it's about the analysis of metagenomic data, which may have exposed a fourth major branch in the tree of life, beyond the bacteria, eukaryotes, and archaea…or it may have just exposed some very weird, highly derived viruses. This is work spawned from Craig Venter's wonderfully fascinating work of just doing shotgun sequencing of sea water, processing…
dgreen | March 18, 2011Jack Hassard wishes us well (and tasks us with being as provocative as we can) in his blog named after his book, The Art of Teaching Science (Oxford, 2004). Summarizing his own approach to science education, he credits Jacob Bronowski as his main inspiration, especially his belief that reasoning and imagination work closely together. Hassard quotes Bronowski at perhaps his most provocative: "You may have been told, you may still have the feeling that E=mc2 is not an imaginative statement. If so, you are mistaken."
Georgia Tech's Mark Guzdial, in his Computing Education blog, takes exception…
pharyngula | March 18, 2011That reputable scientist, Ann Coulter, recently wrote a genuinely irresponsible and dishonest column on radiation hormesis. She claims we shouldn't worry about the damaged Japanese reactors because they'll make the locals healthier!
With the terrible earthquake and resulting tsunami that have devastated Japan, the only good news is that anyone exposed to excess radiation from the nuclear power plants is now probably much less likely to get cancer.
This only seems counterintuitive because of media hysteria for the past 20 years trying to convince Americans that radiation at any dose is bad.…
drorzel | March 18, 2011Just a quick reminder that I'll be giving my "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk (same basic one from Tuesday night) as part of the Saturday Morning Science program (pdf) at the University of Toledo tomorrow, Saturday the 19th. The talk will be at 9:30, with breakfast beforehand. If you're in the vicinity, stop by and hear about some cool physics. My cold is starting to improve slightly, so I should be audible, and I've added at least one Ohio-related joke to the talk, so you don't want to miss that.
In only vaguely related news-- indeed, it's probably only of active…
drorzel | March 18, 2011This year's NCAA tournament is being spread over four tv networks, so that every game is shown in its entirety. Previously, you got whatever game was deemed to hold the most interest for your region of the country, plus occasional looks in at games elsewhere, that usually managed to miss the most exciting bits. For a hoops junkie like me, this was fantastic, with the only problem being how to manage to overload. I eventually settled on switching channels every time whatever game I was watching went to a commercial, so I got to see a bit of everything.
I was struck, though, but just how often…
oracknows | March 17, 2011You know, I really know the feeling described in this song:
I really do. How about you?
catdynamics | March 16, 2011The Japanese Atomic Energy Authority has online environmental radiation monitors.
The list of stations is here.
View Larger Map
The monitoring station at O-arai is the one between Fukushima and Tokyo.
Ambient radiation levels there are 30-40 nGy per hour.
Current levels are around 300 nGy/h - ten times normal.
Acute radiation effects are seen around a dosage of a Gy,
so long way to go - currently getting close to μGy/h.
Things get serious around milliGy/h.
7 day graph is here
Watch that curve.
bioephemera | March 16, 2011For everyone frustrated with the unscientific, spotty, incoherent and often inaccurate coverage of the Japanese nuclear plant situation: one geo-blogger and her dad try to help out. Now THAT is how you use your scientific expertise to improve public understanding in a meaningful, immediate way. Bravo, georneys!
hcarmena | March 16, 2011Have you recently assessed how your students relate to science? I clearly remember when I was young watching old movies and television shows that depicted scientists as older men with glasses, crazy white hair, and lab coats. Have today's students' images of science changed? What about artists? Do they all have mustaches and paint on white canvases? These questions arose for me and my colleagues when working with upper elementary students on science, art, and literacy integration. When asked fourth grade students to illustrate and articulate their understanding of science and art, the results…
catdynamics | March 15, 2011there are a number of questions that need answer regarding the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, aka Fuk-D.
As a starting point, here is an amateur online feed of radiation in Tokyo (Park18).
It is a geiger-counter, the normal count rate is 10-20 cpm, around noon on march 15th the count rate peaked at about 120 cpm, the counts then dropped before there was another broad rise on march 16th to about 40 cpm.
The first question is: why am I having to link to an amateur with a geiger counter?
The Japanese Atomic Energy Authority has four online environmental radiation monitors.…
pharyngula | March 15, 2011
About 600 million years ago, or a little more, there was a population of small wormlike creatures that were the forebears of all modern bilaterian animals. They were small, soft-bodied, and simple, not much more than a jellyfish in structure, and they lived by crawling sluglike over the soft muck of the sea bottom. We have no fossils of them, and no direct picture of their form, but we know a surprising amount about them because we can infer the nature of their genes.
These animals would have been the predecessors of flies and squid, cats and starfish, and what we can do is look at the genes…
catdynamics | March 14, 2011some weeks ago, a number of our colleagues became unaccountably busy, disappearing into their offices, holding long, late night telecons, haranguing stressed postdocs
what they had in common was their membership of the LIGO science collaboration
well, social networks report that at the LIGO-VIRGO meeting all was revealed
the LIGO Internal Affairs division had done a blind injection of an artificial realistic gravitational radiation event to see if the data analysis pipeline actually performs as advertised
apparently it did, the blip was picked up, I presume we will hear soon how well they…
drorzel | March 14, 2011Even though the really important Final Four has already been decided, the Division 1 NCAA basketball championship starts this week, which means it's time to fill out your championship brackets. And so, as usual, I present the guaranteed-can't-miss-sure-thing method of picking the winner based on the rankings of Ph.D. programs in physics (excerpt displayed; click for the full bracket):
OK, maybe there are a few bugs yet to be worked out with this method...
peconomy | March 14, 2011I am Peter Economy, and I have for as long as I can remember been a fan and practitioner of both the arts (specifically, the musical arts) and science. Some years ago, I had the very good fortune to be invited by Harvey Seifter to help him write a book on New York's Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and its unique leadership model. As you may know, one of the things that sets Orpheus apart from most other orchestras is that it has no conductor. Instead, different musicians within the orchestra take on leadership roles depending on their own talents and interests. The book -- Leadership Ensemble:…