Science
bioephemera | February 21, 2011Perfect for a holiday* with big fluffy slo-mo snowflakes** and wintry, brittle light, Clemento's Macro Kingdom short films. The most recent one is below, and the two prior films are below the fold.
I love the incorporation of the fragile, distorted type, but can't resist observing that the words are more in the nature of a poem than labels. Don't expect clarity (or scientific accuracy) about what you are seeing - just enjoy the lovely juxtapositions. :)
macro kingdom III from clemento on Vimeo.
macro kingdom II from clemento on Vimeo.
macro kingdom from clemento on Vimeo.
*for many of you,…
drorzel | February 20, 2011My talk yesterday at AAAS went well, if too long (the person who was supposed to be flagging the time got distracted, and never gave me any indicators that I was going on, and on, and on... But that's not really what I want to post about. The thing that triggered this is the speaker giveaway from AAAS, which is a combination laser pointer and 1GB USB drive.
"Big deal," you say. Those are cheap." And, yeah, they are, but when you think about it, that's really kind of amazing.
50 years ago, the laser had barely been invented, and was still in search of a problem. Nobody had yet had the idea…
pharyngula | February 18, 2011Obviously, I did it all wrong. I have a digital video microscope in my lab, but what I did was spend about $20,000 on a nice microscope, $1000 on a digital still camera and about $500 on a digital video camera, and $200 on a pair of custom adapters to link them together. The principle is simple enough, though; you're just mounting a camera on the scope where your eye would be and grabbing images with a standard computer interface. So here's New Scientist bragging about building a video microscope for £15.
I've done something similar in the past, but I can one-up Lewis Sykes: I made my…
drorzel | February 17, 2011We had an education talk yesterday afternoon, because today's colloquium speaker, Ann Martin from Cornell, has strong interests in that and wanted to talk to people about it. A lot of the discussion had to do with teaching students to write, and getting them to accept feedback. Martin spoke very positively of a writing-intensive introductory course she did about cosmology, and said she saw significant improvement in both students' understanding of key concepts and the quality of their written work over the semester.
Those of us who teach a lot of introductory physics classes with labs all…
pharyngula | February 17, 2011My parents never got me nice things. Sure, there was that one Tony the Tiger cereal bowl we kids all fought over back in the 1960s, but they never got us one of these.
See? If I'd been born just a little earlier, 14,000 years ago instead of in the 1950s, Dad might have given me the skull of one of his enemies from which to dine on my Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. I was deprived.
This cool paper by Bello, Parfitt, and Stringer describes finds from a cave in Somerset, England which, among many other relics of Upper Paleolithic habitation, included several human skull caps with clear signs of…
pharyngula | February 17, 2011So I guess they can't be all bad. Yesterday, I chastised Michio Kaku severely for stepping out of his expertise as a physicist to say something stupid about biology. James Kakalios agreed with me, and sent along a little essay about the subject that also makes the point that expertise is important.
In Defense of Elites
James Kakalios
Following the recent mid-term elections, the consensus of many pundits is that this past November the American public sent a strong message of "anti-elitism." The good news is that nothing could be further from the truth.
Americans are certainly not anti-…
pharyngula | February 16, 2011This week's Nature has a substantial and fairly even-handed article on the unease Templeton funding causes. Jerry Coyne is prominently featured, so you know it isn't an entirely friendly review.
Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning," says Coyne, echoing an argument made by many others. "In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice." The purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to break down that wall, he says — to reconcile the irreconcilable and give religion scholarly legitimacy.
They also quote scientists who found the…
drorzel | February 16, 2011Sean Carroll and Brad DeLong have each recently asserted that relativity is easier to understand than quantum mechanics. Both quote Feynman saying that nobody understands quantum mechanics, but Sean gives more detail:
"Hardness" is not a property that inheres in a theory itself; it's a statement about the relationship between the theory and the human beings trying to understand it. Quantum mechanics and relativity both seem hard because they feature phenomena that are outside the everyday understanding we grow up with. But for relativity, it's really just a matter of re-arranging the concepts…
catdynamics | February 15, 2011The American Physical Society just woke up to the budget threat...
To cut a long story short, the US Government has no budget for 2010-2011.
It has been operating under a continuous resolution since Oct 1, and this expires in March.
The House, which originated budget resolutions, generally, wants a high profile cut.
$100 billion in round numbers.
But, not in Social Security, Medicare, debt service, or Military.
So, the $100G is going to be cut out of the $500G discretionary budget.
But, we're half way through the fiscal year, so almost half that money is already obligated,
so we're looking…
oracknows | February 15, 2011As most of you know, most of the basic and translational biomedical research in the U.S. is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Unfortunately, the NIH budget has been stagnant for the last five or six years. That's been bad enough, leading to a decline in funding success rates for applicants for research grants to a low level that we haven't seen in nearly 20 years. Worse, even though FY2011 started October 1, the federal government still doesn't have a real budget. It's operating on a continuing resolution. While this plays havoc with all government agencies, it's particularly…
pharyngula | February 15, 2011Paul Krugman has a lovely phrase to describe Republican policies: Eat the future. They are under pressure to cut spending, any spending, but they refuse to touch anything that might cause immediate pain to the electorate…so instead, anything in the budget that affects future voters is going to get the axe.
Once you understand the imperatives Republicans face, however, it all makes sense. By slashing future-oriented programs, they can deliver the instant spending cuts Tea Partiers demand, without imposing too much immediate pain on voters. And as for the future costs — a population damaged by…
drorzel | February 14, 2011Doug Natelson talks about a recent presentation on education:
I recently heard a talk where a well reputed science educator (not naming names) argued that those of us teaching undergraduates need to adapt to the learning habits of "millennials". That is, these are a group of people who have literally grown up with google (a thought that makes me feel very old, since I went to grad school w/ Sergei Brin) - they are used to having knowledge (in the form of facts) at their fingertips in a fraction of a second.
I can certainly agree about the Google part-- having graded a bunch of preliminary…
bioephemera | February 13, 2011The placebo effect, of course!
A video by Daniel Keogh (Twitterfeed) and Luke Harris.
h/t Ed Yong.
drorzel | February 13, 2011As I've mentioned in passing before, I'll be attending the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science next weekend, in order to appear on a panel about the TIMSS Advanced 2008 test. I'm an idiot, and didn't submit an abstract in time (I thought there was a perfectly adequate placeholder abstract there, but I must've imagined it), but I'll be talking about how the physics questions on the test line up with standard curricula and conceptual tests and that sort of thing. The three-hour symposium format is not what I'm used to (presentations at physics meetings are…
bioephemera | February 10, 2011Okay, I knew that planets are big, intellectually, but a well-done graphic is worth a thousand words, and a pretty HD video is even better. Brad Goodspeed made this video to suggest what other planets would look like, if they orbited Earth at the same distance as the Moon does. I've embedded it, but you should seriously watch it in HD, full-screen for maximum effect.
Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.
I have nightmares like that. Seriously. But is the video accurate?
In addition to being full-on creepy, Brad's video produced a fascinating discussion in the comments and on various sites…
krandall | February 10, 2011By Dr. Ignacio Mosqueira, an astrophysicist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs
Ignacio Mosqueira works with Paul Estrada to piece together the way in which giant planets - such as Jupiter and Saturn -- and their moons and rings formed. Ignacio notes that making moons is similar to forming planets. Understanding moons may have something to tell us about the possible habitats for life, since large moons could, in principle, have both the liquid water and atmosphere necessary for the kind of diverse biology we see on planet Earth.…
drorzel | February 10, 2011Barring a major disaster, I am scheduled to teach one of our Scholars Research Seminar classes next winter. I've been kicking the idea for this around for a while, with the semi-clever title "A Brief History of Timekeeping." The idea is to talk about the different technologies people have used to mark the passage of time, from Stonehenge down to modern atomic clocks. There's a lot of good science in there, from astronomy (sundials and the like) to basic mechanics (pendulums and so on) to quantum physics (atomic clocks) and even relativity. And there's plenty of room for side trips into other…
catdynamics | February 9, 2011The House Appropriations Committee released a partial summary list of the cuts they plan to make relative to Obama's 2011 budget request, in discretionary items.
Note the 2011 budget year is underway on a continuing resolution, holding funding at 2010 levels, which includes appropriations for a number of things that have been cancelled.
Here are some of the science items released so far, apparently more to come.
The Senate will, of course, also have a say.
· NASA -$379M
· NSF -$139M
· National Institute of Standards and Technology -$186M
· NOAA -$…
pharyngula | February 9, 2011I have received a request for volunteers to assist as subjects in a research project. I was disappointed; there are no exotic drugs, no catheters, no insane experimental surgeries that will turn you into a super-being with surprising powers beyond all mortal ken, but the fellow did manage to spell my name correctly, so it must be on the up-and-up. Contact Ben Myers (hey! That's how he got the spelling correct — he cheated!) if you're interested.
Dr. Myers,
I am an assistant professor of communication studies at USC Upstate. I am in the process of starting a research project and I was…
drorzel | February 9, 2011I haven't been as relentless about flogging How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (now available in paperback!) as I was last year, because it gets kind of exhausting. I do have a vanity search set up on Google Reader that points me to the occasional review-- this one, for example, so I still see the occasional positive comment, which is good for a boost in a difficult week at work.
Of course, the vanity search is world wide, which means it also picks up mentions of the international editions, such as this Italian blog (oddly, it gets my employer wrong-- I should check the Italian edition and see…