Science
drorzel | December 15, 2010As previously noted, the UK edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is selling very well via the Guardian's online bookshop, among other UK venues. It's doing well enough that I might need to start referring to the original text as the American edition of How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog...
There's a nice ironic twist to the Guardian aspect of it, though, in the form of a review by that paper that I hadn't previously noticed until this book business summary brought it to my attention. It's a blisteringly bad review, basically dumping hate all over the talking-dog conceit. Which,…
bioephemera | December 13, 2010This is un freaking real.
My friend John O at Armed With Science has dug up a classic animated film produced for the National Naval Medical Center in 1973. It starts with an awards ceremony for the "Communicable Disease of the Year," hosted by the Grim Reaper (who turns out to know a lot about medical history.)
The top prize is won by the Dracula-esque Count Spirochete (AKA syphilis), over the vociferous objections of a shortlist of other diseases, including smallpox ("I've scarred and disfigured millions of people!") and gonorrhea (who resembles a lavender Tribble with a pitchfork). The…
drorzel | December 13, 2010A bunch of smallish items that have been failing to resolve into full-fledged blog posts for a little while now, thrown together here because I don't have anything better to post this morning:
-- When is doubt, start with self-promotion: Physics World includes How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in their holiday gift books guide, and says wonderfully nice things about it:
Chad Orzel talks to his dog about quantum physics. It is not clear what the dog gets out of this arrangement, but the rest of us ought to be grateful for it, because Orzel's book about their "conversations" is sure to become a…
pharyngula | December 11, 2010
This is awesome news. Biologists have figured out how to enable two male mice to have babies together, with no genetic contribution from a female mouse. I, for one, look forward to our future gay rodent overlords.
It was a clever piece of work. Getting progeny from two male parents has a couple of difficulties. One is that you need an oocyte, which is a large, specialized, complex cell type, and males don't make them. Not at all. You can tear a boy mouse to pieces looking for one, and you won't find a single example—they're a cell found exclusively in female ovaries.
Now you might think that…
oracknows | December 11, 2010Has it really been six years?
Six years ago today, on a dim and dreary Saturday in December, almost on a whim I sat down, went to Blogspot, and started up the first version of Respectful Insolence with an introductory post with the cliched title, Please allow me to introduce myself. Here it is, six years later. On this cold December Saturday, I still find it difficult to his blog is considered one of the "top" medical blogs by one measure, and some actually--shockingly--consider me somewhat of a "famous" skeptic. I know, I know, I still can't wrap my head around the concept myself. At least,…
drorzel | December 10, 2010I'm currently working on a book about relativity, but I still spend a fair amount of time thinking about quantum issues. A lot of this won't make it into the book, because I can't assume people will have read How to Teach Physics to Your Dog before reading whatever the relativity book's title ends up being, and because explaining the quantum background would take too much space. But then, that's what I have a blog for...
Anyway, the section I was working on yesterday concerned causality and faster-than-light travel, specifically the fact that they don't play well together. Given Tuesday's…
drorzel | December 9, 2010How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog continues to sell very well. The vanity search today led me to this, screen captured from the Guardian newspaper in the UK, which sells our book in its online bookshop:
Woo! Take that, biology!
Yeah, yeah, I should be so lucky as to squeak onto the list in 150 years. Still, it's kind of a hoot to see that list.
bioephemera | December 8, 2010This video from the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment is like a conservationist's version of the "Right Here, Right Now" video about social media (although the music isn't as good). It has crisp design, good infographics, and makes a very important point: that nature has massive, unappreciated economic value.
I'm not saying that money should be the main reason for environmental protection; I value nature for purely aesthetic and scientific reasons, over and above economics (although aesthetics and science both have economic value - realized through tourism and R&D).…
bioephemera | December 8, 2010After some scrambling, the Eavesmade team (self-described purveyors of "lasercut science goodness") has their scientist ornaments back in stock! And I have my very own beribboned Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein!
Here they are on my mantel; Sagan is on a rocket, and Einstein is pondering time, of course:
Due to popular demand, Eavesmade just added a Nikola Tesla ornament to their collection. So now I need that too. (It would be especially awesome to have a Tesla ornament on one of those vintage aluminum trees. . . )
Thanks, Eavesmade!
drorzel | December 8, 2010The great British physicist Ernest Rutherford once said "In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting." This is kind of the ultimate example of the arrogance of physicists, given a lovely ironic twist by the fact that when Rutherford won a Nobel Prize, it was in Chemistry. (He won for discovering that radioactive decays lead to transmutation of elements, causing one contemporary to quip that the most remarkable transmutation ever was Rutherford's change from a physicist to a chemist for the Nobel.)
Of course, there's a little truth to the statement-- not the part about…
catdynamics | December 7, 2010From Earth to the Universe was a brilliant outreach project for the 2009 International Year of Astronomy, displaying online, and in real life, some of the best astronomical images around.
Now we have the Year of the Solar System coming up, who knew, and more and better images are needed!
From Earth to the Solar System
FETTSS will be an online collection of images that can be freely downloaded and exhibited by organizations worldwide in whatever manner they choose.
In celebration of NASA's Year of the Solar System, the images will showcase the excitement and discoveries of planetary…
pharyngula | December 7, 2010I got a surprising amount of criticism of my review of the arsenic-eating bacteria paper — some people thought I was too harsh and too skeptical and too cynical. Haven't those people ever sat through a grad school journal club? We're trained to eviscerate even the best papers, and I actually had to restrain myself a lot.
Anyway, I'm a pussycat. You want thorough skepticism, read Rosie Redfield's drawing and quartering of the paper, which rips into the hasty methodology of the work. Man, after that, the body ain't even twitching any more, and they're going to have to clean up the pieces with a…
drorzel | December 7, 2010Today is the official release date for the paperback edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I wanted to write up something cool about quantum physics to mark the occasion. I looked around the house for inspiration, and most of what we have lying around the house is SteelyKid's toys. Thus, I will now explain the physics of quantum teleportation using SteelyKid's toys:
"Wait, wait, wait... You're not seriously planning to explain something quantum without me, are you?"
"I could hardly expect to get away with that, could I. No, I'm happy to have your contributions-- the book is about…
drorzel | December 6, 2010I'm going to be at a media training session for most of the day. I had hoped to have a long and silly post about physics to schedule today, but, well, that didn't happen. So here's a silly poll to pass the time.
The name of element number 13, chemical symbol Al, is pronounced with how many syllables?survey software
We normally deal in macroscopic quantities of this one, so quantum superpositions of answers are right out.
bioephemera | December 5, 2010FYI:
Science Art-Nature and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) present the "Science Without Borders" online art exhibition in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C., February 17 - 21, 2011.This on-line art exhibition, was conceived to display and promote the best contemporary Science Art and to encourage discourse between the scientific and artistic communities. Designed as a companion to the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, each selected piece of…
bioephemera | December 4, 2010Want! (The telescope works!)
Digby and Iona Spyglass necklace, from Catbird.
bioephemera | December 3, 2010Some awesome photos from NSF teams working in Antarctica (click for larger versions). This one makes me want to hum "O Little Base of McMurdo, how still we see thee lie. . . "
McMurdo base by night
James Walker/NSF
Palmer Station Sunset
Lisa Trotter/NSF
Aurora australis over McMurdo
Ken Klassy/NSF
Amundsen-Scott Station
Mel McMahon/NSF
Source: 'Dispatches from Antarctica,' a series of posts by Air Force Lt. Col. Ed Vaughan with OPERATION: DEEP FREEZE, the Defense Department's support of National Science Foundation research in Antarctica. Vaughan's ongoing series of posts includes an…
oracknows | December 3, 2010As a part of a longer post where I was, for the most part, serious albeit sarcastic, I asked one question that I considered a bit of a throwaway joke. Oddly enough, the more I think about it, the more I think that it wasn't such a joke. Here was my question:
Perhaps we could have a contest: Which cranks are most persistent, tobacco/smoking denialists, AGW denialists, anti-vaccine loons, or anti-fluoridation activists?
To which jre responded in the comments:
Fairness requires that we try to round out Orac's list. At a minimum, this must include:
Tobacky / 2nd-hand smoke denialists
Climate…
pharyngula | December 2, 2010
Oh, great. I get to be the wet blanket.
There's a lot of news going around right now about this NASA press release and paper in Science — before anyone had read the paper, there was some real crazy-eyed speculation out there. I was even sent some rather loony odds from a bookmaker that looked like this:
WHAT WILL NASA ANNOUNCE?
NASA HAS DISCOVERED A LIFE FORM ON MARS +200 33%
DISCOVERED EVIDENCE OF LIFE ON ONE OF SATURNS MOON +110 47%
ANNOUNCES A NEW MODEL FOR THE EXISTENCE OF LIFE -5000 98%
UNVEILS IMAGES OF A RECOVERED…
drorzel | December 2, 2010The poor coverage of science in the media is an evergreen topic in blogdom, to the point where I've mostly stopped clicking on links to those sorts of pieces. This ScienceProgress post about newsroom culture bugged me, though, and it took me a while to figure out the problem. The author worked as a reporter in North Carolina over the summer, covering science topics, and writes about his dissatisfaction with the journalistic template:
I had one editor who required that I give him my story pitches using six words or fewer. But the message wasn't even simply to shorten; it was to make it punchy…