Monthly Archives: November 2007

Classical Mechanics, Popularization, Pseudoscience

Pop Science in Die Zeit and Spike TV

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For today, I’m going to let I Postdoc, therefore I am voice my complaints for me:

What bothers me, is that both journalists and the public seem to be so much more interested in, ahem, improbable science than in the usual garden variety.

Via Doug Natelson, who adds,

It is a shame that sometimes the media can’t tell the difference between good science or engineering and crackpottery. On a plane last week I had someone (who realized I was a physicist from my reading material) ask me about the guy who can get hydrogen from seawater by hitting it with microwaves. Kind of cool, yes. Source of energy? Of course not — it takes more microwave power to break the water into hydrogen and oxygen than you can get back by burning the resulting hydrogen. It’s called thermodynamics.

Spoilsport!

There go my plans for funding my all-consuming chocolate habit by selling the secret of seawater power to Big Oil so that the industry could suppress it. . . .

At this point, I should also mention the depressing and macabre quote of the day, which comes from Prof. Clifford Johnson, string theorist at USC. He describes what happened to the guest appearance he made on Spike TV’s show MANswers. While the whole post is quite worth reading, I’ll quote just a tiny bit:
Continue reading Pop Science in Die Zeit and Spike TV →

Evolution, Pseudoscience, Video

Another D-Word Sighting

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This is Mark Lawson interviewing Sir David Attenborough on BBC Four.

Remember, Sir David is the most trusted man in Britain.

LAWSON: Have you at any time had any religious faith?

ATTENBOROUGH: No.

Clearly, he’s not going to be trusted in the United States any longer.

One verbal item caught my attention. Lawson, a journalist of English birth and education, employs the word Darwinist.

LAWSON: Your programs clearly are Darwinist, but it’s not something. . . You never seem to actually take on the creationism. For example —

ATTENBOROUGH [overlapping]: Oh, I certainly do, privately, and, and would be happy to do — it’s not the place to do it in the sort of programs I make.

From this single instance, it’s hard to tell whether Lawson equates “Darwinist” with “atheist,” as our American creationists are wont to do, or if he’s closer to the usage observed among certain academics, roughly equating “Darwinism” with “evolutionary biology.”

Astronomy

Cosmic Tentacular Goodness

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With Phil and PZ together in the same place, it’s only fitting that today’s Astronomy Picture has placed cephalopods in the heavens:

A beautiful blue ion tail has become visible in deep telescopic images of Comet Holmes. Pointing generally away from the Sun and also planet Earth, the comet’s ion tail is seriously foreshortened by our extreme viewing angle. Still, enthusiastic comet watchers have remarked that on the whole, the compact but tentacled appearance suggests a jellyfish or even a cosmic calamari.

Go here for pix.

Wobosphere fun

Memetic Silliness

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OK, it’s Saturday afternoon, I’ve spent most of the day doing a literature hunt (giving myself a crash course on immunology — don’t ask why, just yet) and it’s time for some silliness. Brian Switek informs me that the Internet can tell how smart I am, or at least how smart I look.

Don’t ask how that judgment was made. It’s the Internet. The Internet knows all.

According to the Internet, in fact, John Armstrong is writing for high-school kids. You were in ninth grade when you first developed topology with category theory, weren’t you?

Transparency

Open Access: Get the Story Right

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Dear Nature News,

Get your facts straight. The new National Institutes of Health policy currently up for a vote on Capitol Hill will not require researchers “to publish only in journals that make their research papers freely available within one year of publication.” This is false. Such a requirement is nowhere present in S.1710 or H.R.3043. The new policy will require research funded by the NIH to be placed in an open-access repository within 12 months of publication. Really:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

Notice how there’s no Index of Prohibited Journals? In the industry jargon, the NIH policy will mandate “green OA,” not “gold OA.” This mistake is old enough and tiresome enough that we have a name for it: Journal-Archive Mixup, or JAM.

I’m cynical enough to expect the Washington Post to get this wrong, but Nature News should do better. The truly unfortunate part is that Slashdot picked up the error, so now a legion of science geeks will be completely misinformed.

Eric “Dr. Evil” Dezenhall must be pleased: his strategy for misinforming the public works so much better when all the reportage is sloppy anyway.

(Tip o’ the fedora to Peter Suber.)

Bibliophilia, Classical Mechanics, Popularization, Video

James Burke, Weightless

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I grew up on James Burke‘s books and television series, a taste I inherited from my father. All the way through high school, I had a reputation as a know-it-all, a walking encyclopaedia (who was, at least, a helpful guy). I kept telling people that if they’d watched Connections — and read The Cartoon History of the Universe — my know-it-all-itude would be a great deal less impressive.

I saw James Burke live, once, at an aerospace conference back in 2000. I had to run off and do something else right after his talk, so I didn’t get a chance to have a conversation or even get a book autographed (one more reason I’m glad I was able to say thanks to James Gleick). I do, however, remember a story he told about his days in the BBC, covering the Apollo program.

He was responsible for explaining the scientific motivations for going to the Moon, the motivations which stay valid after you beat the Russians there. As he reports in the Connections book, the British media put more emphasis on this than the Americans did, so British interest remained relatively high during the later missions, when NASA’s TV ratings in the United States were dropping. At the time, the significance of all this was probably less apparent, and Burke was busy enough just trying to translate NASA tech-speak into something people could understand.

Part of this job involved reading through NASA’s manuals for the equipment which would be used on the Moon. These machines were not simple devices, nor were their instructions straightforward. Each manual had to have a full description of possible failure modes, with contingency plans for each eventuality, and all written with such detail that both the astronauts and the Mission Control people could handle all possible malfunctions without going back to the original engineers. The result, Burke said, was something like this: “If X-Y-Zed, then gobbledygook. If X-Y-Zed-Beta, then gobbledygook squared.”

Finally, after a whole page of bullet-pointed technical jargon, came the last contingency plan:

“If all else fails, kick with lunar boot.”

And because this is the multimedia era, here’s a clip from BBC Four, in which James Burke demonstrates how the KC-135 “Vomit Comet” was used for weightless training.

Wobosphere fun

Long Overdue

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When my mother saw MIT’s Stata Center, also known as Building 32, she said, “My God that’s an ugly building.” Are you gonna call my mother a liar?

Now, for some fascinating news. “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing renowned architect Frank Gehry,” says the AP newswire, “alleging serious design flaws in the Stata Center, a building celebrated for its unconventional walls and radical angles.”

Let’s see that again: “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing renowned architect Frank Gehry, alleging serious design flaws in the Stata Center, a building celebrated for its unconventional walls and radical angles.”

No, the suit isn’t over the building’s looks:

Stata Center in September 2005

Instead, “The school asserts that the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage.” Also, at one point, it had skunks living in the main air intake (or so I’m told). The amount of damages sought by the suit is as yet unspecified; the building cost $283.5 million in all, $15 million of which went to Gehry’s firm.

Scott Aaronson says that he first thought the headline “MIT Sues Architect Frank Gehry” had to come from The Onion or, more likely, an MIT publication like Voo Doo. Actually, Voo Doo did once have a headline about the Stata Center (I know because I wrote it): “Building 32 morphs into battle droid; saves Cambridge from Mothra, Megalon.”

Later, of course, Doonesbury covered the same territory.

Transhumanism, Video, Wobosphere fun

Happy Fun Movie Time

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Neil Gaiman quotes a bit of a report about the forthcoming Beowulf movie, and asks us to spot the typo. At first, I thought it was “embarrassed,” because I can never remember how to allocate the Rs and Ses in that word anyway.

Angelina Jolie has admitted she was got a little shy when she saw her nude scenes in her latest film “Beowulf.” The actress says although the nude scenes were stimulated, she was still a little embarrassed. “I was a little shy,” she says. “I was really surprised that I felt that exposed. There were certain moments where I actually felt shy — and called home, just to explain that the fun movie that I had done that was digital animation was, in fact, a little different than we expected.”

Suddenly, I’m feeling the urge to go see Beowulf.

Also, the Coolidge Corner Theatre will be showing the “final cut” of Blade Runner (1982) starting the sixteenth of this month. For the proper ambiance, they should have chosen a venue in Chinatown, of course — but hell, it’s Boston in November. We’re going to have to walk from a half-broken subway through a construction zone in the sleet. All you need to add is a giant speaker on the Hood blimp telling us, “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. . . .”

At one point, during a film-studies class, I made a chart comparing the profusion of versions then known of Blade Runner. Nowadays, alternate or unused footage is a little easier to come by. For example, there was filmed a scene where Deckard meets Holden in the hospital, and they talk about hunting replicants. Watching the clip, I think I concur with the choice to leave it on the cutting-room floor:

It’s entirely the wrong feel for Blade Runner. It conveys no information not present in Rachel’s Voight-Kampff interrogation scene, and it undercuts the severity of Captain Bryant’s line, “He can breathe all right, so long as nobody unplugs him.”

On the other hand, this deleted scene from Terminator 3 (2003) is no worse than the rest of the movie (cough, cough).
Continue reading Happy Fun Movie Time →

Evolution

Posts on Peer-Reviewed Research

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Tired of slogging through troll-infested comment threads? Want to reinvigorate your sense of hope for the Internet? Then try blog posts on peer-reviewed research! A week ago, the “Research Blogging Icons” were unveiled, and now, dozens of posts have been marked with these identifiers, indicating that they discuss serious science which has appeared in professional venues. Dave Munger has picked out a sample of ten, and they all look worth reading.

For a wonder, one of my ICCS posts is on the list. Also, I quite enjoyed Kevin Z’s take on the evolution of fireflies. Did you know that the firefly family of beetles, the Lampyridae, contains about 2000 species worldwide, with around 120 represented in North America? And that the species which more closely reflect the ancestral form use pheromone signals, instead of light?

Kevin Z also describes research which has recently been done to understand the costs of flashing lights, both in terms of energy and with regard to attracting predators. And here’s where I kick myself: back in 2005, I wrote a scene for a science-fiction novel which used almost exactly the experimental setup of that predation study, although the goal in the novel was to understand why their flashes had started to synchronize.

Pseudoscience

Whines from Conservapaedia

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Donalbain points out that the front page of Conservapaedia is now complaining about that “prominent liberal evolutionist blogger and biologist,” PZ Myers. Actually, there’s a bit of back story behind this: a creationist troll dropped by Pharyngula and Jason Rosenhouse’s EvolutionBlog to demand that we evolutionists find even a “single factual error” in Conservapaedia’s article, “The Theory of Evolution.”

Honestly, he shouldn’t have wasted his breath. Conservapaedia endorses the “Darwin caused Hitler” myth, says the bacterial flagellum couldn’t have evolved, etc., etc. It reads like a pile of creationist remarks extracted from the TalkOrigins Index and fed through a Markov process. (To pick one example out of the farrago, the quote attributed to Colin Patterson, saying that there are no transitional fossils, is a classic creationist deception.) Not only is every reference to an actual scientist a quote mine, but also, the out-of-context quotations they use aren’t even assembled in a coherent order. They don’t care about making a good presentation; they just want to throw mud against the walls of academia and make science look bad.

So, a few people with too much free time have been slagging this out down in the ScienceBlogs comment threads. There it would no doubt have fizzled, except that the folks at Conservapaedia decided to whine. On their front page, mind you:
Continue reading Whines from Conservapaedia →