Monthly Archives: January 2008

BPSDB, Evolution, Neuroscience, Pseudoscience

Panglossing Over the Dirty Bits

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BPSDBThe evilutionary superscientist P-Zed has just finished debating a horrid simpleton (i.e., a professional creationist) on talk radio. Being a professor, P-Zed knew to read up in advance, which in this case was a laugh riot in itself, because it meant reading his opponent’s book, What Darwin Didn’t Know. One chapter, “Purposeful Design,” argues (among other things) that the sexual organs of the human female were designed to maximize the pleasure of the missionary position.

Yes, it’s another entry in the department of “you couldn’t make this up if you tried.” Better still, for my money, is this bit:
Continue reading Panglossing Over the Dirty Bits →

Network theory, Neuroscience, Plectics

In Happier News, the ArXivotubes

Luciano da Fontoura Costa, “Communities in Neuronal Complex Networks Revealed by Activation Patterns” (arXiv:0801.4684):

Recently, it has been shown that the communities in neuronal networks of the integrate-and-fire type can be identified by considering patterns containing the beginning times for each cell to receive the first non-zero activation. The received activity was integrated in order to facilitate the spiking of each neuron and to constrain the activation inside the communities, but no time decay of such activation was considered. The present article shows that, by taking into account exponential decays of the stored activation, it is possible to identify the communities also in terms of the patterns of activation along the initial steps of the transient dynamics. The potential of this method is illustrated with respect to complex neuronal networks involving four communities, each of a different type (Erdös-Rény, Barabási-Albert, Watts-Strogatz as well as a simple geographical model). Though the consideration of activation decay has been found to enhance the communities separation, too intense decays tend to yield less discrimination.

The “simple geographical model” is one I’ve played with myself, since it’s so easy to implement (and serves as a null hypothesis for some problems of interest). Throw [tex]N[/tex] nodes into a box of [tex]d[/tex] dimensions, and connect two nodes if they are closer than some fixed threshold. In this case, the box was 2D, but a 3D version is just as easy to implement.

Wobosphere fun

Controlled Experiments

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“Okay, I’m going to hold a small piece of ice against your tooth to test for cold sensitivity. Are you ready?”

“Oh-hay.”

“First, I’ll hold it against the right side, which isn’t having any problems. How does that feel?”

“A i’hl ‘old — ah, ulp, a little cold, not too much pain.”

“Good. Now I’ll move over to the left side and touch it against tooth fifteen, where you’ve been having the ache.”

“Aaaaaaahhhh!”

On the plus side, I got my own copy of the X-ray picture which the dentist took. The older work on my upper left-side molars shows up as opaque blobs. Years of dissipation and unmoderated sugar intake, all condensed into a symbolism of metal! And, of course, it’s a picture of inside my head taken with invisible light. How cool is that?

Astronomy, Pseudoscience

2007 TU24: Essay Questions

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Now that asteroid 2007 TU24 has safely passed us by, without a single one of the apocalyptic consequences foretold by doomsayers, a few questions linger in the mind:

1. How long will the aforesaid doomsayers keep their act going? “The asteroid isn’t outside of Earth’s magnetosphere yet! Just you wait! The worst is yet to come, because I can still feel its astrological influence perturbing the quantum vibrational levels of my chakras!”

2. How many trivial events, the likes of which happen every day, will be claimed as effects of the asteroid’s passage?

3. Who wants to play Asteroids on my projector TV?

Astronomy, Video

Phil Plait on 2007 TU24

I haven’t posted a video in a while. So, in honor of today being Friday, here goes:

This is the formidable Phil Plait, explaining why the doomsayers are wrong about asteroid 2007 TU24. Four days from now, when we’re still here, I wonder how those people will react: will they just slink back into the shadows of the Net, or will we be treated to absurd stories about, say, website hit counters acting like prayer wheels and saving us from the Terrible Rock of Doom?

Group Theory, Neuroscience, Topology

On the arXivotubes

Michael Schnabel, Matthias Kaschube, Fred Wolf, “Pinwheel stability, pattern selection and the geometry of visual space” (arXiv:0801.3832).

It has been proposed that the dynamical stability of topological defects in the visual cortex reflects the Euclidean symmetry of the visual world. We analyze defect stability and pattern selection in a generalized Swift-Hohenberg model of visual cortical development symmetric under the Euclidean group E(2). Euclidean symmetry strongly influences the geometry and multistability of model solutions but does not directly impact on defect stability.

Note to self: file alongside Bressloff, Cowan et al. for future reference.

Bibliophilia, Quantum mechanics

The Name is Planck, Max Planck

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The algorithm informs me that the title for the next James Bond movie, the sequel to the franchise reboot Casino Royale (2006), will be titled Quantum of Solace. This title comes from a short story in Ian Fleming’s collection For Your Eyes Only (1960); the movie of that name used elements from two stories in the book, a third story became part of Licence to Kill (1989), and the title of a fourth story was affixed to the film A View To A Kill (1985).

The title “Quantum of Solace” appears in the story as the smallest possible unit of human compassion. The following paragraph appears in both the Everything2 article on the story (dated 6 March 2001) and today’s Telegraph piece about the movie:

The crux of the story is the emotional phenomenon the Governor calls the Quantum of Solace, the smallest unit of human compassion that two people can have. As long as that compassion exists, people can survive, but when it is gone, when your partner no longer cares about your essential humanity, the relationship is over.

Well, OK, Lucy Cockcroft’s story in the Telegraph doesn’t have the words “of the story” following “crux.” Eit!

Popularizers of physics are going to have a field day with this one. Perhaps, just perhaps, we’ll finally have an example of quantum meaning small!

Bibliophilia, Popularization

Open Lab Reviewed in Nature

The second annual anthology of science blogging has been reviewed in Nature. Joanne Baker writes,

The editor of this second anthology of the best scientific communiqués from the blogosphere thinks blogs offer new ways to discuss science. The Open Laboratory 2007: the Best Science Writing on Blogs (Lulu.com, 2008) takes the curious approach of using dead tree format to highlight the diversity of scientific ideas, opinions and voices flowing across the Internet.

It is a little paradoxical, when you think about it. To pick the “best” science blog posts, you have to find the ones which work in a non-bloggy format!

Next they’ll be asking which blog posts make the best plots for movies. . . .

Every year a different guest editor — here Reed Cartwright, a blogger and genetics and bioinformatics postdoc from North Carolina State University — picks the best posts to coincide with the Science Blogging Conference (in North Carolina on 19 January). First-hand accounts bring to life the stresses of a graduate student, a mother returning to the bench and an archaeologist’s joy at unearthing mammoth fossils. Topics tackled are as varied as the writers, from Viagra and tapeworms to trepanning. Explanations are often offered with a personal twist, such as a father’s tale of his child’s Asperger’s syndrome. The measured voices of trustworthy academics make medical research easy to swallow.

Just a spoonful of authority helps the medicine go down! Incidentally, do these selected highlights sound slanted to the life sciences? Well, I should really be asking the same question about the full list of entries, but on that list we’ve got the perils of taking averages, what a “year” really means, the life and death of cold fusion, cyberwar and quantum algorithms, not to slight a more philosophical piece on testability in Earth science.

If you are overwhelmed by the surge in science-related blogging and don’t know where to start, then this compilation may help you steer a course through the sea of perspectives on offer — or inspire you to start a blog yourself.

Well, I guess I didn’t screw things up for everybody else, after all.

(Tip’a the fedora to Bora.)

BPSDB, Pseudoscience

Shorter Tony Campolo

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BPSDBTony Campolo, author of Letters to a Young Evangelical (2006), has written a diatribe against Charles Darwin which shamelessly regurgitates the ignorant, hateful crap we’ve seen and debunked countless times before. To summarize his position,

Slandering the discoverer of a scientific truth and implying that science has made no progress in the past 150 years are both vitally necessary if we wish to love and honor Jesus.

We can also summarize the response from the seasoned Network travelers:

LOGIC — YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.

Fixing the defective wiring between Campolo’s ears is left as an exercise for the interested reader.

Bibliophilia, Evolution, Favorites, Popularization, Transhumanism

Spraying Habits of Pop Science

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OK, my fellow specimens, it’s time for a rant. This subject came up at lunch today, and I noticed it again at Terra Sigillata; the second occurrence managed to ruin the good mood I’d achieved by reading Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish (2008), which is a great book that everybody should buy.

The subject of this rant is the role economics plays in debates on science education, and more broadly, on a meta-level of rantery, the way people are deciding the roles which different tactics should have in science education. To illustrate the problem, let’s have a story. You’re a scientist, I’m a concerned parent, and we’re at a PTA meeting. You say, “We have to teach evolution in our schools, because evolution is the central concept in biology, and the biotech sector is a big part of our economy.” You’ve got my attention — that’s step zero! Job well done. Isn’t the appeal to the pocketbook — and the “think of the children” ploy — an effective tactic?
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BPSDB, Pseudoscience

Joseph Chikelue Obi: Confirmed Copyright Troll

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BPSDBIn 2008, Joseph Chikelue Obi made legal threats to have blog posts critical of him taken off the Internet. Bloggers promptly mirrored the material in an act of solidarity. Time passed, and I forgot about the incident. Recently, Joseph Chikelue Obi has been writing to my domain-name registrar, threatening to sue for half a billion dollars because in 2008, I shared a copy of a blog post. And yes, he is claiming copyright infringement. (Or, more fully, that my poor little website “has been wrecklessly [sic] (and unlawfully) violating our various Trademarks , our various Copyrights , and our various rights to a Peaceful Racial Existence.”) Again: The subject of the blog post was his making legal threats to have blog posts taken down.

As for Professor Doctor Joseph Chikelue Obi GKB (Biafra) FIDPO (UK) FRCAM(Dublin), his Royal College of Alternative Medicine was only a mailbox and a telephone service in 2005, but now it’s risen in the world, giving out medical degrees “duly recognized by the Medical Licensing Council” whose Executive Chairman and Chief Regulator is Professor Doctor Joseph Chikelue Obi. But it’s a “Fully Accredited Regulator of the Government of Biafra”, whose State Counsellor, “Chief Public Servant & Top Government Envoy” is “The Most Excellent Professor Obi GKB”.

I have been informed that recently, the original skepticism-oriented blog that was the source of all this has taken a turn for the transphobic, which I most emphatically repudiate.

What follows below is my original post from 2008, i.e., the mirrored content with a few editorial remarks of my own. —BCS, 1 September 2021

Continue reading Joseph Chikelue Obi: Confirmed Copyright Troll →

Network theory

Happenings

Abbie Smith is reporting back after finding some truly frightening people in Oklahoma City. Russell Blackford has been appointed editor-in-chief of The Journal of Evolution and Technology, and Tyler DiPietro has written an informative post on the “hiring problem” in algorithm analysis and a practical application of Kolmogorov complexity.

I spent an hour after lunch today experimenting with a toy model of the science blogosphere, investigating how preferential attachment can skew the gender distribution of “Top 10” lists even when individual bloggers are egalitarian and gender-blind. I’ve got the equations for my next SUSY QM post worked out, and a path through them mapped.