Wobosphere fun

Quantum Sleeper

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In the continuing debasement of every scientific word in the English language, today’s installment is the “Quantum Sleeper.” I would have thought this to be a Woody Allen biopic of Schrödinger, but no, it’s a bed — and one which takes the concept of pulling the covers over your head to new heights:

The basic Quantum Sleeper unit consists of an aluminum bed frame and headboard with polycarbonate, bullet proof plating that is designed to provide a protective barrier (shielding) between a perpetrator or environmental condition and the homeowners or occupants.

You also get a “bio-chemical filter in case of bio-chemical attack” and a rebreather system for doing without outside air.
Continue reading Quantum Sleeper →

Category Theory, Information Theory, Quantum mechanics

Categorical Information Theory

Ben Allen is now on the arXivotubes, with a category-theoretic arithmetic of information.

The concept of information has found application across the sciences. However, the conventional measures of information are not appropriate for all situations, and a more general mathematical concept is needed. In this work we give axioms that characterize the arithmetic of information, i.e. the way that pieces of information combine with each other. These axioms allow for a general notion of information functions, which quantify the information transmitted by a communication system. In our formalism, communication systems are represented as category-theoretic morphisms between information sources and destinations. Our framework encompasses discrete, continuous, and quantum information measures, as well as familiar mathematical functions that are not usually associated with information. We discuss these examples and prove basic results on the general behavior of information.

It looks like a discussion about this is starting over at the n-Category Café. If I didn’t have to spend today cutting down a 12-page paper to eight pages for an overpriced book of conference proceedings which nobody will read, I’d totally be writing more about it!

Evolution, Favorites

Dawkins and the D-Word

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I’ve written before about the different ways people define the word Darwinism and its close relatives. The short version is that American biologists and other academics don’t seem too likely to use the word: they just like to say “evolutionary biology” and be done with it. In the U. S. and A., hearing the word “Darwinism” is a pretty sure sign you’re dealing with a creationist, or at least a person whose knowledge of science derives too much from creationist misinformation. Over in Britain, serious academics still use the word, as do people who appear fairly pro-science (maybe there’s some kind of national pride thing going on?). One can still see negative uses of the D-word over in the UK, of course, particularly from people who confuse “social Darwinism” with actual biology or radically misinterpret kin selection and the “selfish gene” idea, but sorting out all their problems would require a book of its own.

Occasionally, people here in the land of motherhood and sport-utility apple pies get upset with Richard Dawkins for using the D-word himself. I mean, here we are, trying to make the point that science is not dogma and Darwin was not a prophet, and then this furriner comes along to screw up the lexicon. So, an event which transpired during a recent Q&A session is rather noteworthy. Both H. H. and Jackie Stone attended Dawkins’s talk at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture Society on Saturday, 15 March; I’ll quote H. H.’s account:
Continue reading Dawkins and the D-Word →

Wobosphere fun

You, Sir, Are No Spider Jerusalem

Thomas Levenson contributes to the information overload by writing a thoughtful post about, er, information overload, and in so doing, he links to Gene Weingarten’s description of the day he buried himself in the “pundustry.” For the sake of the WaPo readers, Weingarten spent Valentine’s Day surrounded by six television sets, two radios and a laptop tuned into the political commentary streaming down through the æther.

Depravity ensues.

I can’t shake one particular impression which Weingarten’s stunt left me: Spider Jerusalem did the same thing, pretty much, in volume 2 of Transmetropolitan — but when Spider watched TV all day, lies were exposed, pundits’ careers were destroyed, and a cooking-show host tried to kill herself by leaping from the roof of a building.

Wobosphere fun

Popularity

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fourth-most-popular-blog-post.pngThis is fun. According to the Nielsen “BuzzMetrics BlogPulse” website (by Poseidon’s beard, they come up with goofy names these days!), the blog post in which PZ Myers told how he had been expelled from seeing the movie Expelled is now the fourth most popular on the entire Network.

Thanks to Paul Sims for spotting this.

In some parallel world, all publicity is good publicity, no matter how popular you already were or what your intended audience is. However, in that world, Nixon has been beatified, and Osama bin Laden is President of Earth.

Evolution, Popularization, Video

A Counter-Proposal

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Expelled the movie -- Exposed!A while back, Paul Gowder suggested we scientists get our act together and make our own movie, for general consumption, countering the damnable and insipid lies of Ben Stein’s Expelled. Shortly thereafter, PZ Myers noted that, while he was sympathetic to the idea, it would be foolish to neglect the practical experience of filmmakers in doing so: the people who write the screenplay have to know how movies work.

Today, a variant of this proposal occurred to me. Somebody else may well have thought of it first, but I haven’t noticed the suggestion being made. Instead of explaining what evolution is all about, why not make a movie which explains why the Holocaust happened? To be sure, one historian will argue with another about which factors were most important in causing a sustained programme of cruelty to arise when and where it did, but a good documentary could lay all those factors out and, in so doing, make the point that Darwin and Wallace are not heading up the list.

Something tells me this project would be an easier sell than a feature-length nature show (I bet you could get Spielberg as an executive producer). And, at least in general terms, there’s a bit of a precedent for scientists entering this territory:

Discuss: what could be done that hasn’t been done before? What are the up-sides, down-sides and middle-sides of this idea?

Bibliophilia, Surveys

Gateway Physics Books

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John Armstrong raises an interesting question: what books could you give to, say, a bright high-school student seeking an introduction to mathematics? The same question could be asked for physics too, and I’m certainly not above writing a derivative blog post — not to go off on a tangent or anything, but it’s really an integral part of my style.

I’m looking for something a little more focused than John Baez’s list of math and physics books, which covers everything up to general relativity, quantum field theory and string theory. Rather than trying to map out a whole self-study version of an undergraduate degree, I’d like to know what materials might be useful for the student who has enrolled in or just recently survived AP Physics.

Suggestions? Also, for anybody who missed it the first time, my earlier poll, “what’s broken with science blogging?” is still open.

Transparency

Warda/Han and Well-Hung Tongues

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The story so far:

As January gave way to February, several bloggers called attention to a puzzling review article in the journal Proteomics, available online and slated for publication in the paper version. Mohamad Warda and Jin Han’s paper was entitled, “Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence.” As PubMed and Proteomics now note, that paper has been retracted, but not, surprisingly, because it offered no actual evidence for its stated claim — that some grandfalutin’ higher power had been at work inside mitochondria, designing the ways their proteins worked together. Instead, the paper was retracted due to “substantial overlap of the content of this article with previously published articles in other journals” — in plain language, plagiarism.

The story is still unfolding. What concerns the scientific community now is not so much the transparently flawed allegations of Warda and Han themselves, but the sloppy practice of the journal Proteomics in letting those claims get through peer review into publication. Now, nobody expects peer review to be perfect — like any human institution, it’s not going to be — it’s just a procedure for telling, as Cosma Shalizi says, that “a paper is not obviously wrong, not obviously redundant and not obviously boring.” Still, this incident is rather beyond the pale.

While the Warda and Han paper was itself obviously wrong, the developments from it have been far from boring. The Korean newspaper The Hankyoreh picked up the story, and in consequence machine translation gave us the delightful phrase, “OK, the power of science blog!” More recently, Fabienne Gallaire wrote it up in the French publication Rue89. Gallaire’s piece describes how these shenanigans have played out, from the beginning until now. Of particular interest is its accurate description of how the plagiarism was first discovered:
Continue reading Warda/Han and Well-Hung Tongues →

Wobosphere fun

Misplaced Obscenicons

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It’s time to take the names of human actions in vain! The following post will contain the sort of language which, if you cared, would have made you stop reading my website already. Consider this item from sportswriter John Donovan:

Joe Torre met with George Steinbrenner for a nice lunch in Tampa the other day, and I’m sure at some point the subject probably turned to the Yankees. And George, I’d bet, at some point looked at his manager and said, “#$!&@* the heck?” The Yanks should be better. Can they win some close games?

Now, I don’t really give a flying $!%!#% about sports, unless there’s a chance that Boston will erupt in a riot. Then, I’m interested. However, linguistic peculiarities always get me perked up. Let’s look at that “#$!&@* the heck?” little remark. Everyone who grew up with comic strips knows about the convention of replacing swear words with punctuation symbols. Sometimes, the word being replaced is obvious to those familiar with modern slang; on other occasions, there’s a moderate ambiguity in the decoding. More unusual, however, is the case of an innocent word being obscured. Following comics convention, one would expect to see “What the #$!&@*,” but that’s not what we’ve got here. So, presumably, the proper decoding for Donovan’s remark would have to be. . . .
Continue reading Misplaced Obscenicons →

Evolution, Pseudoscience, Video

Dawkins and Myers on Being Expelled

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Expelled -- Exposed!Josh Timonen has filmed a dialogue between PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins. The clip below describes what happened when the two of them went, with friends and family, to see the creationist propaganda flick Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Many people have already observed that the movie’s subtitle is a blazing beacon of irony, but gosh darn it, that observation gets truer every day: the makers of Expelled are bound and determined to drive home their lack of acumen.

The Harvard/XVIVO animation to which the biologists refer, one which creationists have plagiarized before, is available on Harvard’s website.

Poetry

A Word from the Cuttlefish

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Only the rarest of authors can demolish the “Two Cultures” divide within a single phrase, conjoining a scientific education with the “classical” like two strands of DNA (or like Baucis and Philemon, take your pick). One such author is The Digital Cuttlefish.

When reinventing history
It’s best to keep the mystery;
If witnesses are noticed, it is best to take them out.
And although the act is telling,
You’d be better off expelling
Doctor Myers, if you see him, just because the man’s a lout.
You see, PZ is a witness
To the movie’s lack of fitness—
He is one selection pressure that would render it extinct.
So, with “WANTED!” posters printed,
To the cinema they sprinted,
And they passed around the mugshots just as soon as they were inked.
The policemen, at the ready,
Kept the ticket-takers steady
While they watched with eyes like eagles for the devil in disguise.
Yes! They spotted Dr. Myers,
Looking just like in their fliers!
The policemen, quite correctly, gave the doctor a surprise.
When they said he’d be arrested
If their actions he protested,
He complied at once (that should have raised suspicions, don’t you think?)
Once his actions had been thwarted
And he left the line, escorted,
Looking back to his companion in the line, he gave a wink….
So this little movie trip is
Like a Trojan Eohippus
That delivered Richard Dawkins deep within the fortress walls
I can’t wait to read the story
Of the battle and the glory—
Cos the trailer to this feature shows the hero’s got some balls!

(Source.)

It’s a good thing we’ve got the Cuttlefish, because a world which has gone this mad deserves a poet.

Poetry

Gas

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I’m taking off for a few days — got to finish writing some other things, and all — so here’s a poem.

“DULCE ET DECORUM EST,” BY WILFRED OWEN

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Popularization

Specific and the General

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TR Gregory finds a particularly egregious and galling mismatch between the headline of a press release and the story itself. He asks, “Do the people who determine headlines not even read the stories?” One more entry in the file of evidence that science journalism isn’t working right. . . and on that note, Brian Switek has some general observations, leading to the following conclusion:

We all bitch and moan about how inaccurate news reports are, but unless we actively become engaged in this sort of reporting (infiltrating the “system,” as it were) our complaints will essentially make little difference outside our own little circles of science enthusiasts. Science bloggers are starting to change this and may play a bigger role in the future, but if we’re to ultimately improve science communication in the media more people with a solid grasp of science are going to have to get involved in the active generation and promulgation of stories rather than just complain about the result.

I always get a Life of Brian vibe when the discussion turns in this direction. “We could sit around here all day talking, passing resolutions, making clever speeches. It’s not going to shift one Roman soldier!”

"no matter how gifted, you alone cannot change the world"