I’m sure I’ll find something broken amongst my plugins and customizations, but to a first approximation, Science After Sunclipse appears successfully migrated to its new home. To celebrate, let’s have ourselves some Wilkins Coffee!
Found Poetry: Search Queries 4
To celebrate the end of the week and the start of the month, here are some search queries by which people have found Science After Sunclipse. Enjoy the free-verse, verse-free goodness:
Continue reading Found Poetry: Search Queries 4
Fractions
When the bus is stuck in traffic, or when I’m curled restlessly in bed during the darkest hours of morning when sleep will not come and all the old wounds on my heart ache like they were newly made, I sometimes think back over my education and add up all the time my teachers wasted. The worst, perhaps, was the mathematics, for which entire years of schooling went for naught. “Pre-Calculus”? Pfft. AP Computer Science? Pfft++. All in all, I’d say that upwards of a third of my mathematics schooling before university was a waste of time, and another third was so incompetently done that any student who hadn’t already been hooked on science and learning would have been completely sunk.
So, I find it easy to sympathize with people who say that math education needs a severe overhaul. I’m willing to contemplate big curriculum changes, but of course, you have to convince me that the specific changes you have in mind will actually do any good. When a proposal comes down the wire to eliminate fractions, I reserve the right to chortle and guffaw.
Continue reading Fractions
Panglossing Over the Dirty Bits
The 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
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.
Shorter MySpace
To summarize the apparent attitude of MySpace honchos:
Spines are for wimps, and Terms of Service are for pansies. Let’s delete the Atheist and Agnostic Group and then go sacrifice a goat to Rupert Murdoch.
Noises are being made that a “secular humanism” group (ID 100130357) has also been vaporized. I get an “invalid group ID” message when I try to check that page. Anybody know more?
Skeptic’s Circle #79
The Podblack Cat has the seventy-ninth Skeptic’s Circle up and running. The mascot attached to my entry captures how I feel when in rant mode — disturbingly well, in fact.
Controlled Experiments
“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?
2007 TU24: Essay Questions
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?
Naturally
Quote of the evening:
People will offer you a pill made from the leaf of an obscure plant and say, “Take it, it can’t hurt you, it’s natural.” But so is deadly nightshade.
— Alan Alda (2002)
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?
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.
The Name is Planck, Max Planck
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!
Math “Joke” of the Day
Q. John is a mathematician. John is a nihilist. John can’t tell a cow from a donut. What does John study?
A. Yep, pointless topology!
Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week. . . .
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.)
Shorter Tony Campolo
Tony 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.