Bibliophilia, Evolution, Favorites, Popularization, Transhumanism

Spraying Habits of Pop Science

8 Comments

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?
Continue reading Spraying Habits of Pop Science →

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.

Quantum mechanics

SUSY QM 3: The Two-Body Problem

Our goal in this series is the solution of the hydrogen atom using the methods of supersymmetric quantum mechanics. Last time, we constructed the following picture of the procedure:

If the potential we wish to study satisfies a certain criterion, which we called “shape invariance,” we can construct a hierarchy of Hamiltonians, each missing the lowest-energy eigenstate of the last, and find the complete spectrum of the original Hamiltonian by “working leftward” in the state diagram. We shall see that with the hydrogen atom, each state in the diagram corresponds to a physical eigenstate of the system, but in order to get there, we have to turn the three-dimensional Coulomb potential of the hydrogen atom into the kind of problem we can study with the SUSY QM machinery we’ve built up so far. Two steps will be necessary to do this: first, moving to the center-of-mass reference frame, and second, separating the radial and angular dependencies. In this post, we’ll tackle the first of those two tasks.

While the SUSY part isn’t widely taught, these preliminary steps are more familiar. This brief note is based on Chapter VII of Cohen-Tannoudji, Diu and Laloë.
Continue reading SUSY QM 3: The Two-Body Problem →

Poetry

Homunculus

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, in a 1960 essay called “Mutations,”

In a hallway I saw a sign with an arrow pointing the way, and I was struck by the thought that that inoffensive symbol had once been a thing of iron, an inexorable, mortal projectile that had penetrated the flesh of men and lions and clouded the sun of Thermopylae and bequeathed to Harald Sigurdson, for all time, six feet of English earth.

This line came to mind when, a few years ago, I had to write a poem for a poetry workshop class. Looking back, it was the easiest course credit I ever got.
Continue reading Homunculus →

About this Blag

Hiatus, Interrupted

6 Comments

UPDATE: My current comment policy, whatever that may be, can be found here.

The Gentle Reader may have noticed a notice at the foot of the discussions on this site, saying something like “Comments for this post will be closed on 22 March 2008.” This is a new anti-spam measure, implemented with Comment Timeout and intended to keep my Akismet spam bucket from filling up six pages overnight. Discussions will be closed after about sixty days of inactivity (I will probably tweak the figures when I feel like procrastinating and have exhausted the potential of changing my desktop background image). So far, closing the older discussions has cut my spam intake by, roughly estimating, an order of magnitude, which makes me pretty happy.

About this Blag

Brief Blog Break

5 Comments

I have more to read, write and process than I can handle right now, and something will have to be sacrificed. Consequently, Sunclipse is going on hiatus until next week. I leave you today (imagine my Charles Kuralt voice speaking these words) with this thought-provoking quotation from presidential candidate Mike Huckabee:

I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living Allah. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in Allah’s standards rather than try to change Allah’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.

Quotation guaranteed accurate.

Evolution, Network theory

On the arXivotubes

Salvo Assenza, Jesus Gomez-Gardenes and Vito Latora say in their e-print, “Enhancement of cooperation in highly clustered scale-free networks” (arXiv:0801.2416),

We study the effect of clustering on the organization of cooperation, by analyzing the evolutionary dynamics of the Prisoner’s Dilemma on scale-free networks with a tunable value of clustering. We find that a high value of the clustering coefficient produces an overall enhancement of cooperation in the network, even for a very high temptation to defect. On the other hand, high clustering homogenizes the process of invasion of degree classes by defectors, decreasing the chances of survival of low densities of cooperator strategists in the network.

Suddenly, with regard to cooperation issues, I have gone from [tex]N[/tex] papers behind to [tex]N + 1[/tex] papers behind. Question: If we construct a time-dependent network model of a population, can we represent both kin recognition and the effect of spatial distribution by node clustering?

Bad Math

One Small Step for Mismeasuring Man

8 Comments

There are only 1.27 times as many straight people as gay people in the world, and most people aren’t either.

How do I know? Google says so. Just count the hits.

porn: 227,000,000
lesbian porn: 9,930,000
straight porn: 610,000
heterosexual porn: 360,000
homosexual porn: 284,000

Now that I’ve gotten Science After Sunclipse banned from every school room in America (oh, like it wasn’t already, me being an ill-tempered, illiterate evilutionist and all), you can just go about your business. Or you can hang around while Windy and I resolve the group selection controversy.

Wobosphere fun

Album Title Meme

14 Comments

Via Quantized Thoughts comes the first album meme. The rules:

My title is Which We Created Them, since my quotation was, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them,” attributed to Albert Einstein. My band name is Köprülü family: I’m triply heavy metal. Just call me osmium, biyotch.

The original image also has its umlauts: Gümüş martı / Yellow-legged Gull / Larus michahellis.

Group Theory, String Theory

Carnival of Mathematics #24

The twenty-fourth Carnival of Mathematics is online at Ars Mathematica. To Ars, 24 is a special number because the Leech lattice lives in 24 dimensions (and, really, what could be creepier than a lattice of leeches? — methinks that could be the title for the sequel to The Halting Oracle). It’s also interesting to the secretive, cultish cabal of quantum gravity research, since it’s 26 (the critical dimension for bosonic string theory) minus 2 (the dimensionality of the string world-sheet). These two occurrences are actually related, although there’s a reason the relationship falls in a domain called Moonshine theory. . . .

Favorites, Software

Sneak Preview: GIF of Life

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As luck would have it, my day job will require me to teach a mini-class on writing computer simulations for scientific purposes next week, and one of the examples I thought I’d include turned out to be just the thing I needed to provide an illustration for the review of John Allen Paulos’ Irreligion (2007) I’ve got in the works. Since the details are a little beyond the scope of that review, I might as well make another post out of them.

First, the punchline:

This is a fifty-frame animation of Conway’s Game of Life which begins with a 32×32 grid of random values and successively advances by applying the transition rules of that famous automaton. The purpose of the exercise is twofold: first, to demonstrate some basic programming techniques and show how much you can do in Python with half an hour of free time; and second, to see how persistent and cyclic features arise from random configurations.
Continue reading Sneak Preview: GIF of Life →

Popularization, Quantum mechanics

Irony, Thy Name is Quantum

11 Comments

I wonder how many instances of the phrase “quantum leap” Scott Bakula is personally responsible for? There is, as many others have observed before me, a hefty dose of irony in calling a major transition a “quantum leap” or “quantum jump,” as the original leaps to gain the name were the transitions of electrons between energy levels. We’re talking about an electron’s “orbit” changing its diameter from one zillionth of a centimeter to four zillionths of a centimeter. But science never stands in the way of evocative, quasi-scientific jargon!

It’s old irony, but it’s still worth a chuckle, as when India’s prime minister declares, “We need a quantum jump in science education and research.” Start at the top, my friend, start at the top. OK, points for effort:
Continue reading Irony, Thy Name is Quantum →

BPSDB, Evolution, Pseudoscience

Taylor County, Florida: WTF?

19 Comments

BPSDBThe people in charge of Taylor County, Florida’s science education are scientifically illiterate. Exhibit A:

Whereas, the new Sunshine State Standards for Science no longer present evolution as theory but as “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology and is supported in multiple forms of scientific evidence,” we are requesting that the State Board of Education direct the Florida Department of Education to revise/edit the new Sunshine State Standards for Science so that evolution is presented as one of several theories as to how the universe was formed.

Let’s look at that last part again:

. . . so that evolution is presented as one of several theories as to how the universe was formed.

Yes, and the American Revolution is only one of several explanations for the invention of agriculture, stone tools and fire.

Browsing the TalkOrigins Index of Creationist Claims, we find that the Taylor County school board has regurgitated CA041 and CA201, for starters. I never knew the job of a school board member was so easy!

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