Kristjan Wager has Skeptic’s Circle #75 up and running at Pro-Science.
Teh Burning Stupid: Relativity Edition
To put the “moral” at the beginning, let’s summarize. If you want to raise my blood pressure, one good way to do it is to write a completely wrong, back-to-front absurd tirade against all of twentieth-century physics. Anyone can slip a few errors into an essay, or even a few “fundamental” errors, but if you want the brass ring, you need at the very least to misrepresent the special theory of relativity, the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the use of mathematics in physics and the scientific method. Bonus points if you confuse general relativity with quantum physics; a woop-woop-woop special prize for taking a non-true assertion and calling it a “fundamental premise” of quantum mechanics; and an extra cherry on top if you take three famous observations which support general relativity, lie about two of them and forget the third.
The story so far:
- 14:06: PZ Myers finds a kook with some dumb things to say about Einstein.
- 14:09: I make a snappy remark,
- and then (14:33) I get kind of angry.
- No, wait, 14:49 is when I got really angry.
- 14:54 — have I calmed down?
- 15:56: maybe. . . .
- 16:06: Nope.
- 17:41: Dave Bacon reminds me to have a little fun in life.
- 18:10 An assistant professor by the ‘nym of “gg” writes a nice post on the matter, and promises more to come.
I might write an actual, non-linkfesty post about this. . . but then again, other corners of the Network are calling to me and reminding me of overdue obligations, so I might leave it to my colleagues.
UPDATE (6 December): gg now has Part 2 out on the blogonets.
UPDATE (16:47 o’clock): Tyler DiPietro dons the asbestos and joins the fun, followed quickly by Mark Chu-Carroll.
UPDATE (9 December): Flavin of the St. Louis Skeptical Society offers an essay.
Quote of the Moment
The quark gluon plasma studied at RHIC is the least viscous fluid known to man.
Just how non-viscous is it? Well, the folks in the STAR Collaboration tell us that for the quark-gluon plasma, the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density, [tex]\eta / s[/tex], is more than one hundred times smaller than that of water.
Barton Zwiebach has some videos on this subject which may serve as a good introduction for those with a moderate physics background.
Dawkins’ Book Endorsements
I just noticed that RichardDawkins.net is now advertising books in the left-hand sidebar, below the quotations and links to other skeptical and freethinking websites. These include Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (2006), Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (1995) and The Varieties of Scientific Experience (2006), E. O. Wilson’s The Future of Life (2001), A. C. Grayling’s Against All Gods (2007) and Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto (2007). This sampling is significant for two reasons: first, if your reading has been limited to American glossy media, the latter two names will probably make you go, “Who?” Second, the implied endorsement of Sagan’s work is interesting, since many people (even some who should know better) have taken to canonizing Sagan as the anti-Dawkins of science advocacy. The same goes, to an extent, for E. O. Wilson.
The list of books is generated anew with each page load, just as with the other sidebar information, incidentally.
Wikipedia and Creative Commons
This is pretty big news: Wikipedia, which has so far been licensed under the GFDL, is moving towards integration with the Creative Commons system. Two days ago, the Wikimedia Foundation requested that the GNU folks modify the GFDL to allow “mass collaborative projects” developed under the GFDL to migrate to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.
A time of troubles awaits in the near future, when Wikipedians will be asked to decide: relicense the encyclopedia under CC-BY-SA 3.0, or not? Even if the community says no, the new version of the GFDL will allow other content developers to mix material from Wikipedia and CC sources much more easily than was possible before.
(Via Peter Suber.)
ED The Future
A growing number of older children are rejecting the doctrine of “parentism,” the idea that gifts could be left under the Christmas tree by Mom and Dad. Now, at ED The Future, Lacie Cuskin takes us into the new, alternative paradigm of “External Delivery.” Can gifts be arranged under a tree by random chance alone? Is “parentism” merely another tool in the War Against Christmas? Only Lacie Cuskin tells it like it is!
When Good Sculptures Go Bad
This is what bioconservatives look like on the inside.
Anti-Matters
Starting your own journal is a time-honored way to make pseudoscience and outright antiscience look more respectable. Known loonball Paul Cameron did it in order to bolster his homophobia, and the walking dishonesty generators known as “creationists” have done it several times. (Ad hominem? Sure, if you like. But creationism is the morally bankrupt pursuit of the factually wrong, and I lost patience with it quite some time ago.) Now, Jason Rosenhouse reports, they’ve gone and done it again.
These journals invariably founder on their inability to find any scientists willing to write for them. Remember Proceedings in Complexity, Information and Design? It’s been moribund since November 2005. Or how about Origins and Design? That one went belly-up around the turn of the century.
The latest representative of the genre is Anti-Matters. It bills itself as “A quarterly open-access journal addressing issues in science and the humanities from non-materialistic perspectives.â€
Apparently, “non-materialistic” science means attacking evolutionary biology with — wait for it — the Second Law of Thermodynamics! Some bad arguments just never die.
Man, I’m on an emotional roller-coaster here. “Ooh, Jason Rosenhouse has a new post! Joy joy. I wonder what it’s about.” Then I read, and: “Oh. Creationists blathering about the Second Law.
“Now I’m sad.”
Sleep Tight!
All things considered, the antics of my government are still higher on my list of oh-god-we’re-all-gonna-die than quantum Zeno effects with dark energy. To illustrate why, I quote David Leppard in the Sunday Times:
A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it. […] Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition†of terrorist suspects.
The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.
Yep. This is all gonna end well.
Via Warren Ellis.
Citation Needed
Sigh! One day, I too will be famous enough to have a Wikipedia article which is attacked by vandals and quickly reverted.
You know, once I had a dream about a wiki. If you edited the wiki, you changed the world, and not just the way the world is now, but the way the world was and has always been. And I was the only one with access to the revision history. . . .
No more Borges before bed!
Good News
Having complained at some length about how the Philosophia Naturalis blog carnival seemed to have died, I am pleased to report that another installment has arisen. Volunteers are needed to host the next edition (sign up before Christmas).
Before you ask, “If you complain so much, why don’t you put that energy into hosting one yourself,” let me say that I’d be happy to run one of these shindigs, but given all the other blog-related stuff I’ve somehow committed myself to doing, you’d better not ask until mid-January. Lay a guilt trip on me the next time ’round.
I’m also curious if anyone has ideas for a different way to get multiple science bloggers to collaborate. I mean, a blog carnival isn’t much of a “collaboration” — it’s all retrospective, put together by somebody who’s more a secretary reading the minutes than an editor. Cosmic Variance recently had an open thread for cosmology questions, and Aaron Bergman did a similar thing for string theory. I wonder if this could be made into a regular affair, sort of an “Ask Professor Science!†tradition in which each month (or every N days, whatever) a different scientist-blogger hosts an open thread. If the event were well-advertised, each occasion could easily attract informed responses from many scientists other than the host, too.
On the arXivotubes
If I didn’t have to be modifying and debugging a network-growth simulation today, I’d be reading these papers. The first is not too far from one subject I’m researching right now. Axelsen et al. (arXiv:0711.2208) write about “a tool-based view of regulatory network topology”:
The relationship between the regulatory design and the functionality of molecular networks is a key issue in biology. Modules and motifs have been associated to various cellular processes, thereby providing anecdotal evidence for performance based localization on molecular networks. To quantify structure-function relationship we investigate similarities of proteins which are close in the regulatory network of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We find that the topology of the regulatory network show weak remnants of its history of network reorganizations, but strong features of co-regulated proteins associated to similar tasks. This suggests that local topological features of regulatory networks, including broad degree distributions, emerge as an implicit result of matching a number of needed processes to a finite toolbox of proteins.
The second, Gaume and Forterre’s “A viscoelastic deadly fluid in carnivorous pitcher plants” (arXiv:0711.4724, also in PLoS ONE), is pertinent to my eventual life goal of building an army of atomic super-plants.
Continue reading On the arXivotubes
Lent of Physics Blogging
For a while, we had a blog carnival of physics writing, Philosophia Naturalis. However, it looks rather moribund today: the last installment to date was on 4 October (at Dynamics of Cats), and the “next available hosting opportunity” was the first of November, which is already almost a month gone.
Combined with the recent description of the physics blogoweb as “an intellectual wasteland,” and we’ve got plenty of excuses to feel a little depressed.
Oh, and have you noticed that ScienceBlogs.com still can’t do math notation? So much for discussing science the way that, you know, actual scientists do. So much for reflecting the increasing quantitative aspect of the life sciences, discussing interdisciplinary work, or doing anything beyond the same old carping over innumeracy. Maybe they’re intimidated by that old “each equation cuts the readership in half” bromide. Or maybe they think that allowing the use of calculus and other such scary mathematics would be “bad framing.”
Continue reading Lent of Physics Blogging
Vericon
It looks like both Lois Lowry and Randall Munroe will be at Vericon 2008, this next January.
You know, for a guy who spent most of his teenage years either reading or writing science fiction, I sure don’t know much about this “fandom” thing. I mean, I have some impressive stories about the Trek convention in Huntsville eleven years ago, but I seem to have missed the whole game ever since then.
Sagan/Smith Mashup
OK, the Silliness Department has not yet clocked out. For this piece, the audio comes from episode 9 of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980).
ERV Ruins My Evening
This is, I suspect, the logical limit of the Snakes On A Plane style of media production: let the Internet write it for you.
Tip o’ the bucket to Abbie.