Archive for the ‘It’s Only Rocket Science’ Category
Polygyny and Anteaters
Two selections from today's reading in Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2004), mostly to confound fundamentalists and creationists: The Ethnographic Atlas of G.P. Murdock, published in 1967, is a brave compilation. It lists particulars of 849 human societies, surveyed all over the world. From it we might hope to count numbers of […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
Not All Things Freeze
Some time ago I started reading1 Robert Wolke's What Einstein Told His Cook 2. It is a collection of very short pieces about food and cooking from a chemist's point of view, assembled from his Washington Post columns. Rather early on though, he made a small error of fact. I point this out not to […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
Statistical Fluctuations
Abraham Pais, a physicist who wrote what is generally regarded as the definitive scientific biography of Einstein, said of his subject that there are two things at which he was "better than anyone before or after him; he knew how to invent invariance principles and how to make use of statistical fluctuations." Invariance principles play […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
The Purpose of Science (Part I)
About 10 or 12 years ago, when I was still a scientist producing science, I was working on an experiment that eventually flew on two Space Shuttle missions (in 1994, then 1996 — our project was called "Zeno"1). We were working under the umbrella of "microgravity" research, research that wanted to exploit the very reduced […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Notes to Richard
Real Science is That Simple
Evolution rankles them because it contradicts the Bible which says God made man in his own image and describes specifically how God did it. But cosmology, the study of the Universe as a whole, is even worse for them, since it clearly contradicts the very first passages of that Bible. If you take the Bible […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
Polling: "Margin of Error"
This is not a particularly recent poll, although the assertion is still true. But that's not the point. The New York Times > Washington > New Poll Finds Bush Priorities Are Out of Step With Americans The poll was conducted by telephone with 1,111 adults from Thursday through Monday. It has a margin of sampling […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
Traditional Atomic Theory
Reminding us that atoms were "just a theory" until the twentieth century when experiment finally established atomic reality (in some quantum mechanical sense yet to be understood fully): But as late as 1894, when Robert Cecil, the third Marquis of Salisbury, chancellor of Oxford and former Prime Minister of England, catalogued the unfinished business of […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
Bon Voyage Voyager
Bob Park, who writes What's New for the American Physical Society (my professional organization), isn't too happy with the new priorities for NASA's budget. Neither am I for that matter, although my reasons are somewhat different. Nevertheless, I agree with him: SPACE: VOYAGER 1 REACHES THE LIMIT OF BUSH’S ATTENTION SPAN. It’s been traveling for […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Speaking of Science, Splenetics
The Discovery of Helium
"Observations of the 1868 [solar] eclipse led to the discovery of a bright yellow emission line in the spectrum of the [sun's] chromosphere, which is normally not observable except during a few seconds just before and just following totality [in a solar eclipse]. What happened next is nicely described by C.A. Young in the 1895 […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
Rickets & Windows
File under "unintended consequences": In 1696 a window tax was inroduced in Britain when the financially hard-pressed govenment started taxing properties based on the number of windows. The citizenry responded by bricking up windows and the darker houses are thought to have contributed to an increased incidence of rickets and tuberculosis. [David Whitehouse, The Sun: […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
A Star Explodes in Slow Motion
I've thoroughly enjoyed reading this book by Peter Atkins (reference below), and I found his slow-motion description of the process that leads to the creation of a supernova uncommonly gripping and dramatic, as well as enlightening. Stars bigger than about eight Suns have a violent future. The temperature in these giants can rise so much, […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
NPC ID "Debate"
Bob Park, a physicist who writes the brief "What's New" reports for the American Physical Society with a great deal of wit and withering obervation (archives here, subscribe here), apparently attended a recent press "event" at the National Press Club put on by the irrepressible [so-called] Design [so-called] Insitute: EVOLUTION: DISCOVERY INSTITUTE FINDS A SCIENTIST […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
How Astrology Works
For the last little bit, Richard Rockley at Skeptico has been posting answers he's received in response to his "Astrology Challenge", which asks the question "how did they make all this stuff up to begin with", surely a defining question. As he discusses this latest response to his query, he claims to find the explanation […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Splenetics
Tangled Bank XXV
The Tangled Bank XXV, hosted this time at Respectful Insolence (a.k.a. "Orac Knows"), is an example of a phenomenon, until very recently unknown to me, known in the blogoon as a "Blog Carnival". It's a pretty cool idea, actually, so it's nice that someone thought of it. The Tangled Bank, which originated with PZ Myers […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, The Art of Conversation
Non-Hostile Casualties
Is it just me? I find the following paragraph very odd and unsettling. Thanks to a mention at the Whiskey Bar, we read this (AP) — As of Saturday, April 2, 2005, at least 1,533 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Against Positive Selection
My usual complaint: it's too far past bedtime to write sufficiently about this topic. It's true, but it's also true that I think the topic is much bigger than I can adequately attend to at this bleary-eyed hour. Nevertheless, I'll sleep better if I jot down a few sentences. (I've alluded to this idea before, […]
In: All, Hermeneutics, It's Only Rocket Science
You Go, Roger Ebert!
The Panda's Thumb suggests "One Thumb Up for the TalkOrigins Archive?" over this startlingly frank piece by Roger Ebert: "Film about volcanoes falls victim to creationists", on the basis on the final paragraph: […] Surely moviegoers deserve the right to decide for themselves what movies to see? "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," according to the […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Splenetics
"Science" a Dirty Word?
Behold the British Press, willing to say what the American Media apparently prefer not to mention: For Bush, science is a dirty word In America's right-to-die controversy the facts were not allowed to get in the way of evangelical populism Admittedly, the piece was written by Tristram Hunt, a visiting professor of history at Arizona […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
Pseudo-Science & Schools
Some things just make you want to throw your hands up in the air, or scream and punch a brick wall or something. Somebody kindly pointed out this transcript of a report on yesterday's Newshour with Jim Lehrer called "Creation Conflict in Schools", reported by Jeffrey Brown. Here were a few comments made by students […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
Key-Word-Based Science
I was reading an interesting article at Science Blog, "Changes in Earth's tilt control when glacial cycles end", about a new report (written by "Peter Huybers, a postdoctoral fellow in the WHOI Geology and Geophysics Department, and coauthor Carl Wunsch of MIT") suggesting that changes in the tilt of the earth's axis may indeed be […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Raised Eyebrows Dept.