Posts tagged #science

By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

How to think about the work

Richard Feynman

Ruby library based on astronomy and astrometry books - rhannequin/astronoby

Opinion | How Shoddy Data Becomes Sensational Research –Academics are addicted to p-hacking, data torturing, and other statistical sins. We must break these habits.

Bartosz Ciechanowski Interactive articles about physics, math, and engineering. Amazing explanations. Watches. Gears. Gps. May 8, 2022 at 06:29AM

Timeline of the human condition | Milestones in evolution and history Milestones in evolution and history December 26, 2021 at 01:58PM

Climate Change Education Across the Curricula, Across the Globe The goal is not to introduce Climate Education as a standalone topic, but to integrate it with the core curriculum of Science, Mathematics and Social Sciences. December 3, 2021 at 07:46PM

Argo (oceanography) – Wikipedia

December 3, 2021 at 07:45PM

CLEAN Our team of educators and scientists has reviewed and organized the best free teaching resources for K-12 through college. Go Entire Collection Activities Videos Visualizations Featured Resource Living Landscapes: … December 3, 2021 at 07:46PM

The world's best free documentary collection - Simply the best Documentaries

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …? May 29, 2021 at 12:54AM

The Sudden Rise of the Lab-Leak Theory Scientists and political commentators are no longer dismissing the possibility that COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese laboratory. What changed? May 29, 2021 at 01:00AM

The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences. May 29, 2021 at 01:16AM

Ruby scientific library

Nice overview of choices of IDEs for Python and data science

Check out some really cool images: Soviet model makers built this spacecraft based on the designs and notes of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Late in his life, much of Tsiolkovsky’s theoretical work focused on ideas about transporting humans into space on board rockets. Although this model, reflecting the scientist’s ideas, grossly overestimates the living space available on board a rocket, it does convey a sophisticated understanding of the physical constraints of space travel for that time. Among Tsiolkovsky’s concerns were the effects of acceleration and weightlessness on the human body.

This is kind of depressing, but I don’t know why – but NASA administrator Bolden says that NASA has no plans to lead another mission to the moon within our lifetime:

“However, he made it clear NASA has no plans to lead its own human return to the Moon under his watch. “NASA will not take the lead on a human lunar mission,” he said. “NASA is not going to the Moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime. And the reason is, we can only do so many things.” Instead, he said the focus would remain on human missions to asteroids and to Mars. “We intend to do that, and we think it can be done.” (from ...

I recently subscribed to the New York Review of Books. Not sure this was a good decision as the last thing I need is more stuff to read. I came to it because I kept seeing interesting articles from the NYRB come up on various blogs and searches.

Here’s quite an interesting book review of “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism “. Thi...

Instead of charging extra (‘congestion pricing’) to drive your car during rush hour, how about giving me a reward (a lottery ticket) for driving using less congested routes? That’s a clever idea that is being tested by a Stanford professor:

“[…]So this spring, with a $3 million research grant from the federal Department of Transportation, Stanford deployed a new system designed by Dr. Prabhakar’s group. Called Capri, for Congestion and Parking Relief Incentives, it allows people driving to the notoriously traffic-clogged campus to enter a daily lottery, with a chance to win up to an extra $50 in their paycheck, just by shifting their commute to off-peak times. The program has proved so popu...

Today (May 29) is Manhattenhenge. One of two days every year when sunrise and sunset are exactly aligned with the Manhattan (New York City, New York, USA) street grid. Just a fun fact.

“What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rises in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.” (from Sunset on the Manhattan Grid)

I saw this article in the Sunday New York Timestoday which starts promising but then becomes a bit ridiculous and makes a mockery of serious research, in my humble opinion.

It starts with a claim that sounds plausible:

“Recent advances in understanding what psychologists call “embodied cognition” indicate a surprisingly direct link between mind and body. It turns out that people draw on their bodily experiences in constructing their social reality....

From the New York Times, How Exercise Benefits the Brain:

“For some time, scientists have believed that BDNF helps explain why mental functioning appears to improve with exercise. However, they haven’t fully understood which parts of the brain are affected or how those effects influence thinking. The Irish study suggests that the increases in BDNF prompted by exercise may play a particular role in improving memory and recall.” (from NYT)

Out of left (star) field. Here’s a succinct tutorial on buying a telescope that my friend Ben Gomes Casseresemailed me which I thought might be of general interest. You can see Ben’s own astronomy work here.

If you are thinking of buying a telescope (or giving one as a gift), Ben says:

The place to go to browse is www.oriontelescopes.com. They have advice on entry-level telescopes and such. Have Dick review what is available there and then let me know….I can help select among options. I am not sure what you can get for 500-1000, as ...

If I could fool you into believing that a fake rubber hand that you were looking at was really your own hand, how would you react if I took a knife to it? Weird questions that Neuro-science researchers busy themselves with, but really fairly amazing. Here’s an article in Scientific American about the study:

“A knife-wielding researcher is bearing down on your right hand—or is it your hand? You see three arms in front of you, and you can feel your palms dampen with fear-induced perspiration. But is it your right hand the kitchen knife is plunging toward, or a false, rubber right hand?” (from Scientific American)

This article is called “Fact and Folklore In Software Engineering” and while it is about that, the part that was more interesting to me was the first section talking about Scientific Discourse:

“This article is about why some “facts” refuse to die, and about how to avoid being fooled by opinion disguised as scientific “fact”. We start, therefore, with some observations on science and facts.” (from “Fact and Folklore In Software Engineering”)

Here he goes on to describe “The messy workings of scientific discourse”. It’s clarifying explanation of a process that we understand intuitively but actually ...

This is actually a keynote to a conference, but it had some very interesting ideas in it. The article is called “The New Science of Morality” and it’s by Jonathan Haidt. I don’t know if it makes full sense out of context, but read this section. It makes an important point and it might draw you into reading the whole thing.

“[…snip]Morality is like The Matrix, from the movie “The Matrix.” Morality is a consensual hallucination, and when you read the WEIRD people article, it’s like taking the red pill. You see, oh my God, I am in one particular matrix. But there ...

“That journey will provide reasons for resisting the claim that a deterministic view of the material universe is incompatible with free will. Much of the apparent power of deterministic arguments comes from their focusing on isolated actions, or even components of actions, that have been excised from their context in the world of the self, so that they are more easily caught in the net of material causation.” (from How Can I Possibly Be Free?)

This is from a really difficult article called“How Can I Possibly Be Free?” in the New Atlantis. At ...

I’ve always been a major space travel fan and geek. This video linked from Engadget incredibly had me glued to my seat for almost 40 minutes. Some fantastic super slow motion footage of the launch.

Note especially how the two narrators just love the shuttle and love their jobs. They can’t get enough of it, even after having seen this stuff a million times over.

Say what? I came across this paper; Mathematical Foundations of Consciousness. I generally love this stuff: Mathematics and writings on the nature of consciousness. When I saw this paper the title really intrigued me. Now my math is not strong enough to tackle anything like PhD level math (in fact my math knowledge beyond under graduate level is definitely uneven.) “The self-referential qualities of consciousness place it outside conventional logic(s) upon which scientific models and frameworks have heretofore been constructed. However more contemporary mathematical development has begun to deal with features of self-reference. We shall address Schrödinger’s...

What are high reactives? “Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to explain much of normal human variation. He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious. Eager to take a peek at the early results, he grabbed the videotapes of the first babies in the study, looking for the irritable behavior he would later call high-reactive.” (from ...

I wrote the other day about the ‘amusing’ dust-up between the RealClimate blog and Levitt and Dubner, authors of Super Freakonomics. Well today I see in the Wall Street Journal, a defense of Levitt and Dubner, but it’s an odd one. It actually supplies no facts (unlike the article I sited) just a criticism of ‘pro-climate-change’ (forgive the generalization) people ...

I can’t vouch for the accuracy, but it is fun to see a major league cat-fight errupting between academics. Here’s the conclusion:

“May I suggest that if you should happen to need some friendly help next time you take on the topic of climate change, or would like to have a chat about why aerosol geoengineering might not be a cure-all, or just need a critical but informed opponent to bounce ideas off of, you don’t have to go very far….” (from An Open Letter To Steve Levitt)

...

This is actually a pretty cool idea! Here’s a quote from Scott’s post: “I’d like to see a Wheaties box featuring Sally Ride, the first American woman in space (who also happened to be an astrophysicist and Stanford PhD); Internet pioneers Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf; the great primatologist Jane Goodall…” (from: Dear General Mills)

“NASA’s Phoenix lander may have captured the first images of liquid water on Mars – droplets that apparently splashed onto the spacecraft’s leg during landing, according to some members of the Phoenix team.” (from Newscientist.com)

Now there’s a big topic, eh? A magazine that I don’t normally read has a good, in depth, thoughtful article about the debate between Religion and Science (see what I just did?). It comes in the guise of a book review (oddly the author has, himself, recently come out with a competing book, which does undermine his objectivity a little bit.) Still, it’s an excellent overview. (Funnily enough, the factoid that stayed with me the longest from this article is that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the exact same day. Talk about trivia!)

“It is a depressing fact that while 74 percent of Americans beli...

“Revelers will have an extra second to enjoy the New Year celebrations.

Drunken party goers may not notice but, thanks to the Earth’s erratic rotation, the countdown to 2009 will last a moment longer.

British physicists and official timekeepers around the world will insert a “leap second” to bring the most accurate atomic clocks in line with the astronomical day[…]” from Big Ben Adjusted for Leap Second

Happy New Year. Bon Anja, Tur Kos Bon!

Check out this post Field notes from a Nature Conservancy meeting: “First, the Nature Conservancy has a strongly science-based policy for making land-purchasing decisions. They take into account things like the minimum viable ecosystem size in determining which acquisitions will actually have lasting impact.

Trouble is, for many areas, the conditions those decisions are based on may change.

Areas near sea level are an obvious example. But so are the more than 10,000 acres of native tallgrass prairie that they have protected in Kansas. How much will that ecosystem change with the projecte...

Check out this post Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism: “So far the proposition that a global superorganism is forming along the internet power lines has been treated as a lyrical metaphor at best, and as a mystical illusion at worst. I’ve decided to treat the idea of a global superorganism seriously, and to see if I could muster a falsifiable claim and evidence for its emergence.” (from: from The Technium)

Another great essay by Kevin Kelley. He’s such a great writer. Here are some other wonderful passages:

“This megasupercomputer is the Cloud of all clouds, the largest pos...

A very interesting article in Edge.org (by the way, an always interesting site.) This one is called Moral Psychology and the misunderstanding of religion: “I study morality from every angle I can find. Morality is one of those basic aspects of humanity, like sexuality and eating, that can’t fit into one or two academic fields. I think morality is unique, however, in having a kind of spell that disguises it. We all care about morality so passionately that it’s hard to look straight at it. We all look at the world through some kind of moral lens, and because most of the academic community uses the same lens, we validate each other’s...

An interesting, quirky, though-provoking — memorable article in Wired about Memory: “[snip…]SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget.” (from Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn?)

It’s rare that I watch/listen to a whole Youtube. But here you go… [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRRDzFROMx0&hl=en]

“The new image shows tan clouds moving away from the foot of a 700-metre slope, where dust and material made of water ice and frozen carbon dioxide have just tumbled down.” (from New Scientist)

This is one of those times when a picture is worth 1,000 words 🙂

Check out this post from I, Cringely . The Pulpit | PBS: A couple months have passed since I announced Team Cringely, my plan to win the Google Lunar X Prize by landing a rover on the Moon and driving it around. This week the first of the GLX contestants formally registered with more to follow, including Team Cringely, so it would seem that an update is in order. Mostly, though, I want to cover what has emerged as the primary motivation behind Team Cringely, which is literally preserving the entire idea of going to space, an idea that — at lea...

Just a curious fact from Scientific American: “All the bacteria living inside you would fill a half-gallon jug; there are 10 times more bacterial cells in your body than human cells [snip…]”

(from Scientific American: Strange But True)

Have you had this debate? Does cold weather cause people to catch colds more easily or not? Well here’s an interesting article that says there is ‘scientific’ proof that flu infections do in fact spread more during cold winter months: “Researchers in New York believe they have solved one of the great mysteries of the flu: Why does the infection spread primarily in the winter months? The answer, they say, has to do with the virus itself. It is more stable and stays in the air longer when air is cold and dry, the exact conditions for much of the flu season.” (from New York Times)...

I know that access to my blog is blocked at least by EMC (heard so from friends there) so I will refrain from quoting this article’s first word: “ucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria exclaimed, “This is really, really, ucking brilliant” on the air.” (from Pinker on Why We Curse)

It’s actually a serious article about linguistics, culture and human nature. Well written, well reasoned and interesting. Read Steven Pinker, Why We Curse, “What the F***?”

A really interesting experiment reported in various places trigger the sensation of an [tag]out of body experience[/tag]. I read about it first in the New York Times: “Scientists induce Out-of-Body Sensation.” But here are some additional links about it:

New Scientist: “Out-of-body experiences are ‘all in the mind'” Ars Technica: “On-demand out-of-body-experiences: all you need are VR goggles and a stick” Mind Hacks: “Do try this at home”.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQAc_Z2OfQ&w=425&h=350]

Hey, don’t blame me, I’m just posting a pointer to this interesting story over that the ever-legitimate Freakonomics Blog. The depths to which people will sink to get certain words and images on their blogs, it’s just outragous. Shameful.

Check out this post from the always respectable Freakonomics Blog:

“I blogged nearly a year ago about a study by the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa wh...

Saw this in the newspaper today – “Mars Rover Visits Crater, Then Poses for a Picture.. Also here’s an article with some links to the high res snaps of the rover: NASA’s Mars Rover and Orbiter Team Examines Victoria Crater | SpaceRef – Your Space Reference. You gotta love this stuff!

Bad Astronomy Blog

Looks like this might be interesting

(tags: interesting astronomy)

This article: The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web is a very interesting survey of RSS and issues that folks in the Science community have to be aware of.

I saw these two books in Barnes and Noble. They look quite interesting. I might get them.

The God Theory. I am always interested in the various evolution vs. intelligent design debates, and this book claims to come up with a way to accommodate both into one framework or paradigm.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=blogbridge-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0300110561&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&lc1=0000ff&bc1=ffffff&bg1=ffffff&f=ifr

**The Wealth of Networks. ** This is a fairly dense, scholarly book about networks, social and otherwise. Looks very interesting, but honestly, it may be too thick 🙂

Technorati Tags: book

Pop!Tech 2005 was a great conference, again. I made notes only when something struck me as interesting or memorable or quotable, so this list of memes is very quirky just based on my in-the-moment reactions!

“Barcode of Life” – Robert Hanner.My summary of this is that it is a specific gene sequence that can be found across a very wide spectrum of organisms, which has the characteristic that it is more or less the same in individuals from a single species and very different in individuals from different species. Such a sequence can be used to establish the borders between species. See ...

If you are interested in the Intelligent Design debate, this is an fascinating and somewhat surprising article about a survey done by the Pew Research Center for the People. As usual with this kind of thing it is useful to know the bias of the folks doing the survey, which I have not looked into at all.

“Despite these fundamental differences, most Americans (64%) say they are open to the idea of teaching creationism along with evolution in the public schools, and a substantial minority (38%) favors replacing evolution with creationism in public school curricula.” (from “Religion: A Strength and Weakness for Both Parties“)

Interesting reading.

Technorati Tags: intelligentdesign, science

The New York Times is running a series on the Evolution/Intelligent Design ‘debate’. Quite interesting. I was startled to see this in the article, though:

Referring to the Discovery Institute, one of the main think tanks pushing the ID agenda, the New York Times says:

“A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and mainstream groups – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman’s $141,000 annual salary – and asserting itself on questions on issues as varied as local transportation and foreign affairs.” (from “Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive”, New York Times)

The New York Times series is just beginning (2 articles so far) and seems to be a good survey of the issue.

If you, like me, are a space buff, you will find these pieces about space-shuttle safety very interesting (and follow the links too.) So check these out:

“They’re going to kill more astronauts” (from Terrestrial Musings) and “Nobody’s Perfect” (from Tech Central Station.)

You know I am a fan of the cool little Mars Rovers. Here’s an interesting little bit from Nasa: “Mars Orbiter Sees Rover Tracks Among Thousands of New Images

NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, starting its third mission extension this week after seven years of orbiting Mars, is using an innovative technique to capture pictures even sharper than most of the more than 170,000 it has already produced.

One dramatic example from the spacecraft’s Mars Orbiter Camera shows wheel tracks of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and the rover itself. Another tells scientists that no boulders bigger than about 1 to 2 meters (3 to 7 feet) are exposed in giant ripples created by a catastrophic flood.
...

Here’s an interesting link that continues on the theme from my previous post on Agent Based Modeling. This isn’t agent based, but it is kind of the most auspicious use of simulation one could imagine: “Computing the Cosmos. One of the biggest computer simulations ever run is illuminating the deepest mysteries of the universe.”

And now for something completely different. I was reading this book: “It’s Alive” over the weekend. Particularly of interest to me was all the discussion about so-called “Agent Based Modeling.” Agent based modeling is a big word for simulations used generally to research and understand systems involving many independent agents. They often have very cool visual displays where you can see, variously the agents traversing their space, growing, reproducing, exchanging, consuming, etc. ...

Amazing little rover “calculates its own location in the universe…..on Mars”: I just can’t get enough of this amazing bit of engineering called the Mars Rover. Get this:

Opportunity also updated its “attitude knowledge,” which fine-tunes the rover’s information about its exact location and position on Mars….To adjust the attitude knowledge, engineers have the rover turn the panoramic camera to the Sun and watch the Sun travel across the sky for 15 minutes. The rover is then smart enough to take the Sun movement data collected from the panoramic camera to calculate its own location in the universe…..on Mars.

This is such an amazing little machine. That’s not even getting into the astronomy, orbitall mechanics, geology, physics, and who knows what other basic science that determines the core algorithms. Hats off to the team who built it.

The 100-Million-Mile Network – Great article about one of my favorite topics, the Mars Rover. There are several really interesting blogs about this project as well, that I’d recommend for the space buffs among you!

I’m not that geeky: I am totally fascinated and entralled with what’s going on on Mars right now. I’ve followed all sorts of sources and recently came across this blog by Susan Kitchens who has very detailed posts about what’s going on. I don’t know who she is or how she’s connected, but it’s a pretty comprehensive way to keep up.

As a software guy I am very interested in how the software for the Rover is put together. I asked Susan whether she could give me some pointers, which led to this recent post in her blog, which I thought was amusing:

“Backing up the Mars Rover Mission: ...

Living in 3d? So here are these really cool 3D Mars Pictures. But my question is, where do I get the specs? I saw these freebie 3D glasses, but who knows if they are the right kind. I will report further if I find out. Faithful readership, please let me know?

Some amazing (Mars) panoramas. This is via Boing Boing. If you look at the navigation device in the bottom right, you’ll see that this site actually is an archive of all kinds of cool 360 degree panoramas!

Wonderful Mars pictures? Unavailable! I was looking around the Mars Rover Web site for some of those amazing pictures, and to my surprise they are now asking for a password to get into the ‘raw images’ area. I’ve got to believe that this is not for security but because their server was getting totally beat up by people like me browsing around.

Hmm, maybe they should use some warez technology? Here maybe for the first time is a very ligitimate, legal, and useful place where Bit Torrent and other clever file sharing technologies could be used as a force for good 🙂

Absolutely stunning animation of recent mars landing. I do not exagerate! Check it out.