Category Archives: Science-general
Motivated by Wanting to Understand the Punchline
What the Heck is it, Edgar?
What is public science, and why do you need it?
Here’s the truth: the NIH has funded research that led to 130 Nobel Prizes, and recently funded research that led to the first cancer vaccine. Here are some highlights from the research they funded in 2010 alone. And the NSF has sponsored research that led to 180 Nobel Prizes. Over the past few years, NSF has contributed to research that has made major strides in health, energy efficiency, and exploration. The NSF funded one of the very first web browsers in the 1990s, and is currently funding the development of next-generation robotics. NSF and its sister science agencies are investing in technologies that could one day transform the world.
To sell this idea, I think you have to paint people who are against science funding as being against progress. It’s important to note that it takes time for research advances to work their way into commercial products or otherwise be useful. To pick an example from my area of work, Norman Ramsey won (half of) the Nobel Prize in 1989 “for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks” but the invention was based on microwave/radar work in WWII and the paper on the topic came out in 1950. And yet the technology that it enabled, atomic clocks, became the basis for worldwide timekeeping in 1967. Among other things, atomic clocks enable high-speed communication and GPS. Industries that make billions of dollars a year, but it took decades for the various technologies to come together, mature and be applied. Choking off funding for research puts at risk future discovery that could have the same level of impact. We may not feel it immediately, but it will affect us eventually.
It's Sports-Science Analogy Time, Again
Jon Huntsman, the lone voice of scientific sanity in the US Republican Presidential race
It’s like trying to explain the behaviour of football players without acknowledging the existence of a game of football. Why are these strange people running around after a sphere and kicking it to each other? What is the significance of the rectangular white box at the end? Why don’t they use their hands? Sure, we could posit some “laws” of “Association Football”, but that’s just a theory!
Similar to something I observed a while back. The difference here is that it’s in application to people who are vying to be leaders of a country, and to me it’s scary to think that the list is almost exclusively comprised of people who put ideology first, force the facts to fit and toss out anything that doesn’t.
The Bad Astronomer mentions this in reference to Rick Perry’s baffling “Galileo got outvoted for a spell” remark: Republican candidates, global warming, evolution, and reality. Galileo vs the church was not two scientific schools of thought duking it out, it was the suppression of science by holders of an ideological truth. Which is what is going on here, except that Perry got it exactly backwards.
Update: if you don’t want sports* analogies, here’s another.
Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex: They know it exists, they have strong opinions about what it might mean, but they don’t have a clue what it’s actually about.
*Though I’m sure there’s an xkcd cartoon where sex is a sport, and it does fulfill many of the basic requirements: physical activity, somebody possibly winning (I finished first. And you, not at all**) and I will never be mistaken for a professional practitioner.
** Which is why you shouldn’t keep score
One, Two, Three, Draw!
Drawing ‘integral’ to science learning
“From the notebooks of Faraday and Maxwell to current professional practices of chemists, scientists imagine new relations, test ideas, and elaborate knowledge through visual representations. However, in the science classroom, learners mainly focus on interpreting others’ visualisations.”
and
The press release is vague — in physics drawing free-body diagrams is generally taught. That’s an abstraction, though. Maybe they mean something else.
This Could Be Highly Significant
Measurement and Uncertainty Smackdown
So, here is the plan. I will very briefly describe these three methods and then use them to determine the uncertainty for the volume of the ball above. I will also (for comparison) find the uncertainty in the coefficient of friction for a block sliding down a plane – just because it is different.
The Reach of Outreach
Uncertain Principles: The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves
People are generally in favor of outreach activities, of course, but in the same diffuse way that the general public is in favor of tax increases. If you ask them whether they’re in favor of outreach to the general public, they’ll say yes, but pressed to support it in a concrete way, they’ll find reasons not to.
Raw Data are Usually Raw
Any set of figures needs adjusting before it can be usefully reported
The last two [articles], at least, made a good effort to explain that this effect disappeared when the researchers accounted for social and demographic factors. But was there ever any point in reporting the raw finding, from before this correction was made?
Iconic, Beautiful
And the Winner is… The Turboencabulator
Several years ago, Rockwell International decided to get into the heavy duty transmission business. We were getting ready to tape our first introduction video, as a warm up, the professional narrator began what has become a legend within the trucking industry. This man should have won an academy for his stellar performance. Now remember this is strictly off the cuff, nothing is written down, this became the biggest talk in the industry, vs our new product which we were introducing. I think you will enjoy this once in a lifetime performance from this gentleman.
That there’s some awesome word salad, with a creamy low-calorie cryptojargon sauce. The Wikipedia writeup has a reasonable approximation of the transcript.
Update: more fun at turboencabulator.info