Category Archives: Science-general
Calibration is a Cold Dead Fish
But did you correct your results using a dead salmon?
With the sheer number of images, can certain voxels light up as false-positives? You betcha. Is every voxel significant? Well, to answer that, Craig Bennett and his colleagues took a dead Atlantic Salmon, and placed it in an fMRI. The salmon was then shown a series of photographs depicting humans in various social situations. The (dead, remember?) fish was asked to determine which emotion each individual has been experiencing. They scanned the salmon’s (did I say it was dead?) brain, and collected the data. They also scanned the brain without showing the fish the pictures. The images were then checked for change between the brain doing picture recognition tasks, and the brain at rest, voxel by voxel. They found several active voxel clusters in the (yes, still dead) salmon’s brain.
The Brain Stork
Steven Johnson: ‘Eureka moments are very, very rare’
Good ideas happen in networks; in one rather brain-bending sense, you could even say that “good ideas are networks”. Or as Johnson also puts it: “Chance favours the connected mind.”
Another surprising truth about big ideas: even when they seem to be individual flashes of genius, they don’t happen in a flash – though the people who have them often subsequently claim that they did. Charles Darwin always said that the theory of natural selection occurred to him on 28 September 1838 while he was reading Thomas Malthus’s essay on population; suddenly, the mechanism of evolution seemed blindingly straightforward. (“How incredibly stupid not to think of that,” Darwin’s great supporter Thomas Huxley was supposed to have said on first hearing the news.) Yet Darwin’s own notebooks reveal that the theory was forming clearly in his mind more than a year beforehand: it wasn’t a flash of insight, but what Johnson calls a “slow hunch”. And on the morning after his alleged eureka moment, was Darwin feverishly contemplating the implications of his breakthrough? Nope: he busied himself with some largely unconnected ruminations on the sexual curiosity of primates.
I’m not sure if he’s drawing the distinction between “thinking about a problem” and “coming up with the solution;” I’ve certainly had this happen on the much smaller scale of problems on which I work. You can be thinking about something, and making efforts to come up with a solution, and have a flash of insight which comprises the bulk of the answer. But the point about networks is, I think, well taken — it is invaluable to be able to bounce ideas off of someone and get feedback. It saves time to hear the fatal flaw that you have not yet discovered.
The broader thesis of needing certain other ideas, techniques or technology to be present before a solution is possible is something I thought was fairly obvious. “Conventional wisdom” has a way of setting in and restricting thought processes, and sometimes the best thing one can do is to find a person who doesn’t know a problem can’t be solved, and let them have at it. Experimentally you need certain technologies to exist before a phenomena can be investigated. Or, put another way, scientists tends to work on the cutting edge, but that cutting edge is defined by what is already known.
What's a Miracle, Anyway?
Roger Ebert: What do you mean by a miracle?
Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is also true that an apparent miracle can be explained because our knowledge of its natural cause is inadequate. For the Church to declare anyone a saint, I presume, is possible because the Devil’s Advocate (that is, mankind) does not yet possess sufficient knowledge
Too Long, Didn't Read
The caveat in paragraph number 19
This is what they found: by the time you get to a story length of 8 to 11 paragraphs, on average, your readers read only half the story. A minority will make it to paragraph number 19, where, on this occasion, a fraction of the readers of the Daily Mail would have discovered that the central premise of the news story – that a new trial had found a 40% reduction in cancer through intermittent dieting – was false.
Show and Tell
Experiment vs. Theory: The Eternal Debate
Bottom line: we have lasers, with or without the sharks.
That’s something you can show off on a tour of the department and it’s guaranteed to make an impression on prospective students and parents.
From my perspective, it’s also something you can show off to admirals and generals and civilian upper-level cogs. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
Choose a Donors Choose
It’s October, and that means it’s the time of year that the science blogging Donors Choose challenge gets underway. I see that among the blogs I regularly read, Cosmic Variance, Dot Physics and Uncertain Principles are all participating in the organized challenge for their respective blogging organizations. Please consider picking one (or via the Colbert challenge) and making a donation.
Update: add Bad Astronomy to the list
Science is Vital
We are a group of concerned scientists, engineers and supporters of science who are campaigning to prevent destructive levels of cuts to science funding in the UK.
Experts are Called "Experts" for a Reason
Don’t Listen to the Newspapers
Presented in terms of the climate “debate,” but the thrust is true in general.
97.6% of publishing climatologists, 100% of studies in scientific journals, and every scientific organization in the world now agree that humans are changing the climate.
Compare this to the media coverage of climate change. The majority of articles in respected newspapers like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal give roughly equal time to the “two sides” of the so-called “scientific debate”. Balance in journalism is all very well when the issue is one of political or social nature, but for matters of science, giving fringe opinions the same weight as a robust consensus is misleading. Being objective is not always the same as being neutral.
(emphasis added, just because)
The Relativity of Wrong
Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong
“If I am the wisest man,” said Socrates, “it is because I alone know that I know nothing.” the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.
My answer to him was, “John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”
The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that “right” and “wrong” are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.
This is old-ish, but I just ran across it; I had written something vaguely similar recently in response to a Feynman video about there being varying degrees of wrong, but Asimov goes into some nice detail in quantifying “wrong,” and filling in the shades of grey to contrast with the black-and-white of right vs. wrong. It is reminiscent of George Box’s quote, All models are wrong, but some are useful