TV isn’t real, especially when it comes to science. PhD comics gives an independent confirmation.
Category Archives: Science-general
Science = Imagination
Bad Astronomy: Science IS imagination
People don’t understand science.
And I don’t mean that your average person doesn’t understand how relativity works, or quantum mechanics, or biochemistry. Like any advanced study, it’s hard to understand them, and it takes a lifetime of work to become familiar with them.
No, what I mean is that people don’t understand the process of science. How a scientist goes from a list of observations and perhaps a handful of equations to understanding. To knowing.
Anywhere He Wants To
Dr Bunsen Honeydew- Gorilla Detector
I know, scientifically, that I am not being eaten by a gorilla!
Not too Bitter, not too Sweet
Advice on deciding on whether or not one should go to grad school. Striving to be realistic, without flavoring it too much in either direction.
[Y]ou should know the basic facts of grad school experience: most experiments do NOT produce useful results, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying. You are not guaranteed an academic job after your PhD – or any job in specific geographic area or any specific type of the job. You will be making minimum wage-like salaries for ~5-7 years, and even though postdocs get paid more, it is not much more. But for this time you will have the company of like-minded people who are extremely smart, you will learn a lot, and since you live only once, grad school will certainly provide a unique experience that will shape your outlook on life.
“You will make a lot of money” isn’t on the list of what happens afterward, either. (It certainly can happen, but it probably won’t). But what the PhD helps enable is the opportunity to work on interesting problems. So if the whole “hanging out with smart people” angle appeals to you, it’s certainly something to consider.
Time Lapse
And Now, a Word from our Sponsor
Presidential Memorandum on Scientific Integrity, March 9, 2009
The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in policymaking. The selection of scientists and technology professionals for positions in the executive branch should be based on their scientific and technological knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity.
Aw crap. You can do that? (Oh, yes we can)
Ideologyspotting
How to spot a hidden religious agenda
Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.
UPDATE: As the comment below indicates, the article was pulled. PZ points out that there is an archived copy of the article
I think it’s sad that NS would cave to complaints, rather than having some intellectual integrity. There was no malice in the story. Occasionally the truth is going to force some people to open their eyes a little, and that can sometimes be painful.
In this Corner, Correlation …
Friday’s XKCD was one of Randall’s better ones, and I see that Matt has already commented on it
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It goes right to the heart of one of the greatest philosophical difficulties of science. All we can do is measure correlation. We can never be assured that we’re not just getting lucky and that in fact the fundamental-seeming physical laws we deduce are just flukes.
And this is true — science is inductive, and we draw conclusions rather than prove. What distinguishes science from superstition is what happens next. Correlation is the start, but can easily be wrong, which is the basis of the logical fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc (happened after, therefore was caused by). If one is not cognizant of this, one might notice that the US never used nuclear weapons until after women got the right to vote, and think there’s meaning to the correlation.
So we ask for more. What we can do is set up conditions where if the phenomenon does happen to be a fluke, that the odds of it being so are really, really small. (Flip a coin and get heads 10 times in a row? Doesn’t mean you have special powers. Do that significantly more often than once per thousand attempts and we’ll talk). That’s the power of statistics, and why a single event is not enough to demonstrate causation. But even then, there are potential pitfalls. Two correlated effects might be caused by a common factor. If you don’t consider this possibility, you might conclude that buying a Lexus causes people to vote Republican.
But even that isn’t enough. We also want there to be a plausible mechanism that we can model, and use that to predict other behavior. Then you test — can you turn the effect on and off, and do it in such a way that eliminates other explanations? And the tests must be rigorous, with specific predictions and carefully executed experiments. It’s only after that testing that the suggestive winking of correlation can be reasonably concluded as causation.
This is Highly Significant
The idea of significant figures is that when you’re doing experimental work, you’re taking measurements – and measurements always have a limited precision. The fact that your measurements – the inputs to any calculation or analysis that you do – have limited precision, means that the results of your calculations likewise have limited precision. Significant figures (or significant digits, or just “sigfigs” for short) are a method of tracking measurement precision, in a way that allows you to propagate your precision limits throughout your calculation.
Mocking What You Don't Understand
A discussion of recent neuron-deficient attacks on science.
The tricky thing about most basic research, though, is that you don’t always know what you’ll get out of it when you release the funds. Such research often opens up new and surprising avenues that themselves then spin off important innovative technologies that no one could have predicted. (In Jindal’s case, he wasn’t even attacking basic research, but rather, research of obvious disaster safety import. Not even my caveats can help him.)
In an ideal world, then, specific scientific appropriations would hardly be above criticism—but you would also have to make a cogent argument for why they’re not the best use of our investments. You wouldn’t just mock that which you don’t understand