Evidence of gravitational radiation from a binary black hole system
A central black hole, with a mass equal to 18 billion times that of the Sun, is orbited by a smaller one, and the interaction of the system with its surroundings produces brightness changes that allow astronomers to study the evolution of the orbit.
And the system evolves in a manner consistent with general relativity.
I agree that finding that half of polled students can’t identify that “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” is true doesn’t imply that the other half are creationists, given that other science questions also garnered less-than-spectacular results.
However, it also doesn’t mean that all of the negative response is due to insufficient science education, nor would a general improvement in science education necessarily imply an improvement in biology, et. al, if crappyscience™ is what gets adopted be school boards, or actual science education is discouraged.
Blake Stacey has an excellent post in which he has compiled a collection of incidents of educators and others being harassed and hounded by people who didn’t like the conclusions at which science arrives.
Open your mouth about evolution around the wrong people, though, and you can find yourself harassed, ejected from your job and even beaten in the street.
Just ask these people.
The recognition that our science education needs to be improved has to be tied in with admitting that things won’t get better if we don’t actually teach science in science class.
Gordon Watts has become The Margin Lady (and that’s a sequel to the original margin lady story).
One of the things I’m responsible? Make sure the figures are done right. Make sure everyone uses the same units. Make sure everyone is printing on A4 paper. Make sure the margins are right!
I am the margin lady! Shoot me now!
I’ve bet on the over/under for hyphens added to documents I’ve sent in for review. And I recall going into the “Yeah, we got that” store, asking for A4 paper, and being told that they didn’t carry it. (I ended up buying it on my trip across the pond to the conference. The remaining supply is carefully guarded in an undisclosed location)
As for the original Margin-Lady interaction in grad school, I had my tangles with her, including an omission on the copyrights page, which needed to include the phrase “all rights reserved,” despite another page in the submission package where I was required to sign away my copyright, so it made no sense to include the phrase. Of course, logic is a puny weapon against bureaucracy.
I went out geocaching in the wonderful weather today. First stop was to check on caches I have placed, in response to a couple of emails from people who couldn’t find them. Sure enough, they had been muggled. One cache almost completely gone — only the lid and the logbook could be found. The second one was a multi-stage cache, and only stage one was missing. So it’s likely that these were discovered by accident and taken. Immature little … hippies.
An online colleague at my blog-host, SFN, makes the following observation:
Wouldn’t it be amusing if science groups started leading tours of the Creation Museum, lead by archeologists pointing out the flaws in their reasoning and why evolution really does answer those questions?
It would be a great response to that story out of Colorado about creationists leading tours of a natural history museum out there.
I say go for it. It would be great.
But I expect such a group would likely be EXPELLED from the museum. A normal tour (of at least, say, a dozen people), with no stealth or rambunctiousness (i.e. normal speaking voices and doing a reasonable debunking, not trying to get kicked out), touring the whole museum, even without PZ Myers hosting it. I’ll even pony up 20 bucks as a reward for the first such tour that is allowed to finish, just as incentive (such as it is) to be on one’s best behavior. Documentation shouldn’t be too difficult in this, the digital age.
So, I’m off to the park a little later on today …
The temperature range in these images (and others on the site) mean that these were taken with a thermal imaging camera; 300-310K blackbody spectra peak somewhere between 9 – 10 microns, rather than a regular ol’ digital camera with the IR filter disabled.
Frankly, though, most of the other birds and mammals in the menagerie have more interesting IR spectra associated with them, like yappy dog.
Of course, the real explanation here is that this is a stroboscopic effect, aka the wagon wheel effect — the rotor speed and the film speed are matched (to some ratio) so there is no apparent movement of the blades for each frame of the camera.
Try it yourself and alias your monitor’s refresh frequency
Stepping Feet Illusion and radial version
Many other illusions at the site, including some favorites such as
Pinna-Brelstaff Illusion though I never actually call it that
Roget’s ‘Palisade’ Illusion I’ve seen a similar effect while walking past a door and seeing a crt monitor through the narrow gap between the door and jamb.
Motion Binding has a subtle demonstration about orthogonal dimensions really being independent
Here’s the index in case you want to pick and choose, rather than march through all of them
Is our children learning science?
Science Indicators: The More Things Change, the More They Don’t
Science literacy, or, to be more precise, the lack of science literacy.
The wrong answers to all these questions are idiotic, but they’re not idiotic in a religious way, unless I’ve been missing the public lobbying from the First Church of the Acousto-Optic God. The problem isn’t religion, or political lobbying, or idiot celebrities peddling quackery– the problem is that we do a piss-poor job of teaching science, period. All fields, all areas, people are not getting the science education they need.
Excellent point.
Update: I had missed something important in originally posting this. from Sheril’s summary
The universe began with a huge explosion. (True)
Male 40
Female 27** that right folks, almost 3/4 of female respondents answered incorrectly
Um, not necessarily. It’s a crappy question — characterizing the big bang as a “huge explosion” is is way too ambiguous, IMO. Most people think of an explosion in the sense of setting off some dynamite, or something similar, and it wasn’t: it was a rapid expansion of spacetime. A question where understanding more may actually reduce the score.