Category: Science

Today’s the day: I’m going to hear Steven Pinker speak at Town Hall Seattle this evening. 7:30pm. See you there?

Today must be one of the most seismically active days on record. Take a look at this map from the USGS:

The three largest squares correspond to earthquakes of magnitude 8.4, 7.8 7.9 and 7.1 7.0, all within a few miles of each other. There’s also an M6.0, and 18 other quakes greater than M5; all of these occurred within a period of 18 hours. Not surprisingly, thousands of people are moving away from the coast, even if they have to sleep in the open air.
I’ve included the USGS RSS data in my news feeds for several years. Most days there are just a couple of events of M5 or greater; today was extraordinary.

Check out the nice parody of Dire Straits: Papers for Nothing:

If you are a physicist, or someone who hangs out with them, like a physics groupy, you might be interested. If so, please keep in mind that it’s meant to amuse. I don’t really feel that string theorists get a free ride. Well, not entirely anyway 🙂

If you were to read the following sentence in a news item, could you correctly recreate the rest of the story?

The Salt Manufacturers Association said the evidence did not prove that salt reduction would have any significant health benefits for the majority of people.

If you deduce from this that there is new, overwhelming evidence that limiting salt intake has dramatic health benefits for the whole population, you’d be right. It’s a great time-saver: just flip to the bottom of the story, check out the industry association reaction, prefix it with NOT, and you don’t need to read the rest of the story.

As a footnote to my recent piece on taking responsibility for scientific literacy, check out this piece in which Jeremy Smith fisks Brooks in the NYT:

In his Feb. 17 New York Times column, “Human Nature Redux,” David Brooks argues that belief in human goodness is nearly extinct–and that science is responsible.

As Smith demonstrates, Brooks gets most of the science (and much of the history) dead wrong. Embarrassingly, painfully wrong. And this is stuff about which some of the best science writers have produced extremely accessible material. Pompous op-ed writers for the WaPo and NYT should stop blaming scientists and consider their own responsibilities….

Here: let me tweak that amino acid receptor protein for you….

Cori Bargmann, a geneticist at the Rockefeller University, has studied two variants of a worm called C elegans, that differ in their feeding pattern. One variant is solitary and seeks its food alone; the other is social and forages in groups. The only difference between the two is one amino acid in an otherwise shared receptor protein. If you move the receptor from a social worm to a solitary worm, it makes the solitary worm social.

The Bacon-eating Atheist Jew posted a delightful Human Evolution Quiz to celebrate Darwin’s 198th birthday. The questions started out fairly easy, but I soon realized that I need to brush up my hominid evolution. Sample question:
25. Most scientists agree that the oldest known hominid was a) Homo habilis b) Australopithecus afarensis c) Australopithecus boisei d) Home Homo erectus
Hmmm…… Wait, wait, don’t tell me!
Typo corrected – thanks Yule!

Via Pharyngula:

Today, December 20th 2006, is the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s untimely death. Among his many gentle – but uncompromising – admonitions, this was always a personal favourite:

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

If only more people realized this….
Check out the Celebrating Sagan blog – part of the Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon. People have posted video and audio clips, anecdotes, reminiscences, photographs, and personal tributes. Lots of stuff to make you think – which is the whole point, isn’t it?
UPDATE: My colleague Werner has just posted his thoughts about Sagan the educator.

I just got back from the Freeman Dyson talk at the Town Hall. I’ve always liked his writing – I thought Infinite In All Directions was wonderful – but I’ve been concerned with his wobbly thinking after the Templeton Prize. See Edge #180 for Dawkins’ scathing comments about Dyson’s Templeton piece. Like Dawkins, I don’t know what to make of stuff like:

I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind.

Since I’m one of those people who think that “minds are what brains do”, this is completely incoherent.
Anyway, the talk began with a very entertaining introduction by George Dyson, Freeman’s son, which included the clip from ST:NG where Picard speculates that an object that the Enterprise has discovered might be “a Dyson sphere”! As Freeman Dyson later commented, everybody completely misunderstood him: he always meant “biosphere”, specifically a loose assemblage of inhabited objects orbiting at the right distance from a star. A rigid sphere would be mechanically impossible.
Freeman Dyson’s talk was actually on biotechnology. It’s taken people less than 50 years to go from the first computers to a total addition to pervasive computer technology. He expects the same thing to happen to biotech over the next 50 years – complete domestication. He got a bit mystical over evolution – in the beginning everything shared genetic information horizontally – “open source biology”; then some organisms got selfish and Darwinian evolution kicked in; now humans are ushering in a new era of genetic sharing, marking the end of the “Darwinian interlude”. A rather blinkered view, IMHO. There was stuff about creating plants with silicon leaves to boost energy capture from 1% to 10%, and an impassioned plea for scientific freedom from political interference. And er… that’s it.
The questions were mostly softballs about energy futures, and the wonder of mathematics, and so forth. And then someone asked him about science and religion, and Dyson got all hot and bothered and ranted about Dawkins for a bit, and then realized that he was getting over the top, and backed off. And then I left. I hope many of the audience (200+) bought his new book; since I’ve already read most of the essays (reviews from the NYT, NYRB, etc.), I didn’t bother.
PS It was odd to be back at the Town Hall for the third night in a row – two Tallis Scholars concerts, now this lecture.