Uncategorized
jdupuis | July 18, 2015Sydney Padua's The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is one of the most flat-out entertaining books I have read in a very long time.
You should buy this book. Your library should buy this book. Buy a copy of this book for all your friends.
What's all the fuss?
TTAoLaB is a graphic novelization of the lives of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, those wacky pioneers of computers and programming. But TTAoLaB isn't really just a novelization of their lives -- really only the first chapter or so pretends at any kind of historical accuracy. What it is is an imagineering of what their…
jdupuis | July 17, 2015In the Late Harper period of Canadian politics it's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between satire and legitimate news stories.
Here's a couple of examples of satire followed by one that's even scarier and more disturbing because it's an actual news story. We live in interesting times. Fortunately there's a election coming up...
Honestly, few of the serious critiques of the Harper government's war on science, evidence and civil society ring as true as these two satirical takes. This is definitely in the Stewart/Colbert mode of so funny it hurts.
Government of Canada pledges…
jrosenhouse | July 13, 2015I realize I've been away a little longer than usual, but I have a good excuse. I just spent the past week with my family at Beaches resort, on Turks and Caicos. You see, my father turned 80 this year, and we marked the occasion by schlepping the whole family down to the Caribbean.
My peeps! There's Mom, Dad, my older brother Neil, my niece Sonia and nephew Noah (age 8 and 10 respectively), and my sister-in-law Elana. I'm sure you can figure out who is who.
Actually, Dad and Elana got a little shortchanged in this one. So here's Noah trying to get Grandpa's attention:
And here's Dad…
sastyk | July 13, 2015My children made me try a chocolate-covered gummy bear the other day. Now a chocolate gummy bear is not a local, sustainable or home-grown food, and frankly, I don't like gummy bears (the only good use I ever had for them was in college, where nothing would keep posters on cinder-block walls without damaging the walls like a gummy bear melted on with a lighter), and I'm not that big a chocolate person. But the kids kept telling me that this was better than either the low-quality chocolate used to cover them or gummy bears. I tried one, and they were right - it was better, an official…
pgleick | July 9, 2015by Peter Gleick and Heather Cooley
Debates about water in California, the western U.S., and indeed, worldwide, have traditionally focused on the question of how best to further expand water supply to meet some hypothetical future increase in water demand. And the solution frequently offered is to build massive new infrastructure in the form of dams and reservoirs, drill more groundwater wells, or expand water diversions from ever-more-distant rivers, in order to “grow” the supply available for human use.
“Build more traditional water infrastructure” is increasingly the wrong answer to the…
jdupuis | July 7, 2015Science! What's it good for? Working towards better knowledge about the natural world!
Under review today are two books that approach what science is and what it's good for from very different angles. Steven Weinberg is a Nobel laureate in physics and in his book To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science he uses the example of the development of physics and astronomy in modern times to show how the scientific method has been developed and evolved over time. Harry Collins is a sociologist who was instrumental in developing the fields of science studies and the sociology of…
gregladen | July 5, 2015As part of the current discussion of the use of the Concrete Flag to express one's Free Asshatitute, in particular in relation to a volunteer firefighter who stuck one of the flags on the fire truck turing the Independence Day Parade in a small community in Outstate Minnesota, I saw someone state that there were more slaves in the North than in the South.
Specifically, the individual, commenting on a the flag story on a local news site, said:
Now, this particular joker was trying to say that there were lots of white people who "may as well have been slaves" in the North, or words to that…
gregladen | June 23, 2015Gemini is what got me into space, science, all of it. Amy Shira Teitel can bring you up to speed.
Gemini worked out almost everything that had to be worked out to go to the moon. Not the part with the big fire cracker under the tin can to take off from the moon, but most of the rest of it.
Science Communication Gone Rong!
And, just for fun, right after I tweeted this post, I got this:
jdupuis | June 22, 2015A bit of a change of pace for me and my reviewing habits -- a book written in French!
Of course, books about science or scientists are pretty typical review fodder for me. And even more typically, graphic novels about science or scientists are incredibly common for me to review. But books in French? This is a first.
During my recent month-long stay in Paris (sabbatical life FTW!) one of the things I really enjoyed about the City of Light was the profusion of bookstores. Bookstores, record stores, bandes dessinées stores, every neighbourhood had a least a handful of good ones. Which is in…
jrosenhouse | June 21, 2015This past week has mostly been devoted to working on my magnum opus about mathematical anti-evolutionism. That has meant lots of frustrating hours staring at the computer trying to make words appear, coupled with many more annoying hours wading through poorly written creationist pseudomath. But miracles do happen, since I actually finished a first draft tonight! Alas, it's currently eleven thousand words (not including bibliography and abstract) which is way too long for a journal article. (Maybe I can find some way to turn it into two articles!) Whole sections are going to need to be…
esiegel | June 19, 2015“Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.” -Bernard Baruch
Take a common, macroscopic object -- like an apple -- and imagine what's going on inside at the level of individual particles. At a small, fundamental scale, they're just bouncing off of one another, rapidly in motion due to the nature of kinetic theory. Each particle has a certain amount of energy, collides with other particles, and on average moves at a specific speed.
Image credit: Wikimedia commons user Greg L.
If you aligned all these motions -- somehow -- how fast could you get your apple to go? And…
gregladen | June 18, 2015The US Treasury Department has announced that the $10 bill will have a depiction of a woman, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which allowed women to vote.
And now, apparently, everyone can vote on who that woman will be. Or, at least, make a suggestion.
The bill will be come on line in 2020.
You can learn more go HERE.
So, who do you think it should be?
gregladen | June 15, 2015It begins with a garden or two. Once you have gardens, you have a resource that has the two most important characteristics anything can have with respect to human society. First, you can eat it. Second, your enemies can destroy it.
If you have just a few gardens and get your food somewhere else, no big deal. But back in the old days, and by "old days" I mean any time during the last several thousand years everywhere and anywhere that is not urbanized and has gardens, most people relied on their gardens. These gardens were maintained by families or small villages or occasionally larger…
jrosenhouse | June 14, 2015This week we have very clever helpmate from Russian composer Viktor Chepizhny, that was published in the November 2014 issue of The Problemist magazine. The diagram below calls for helpmate in two. There are two solutions:
Recall that in a helpmate black moves first and cooperates with white to contrive a position in which black is checkmated in no more than the stipulated number of moves. Normal chess logic does not apply! To be clear, we are looking for a sequence of this form: black moves, white moves, black moves, white gives mate. You should keep in mind that white is moving up…
jrosenhouse | June 11, 2015Lee McIntyre has a good article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is discussing the wholesale assault on truth in our culture:
To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care anymore. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many commentators in the media — and even some in our universities — have all but abandoned their responsibility to set the record straight. (It doesn’t help when…
gregladen | June 11, 2015We hear this all the time. Pig physiology is like people physiology. Pigs and humans have the same immune system, same digestive system, get the same diseases. Pigs are smart like people are smart. Pigs are smarter than dogs. And so on. Ask a faunal expert in archaeology or a human paleoanatomist: Pig teeth are notoriously like human teeth, when fragmented. Chances are most of these alleged similarities are overstated, or are simply because we are all mammals. Some are because we happen to have similar diets (see below). None of these similarities occur because of a shared common…
kkrisberg | June 10, 2015“All response is local” is a commonly heard phrase among public health practitioners who serve on the front lines of disease outbreaks, emergencies and disasters.
Whether it’s a measles outbreak, a terrorist attack or a hurricane, public health agencies are at the ready to deploy an emergency response infrastructure designed for one overriding purpose: to protect their communities against preventable disease and injury. That kind of preparedness takes an enormous amount of planning, training, practice and collaboration. It also requires sustained funding support — something that’s all too…
jrosenhouse | June 9, 2015After publishing Among the Creationists back in 2011, I started to lose interest in the evolution/creationism issue. I felt like I said what I wanted to say (at least to the handful of people who read the book) and that it was time to move on to other things. Besides, ten years on ID does not seem to have recovered from the big Kitzmiller decision, and lots of people more qualified than I have the creationism beat covered.
Recently, though, I've gotten interested again. I've slowly been working on my magnum opus about mathematical anti-evolutionism, and I've been perusing the most recent…
gregladen | June 2, 2015In 2008, I was visiting the Nobel Conference held annually at Gustavus Adolphus college in Minnestoa. The conference was on Human Evolution. The college provided space in a large room for people to have their lunch, and while I was having lunch on the first day, I noticed a table off to the side staffed by a serious looking man with a clipboard. The front of his table was adorned with a large “Science Debate 08” banner. Seemed interesting. So I wandered over and had a chat.
It turns out the man was Shawn Otto, one of the co-founders of Science Debate. Shawn, a Minnesota resident, is the…
jrosenhouse | May 31, 2015For the past two weeks we have looked at calm, sane direct mate problems. Good stuff, but it's time to mix it up a little. So this week we return to the crazy world of fairy chess. We shall consider a relatively new fairy condition called “Take and Make,” which has taken the problem world by storm over the last few years. I was a little skeptical at first, since it seemed a little too contrived to me, but I have gradually become a convert. There is a lot of room for intriguing themes with it.
Here's how it works. In Take and Make chess, when a unit of either color makes a capture, it…