Science & Society

Proofiness, slightly different than Stephen Colbert's truthiness, is basically finding statistics you want to believe to enhance your confirmation bias.  It was coined by Charles Seife, a long-time science writer who teaches journalism at New York University, because he was outraged at skewed representation on both sides of the aisle, like Al Gore for cherry-picking data about global warming and George Bush for cherry-picking data about how tax refunds would save poor people money.   He wrote a book on it called "Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception" to clobber…

The quality of TED talks is in free fall and has gotten only worse since the last time I mentioned this. So it is worth to point to a rare good presentation whenever one comes along. Geoffrey West’s The Surprising Math Of Cities And Corporations shows nicely how other than biological systems, namely cities and corporations, undergo similar evolutionary shaping by natural selection, even though they do not necessarily die or go through generations. Therefore, they can be described - and their development predicted - with simple scaling laws, which physicists like yours truly always find…

Some stereotypes are self-reinforcing.   If someone tells you over and over that you are oppressed, if you hit an obstacle and fail, like all of us do at some point in our lives, a convenient excuse is that you are discriminated against.(1) There is zero data showing women are discriminated against in science, math or engineering - none.   But because there used to be far more men and those men were not lined up against the wall and shot to make room for women in faculty, the claim is that science academia is still prejudiced against women. For caring about science, some people sure…

Freethoughtblogs.com has now been announced. PZ Myers’ “Pharyngula” and Ed Brayton’s “Dispatches from the Culture Wars” together with three other blogs start a new network. The scienceblogs “science blogs” gotten somewhat better over the years with some silly blockheads leaving, but one of the worst, PZ Meyers, known for tiny little snippets of vitriol of pseudo-progressive populism that panders to the stupid “skeptics” crowd (the self-righteous feel superior about bashing morons with silly non-arguments type), seemed to never want to go away, giving science blogging a very bad reputation…

Is This A Fishing Expedition ? In legal circles, a 'fishing expedition' is an illegal attempt to discover unspecified information which may, perhaps, be prejudicial to one party in a legal case.  It is illegal because just about everybody has things in their possession which might be evidence of breach of some law or other - however trivial, archaic or obscure. Currently in the news1 is the fact that wildlife biologist Charles Monnett is under investigation by the office of the inspector general at the US department of the interior.  News stories have reported that the investigation…

We've all heard that that the population of whites in the U.S. will be surpassed by non-white minorities in the not-so-distant future.1 Advertisers have adjusted to the demographic growth and shift by creating multicultural campaigns, and that's great - if you're targeting a particular group. But what about when we reach the tipping point, when Hispanics and Asians and African-Americans and Caucasians and all sorts of folks make up the population without one being so dominant - there's a 'general' marketplace? Do you continue to market to each ethnic group separately, or do you just…

There's a giant ceramic squid in a New York art gallery. Walking into the gallery, you encounter the 16-foot-long, beached creature, its opalescent, slick-looking flesh seeming to putrefy, lying in a puddle of its own ink. You expect its tentacles to quiver in a final death-throe. Despite the distraction of seeing the singular form of "throe" for the first time in my life, that's still a pretty striking image.And it's a pretty striking accomplishment. The artist, David Zink Yi, had to go to the Netherlands to the world's largest kiln (!) to fire the behemoth. As for the ink, apparently it's a…

Life's Fall How many years can a mountain exist,before it is washed to the sea? As a rock tumbles from its perchatop a cliff into the water below,impelled by gravitational acceleration, it is potential transformed to kinetic,object to process, noun to verb.This crumbling topology is the metaphoric substance of life -  mountains thrust upby Earth’s violent bowellaboriously digesting its nickel/iron coreand ground down by wind and rain, warped by spacetime - the ephemeral thermodynamic erosionof elevated electrons. Biological water millscapture density-dependent flow,energy to turn their…

‘Tut! I have the best armour in the world. Would it were day!(W. Shakespeare, Henry V, 1599)  In Medieval Europe, soldiers wore steel plate armor for protection during warfare. Heavier armor would provide greater protection, but would also make it harder for soldiers to move around during the fight. In 1415, Henry V’s lightly-armored men-at-arms defeated the French knights in the battle of Agincourt; would the French have had a better chance in lighter armor? To what extent did Medieval armor limit soldiers’ performance? A recent study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of…

(I guess this goes in the "Science&Society" Field, or maybe just "Random Thoughts.") Anyway, there's a short film coming out this summer, a promotional thing for the World Wildlife Fund, called "Astonish Me." It popped up in my news feed because the colossal squid is one of the many animals highlighted by the film. The director, Charles Sturridge, commented: The thing that I like most is that we’re finding out fiction was right.  Jules Verne and all those sailors that talked about monsters in the sea weren’t completely making it up. They’re actually there.  Look at the…