Science & Society
You may not have heard of Chandra Wickramasinghe, but he is due to be sacked alongside all of his collegues at the center for Astrobiology at the University of Cardiff.
Yes, he and all his collegues were cheap (£15,000 a year, or $24,000), and yes, astrobiology is a very legitimate way to spend the money. But, on Chandra Wickramasinghe? Really?
Chandra who?
If Thomas Huxley was Darwin's bulldog, then Chandra Wickramasinghe is Fred Hoyle's poodle. For those unfamiliar with Hoyle, whilst he did some truly admirable work on nucleosynthesis early in his career, Hoyle eventually descended into…
How The Media Has Hurt The Japanese People
First and foremost I have a personal message for the 180 or so heroes who have been working in shifts around the clock to save their nation from a worse disaster than the one that Japan has already suffered.
To the Heroes of Fukushima:
May you each be most correctly and sincerely honored - not just by by your own nation, but by the whole world. You have risked your lives to save others. You are morally remarkable people who have actively taken part in serving our global society. Through your diligence and perseverance you…
vongehr |
In Nanjing, that is close to Shanghai, and I suppose also in other places around here*, you cannot buy salt anymore. Every last grain has been bought up. Why? Apparently, some evil guy started the rumor that table salt, which is sodium chloride (NaCl), can protect you from radioactivity. We are not talking about iodide salt here, nor even sea salt either, which has some iodide in it, but simple salt, which there is already way too much in the Chinese diet.
*(Update: In the whole of China, the first person died already from eating too much salt!)
So I check my blog comments this morning, and…
Language may have an undervalued role in learning the meanings of numbers. A study based on research using deaf people in Nicaragua who never learned formal sign language showed that people who communicate using self-developed gestures (homesigns) were unable to comprehend the value of numbers greater than three because they had not learned a language containing symbols used for counting.
Yet deaf people who acquire conventional sign language as children can learn the meaning of large numbers. A group of researchers believe this is because conventional sign language, like spoken…
Really? Seriously according to OK Cupid's analysis of their data from asking 642533 people the question 5% of men (gay and straight) and 10% of women (gay and straight) think the Earth is bigger than the Sun. This finding is in a posting by Ok Cupids researchers about gay Vs straight sex.
Ok, I suppose we can argue about just what one means by "bigger". The only way that that percentage of people are not even wrong is if we say the Sun looks smaller in the sky than the Earth beneath us which is obviously huge. That is the only defense for that…
Samshive |
Given the general fear regarding radiation levels around Japan, this seems the perfect time to give a short introduction to this important topic. There is a lot of confusion regarding radiation and radiation poisoning and this article will try and break it down.
Radioactive decay
To start off with, here is a little recap of the physics that is important. Atoms can be thought of as made up of protons, electrons and neutrons. The type of element is determined by the number of protons. The number of protons in any element is fixed, but the number of neutrons is variable (within limits).…
PopSci |
Borrowing from the tactics of Bill Maher, I propose a New Rule: When putting forth the claim that something is "sustainable," it must be with reference to a comparable item or process that is less so. Go ahead and pretend it's a grammatical rule.
It bothers me to see people claiming sustainability for their product or idea or just something they are just thinking about and happen to like. It's nice that people now seem to care, of course, but greenness claims become difficult to sift through without any frame of reference. Part of this difficulty is that sustainability…
The UK Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Sir John Beddington, is in Tokyo trying to dampen expat fears that the Fukushima nuclear reactors could possibly ruin their lives.
I had actually received snippets of this meeting by email and was tempted to publish them yesterday. Luckily, Sir John's wisdom is now online for all to see. I just wish to copy some excerpts.
Let me now talk about what would be a reasonable worst case scenario. If the Japanese fail to keep the reactors cool and fail to keep the pressure in the containment vessels at an appropriate level, you can get…
ASAN and the IACC
On Monday, I went through an ASAN petition to the CDC that appears to have been intentionally hyperbolic and meant to get supporters foaming at the mouth. Since I posted the piece, I've continued to look into the ICD-9-CM, IACC's take on wandering, and when it was first mentioned at the IACC, of which Ari Ne'eman is a committee member.
This morning, Wendy Fournier commented at the article on Science 2.0, providing information that placed when Ari Ne'eman would have been first informed of the CDC's interest in wandering:
"This request from CDC stems from a…
vongehr |
For days now, scientists and science blogs tell us not to worry about Japan’s nuclear reactors. Nothing can happen; no radiation will be released, all is fine. We are treated to false experts even, to one-sided rants of somebody who studied risk management in corporations, published originally on a business friendly website.
That piece of fluff was reposted all over the net, but the crucial claim -- that there was no chance radiation would be released -- has been conveniently cut. The forgetful masses with their short attention spans are given ever new versions, from “all under control” over…