Science & Society

Michael White recently blogged about Rock Stars of Science (July 8), which is an educational effort to attract kids to careers in science.  (Michael characterized this as “another hopeless attempt to make nerds look cool.”)  My guess is that nerds are born, not made.  Many, perhaps most working scientists were not nerds. They drifted into their careers more or less by chance, taking a modest interest in science sometime in college, then choosing to do graduate work in a science program just because it seemed more interesting than a career in medicine, law or some other…

PhRMA is trying to up their street cred with the newest star pulled into its galaxy: rapper/actor Ice-T. Honestly, I like Ice-T. As one of the original hip-hoppers and pioneer of gangsta rap, he actuallly had some creativity and intelligence; he's spoken out about war, poor conditions in prison, ghettos, and "good" hip-hop versus "whack" hip-hop. And he's great on Law&Order: SVU. And I admire that he's trying to reach out to people about high blood pressure (a condition he has) and the risk of heart disease, which is so prevalent in African-Americans. But I take two issues (well, one…

Even though you're already the mathematical Wizard of Oz, you can still benefit from the Wow factor of hoisting a new curtain of number tricks to impress your friends and intimidate your enemies. Here, dear geek, are three nifty mind widgets to make mates want you and peers want to be you. Multiply up to 20x20 1. For example, take 17x132. Place the larger number on top, in your head3. Imagine a box, encompassing the 17 and the 34. Add these to make 205. Add a zero to this, to make it 2006. Multiply the 7 and the 3 to get 217. Add this to 200 to get the answer: 221 Multiply any two-digit…

Photo Shoots that Should Never Be Done I'm sure I'm not the first to blog about this, but while I was out of the loop for a few days, someone made another hopeless attempt to make nerds look cool: Rock Stars of Science. Here's what it's about: The Rock S.O.S campaign idea was generated in part by a recent Research!America public opinion poll finding: 74% of Americans can’t name a living scientist. ROCK S.O.S aims to bridge that recognition gap. So they start out with 11 science 'Rock Stars', and to be honest, I don't know who the hell half of them are. Plus 9 or the 11 are MDs - I thought…

The Young People's Development Programme (YPDP) in England, a government-backed youth development pilot program aimed at reducing teenage pregnancies, drunkenness and cannabis use not only didn't reduce teenage pregnancies or drunkenness or marijuana use, it might actually have increased pregnancies, according to research led by Meg Wiggins of the Institute of Education, University of London and Chris Bonell at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. They were commissioned by the Department of Health to carry out an independent evaluation of the YPDP, which was initiated in…

After an intense competition among finalists chosen from a pool of more than 300,000 students from more than 100 countries and regions, Microsoft Corp. announced the winners of Imagine Cup 2009. Celebrating first place, Romania's Team SYTECH won the worldwide Software Design invitational, South Korea's Team Wafree won the Embedded Development invitational and Brazil's Team LEVV It won the Game Development challenge. Imagine Cup, the world's premier student technology competition, empowers students to unlock their creative genius and build solutions that tackle real-world issues facing society…

Who hasn't thought about starting a food fight at a formal dinner function? Telling your interviewer about some embarrassing personal story? The worst thing to do at the wrong time? And then the internal fight starts: "The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing," says Poe, as quoted in the NY Times Science Tuesday article on why the imp in your brain gets out. An article in Science (from which I took the title to this blog) addresses this odd desire to commit a counterintentional error of the most embarrassing sort: In…

Look what I found on Quark Expedition website! http://www.blogyourwaytoantarctica.com/blogs/view/257 In a nutshell, Quark is sponsoring a competition to send someone on an eco-cruise of Antarctica in order to blog for a week.  The Fossil Huntress apparently threw her hat in, and I think any of her readers here would agree that she'd do a kickass job of blogging from Antarctica. But naturally, the competition is a bit more of a popularity contest than a merit-based blogging appointment; you have 300 words in which to pitch yourself, but nobody besides your friends has any incentive to…

House of StrawUse six straws to create the classic house shape (a rectangular body with two straws forming the roof, all laying flat on the table). Bet that you can make four equal triangles by moving only three straws. Try it! To all but the most creatively freethinking, this is impossible. The trick is to go 3D—pick up the three straws that make the bottom and sides of the rectangle and replace them so that one end of each straw is rooted in a corner of the triangle with all three moved straws touching above the center of the original triangle, like a tent or teepee—four, equal triangles,…

True Math GeniusThis trick will bring a smile to the face of even the most hardened math geek. First, lay matches on a table to form the equation I + II + III = IIII (crossed matches make the plus signs and parallel matches make the equals sign). Challenge your opponent to make this statement true by moving only one match and without messing with the sum after the equals sign. The trick is to pick up one match from the II, and lay it across the middle match in the III, making the full equation read: I + I + I + I =IIII. Two Glasses IIThis time, use shot glasses—fill one with colorful liquor…