Random Thoughts

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is continuing its long-standing policy of defending dead animals by exploiting live human women. Well, clearly it works, since I am giving them free publicity by hammering on their lack of ethics in my blog once again, but at least this time it is not about their being anti-science crackpots or killing animals they say they want to protect, it is about about their annual effort to make vegans sexy by objectifying attractive women in their Sexiest Vegan Next Door contest. PETA has been giving away these Sexiest trips to pretty people since…

Why Science Needs Pete Williams Way To Go Pete! Pete "I dont want to be trending" Williams is currently trending worldwide on Twitter despite having tweeted very few times. The reason? He has proven to be very accurate in his reports on the Boston Marathon bombers. Where others rushed to report any wild rumour, Pete Williams has applied caution, honesty and ethics to his profession, so much so that he has become the "go to" source for accurate information. If only he would report on climate change. We would then see far fewer reports based on the Daily Mail's time-warp stories about a halt in…

FBI Releases Images of Two Suspects The FBI today released images of two males suspected of planting the Boston Marathon bombs. Shortly afterwards the FBI website crashed, no doubt due to demand for these images. As a public service I am posting the images in my blog and I encourage other bloggers to please do the same.  Copy from this blog if the FBI site is still down: there can surely be no copyright issues. Let's all help catch these unspeakables. If you recognize these scumbags, call 1-800-CALL-FBI

Apres un long silence Apres un long silence, dont je ne chercherai pas a m'excuser,j'ai le plaisir de vous communiquer ... After a long silence, for which I will not try to apologize,I am pleased to inform you ... On the Electricity excited by the mere Contact of conducting substances of different kinds.  In a letter from Mr. Alexander Volta, F.R.S. Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Pavia, to the Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. K.B. P.R.S.Read to the Royal Society June 26, l800 I have been absent from Science20.com for far too long, due to various reasons.  I…

To those who follow my twitter account: my account was hacked over a week ago, and only today could I get it back to work (the twitter support team is not -hehm- a prize-winning one). So while I am busy deleting the >200 tweets that were (I believe automatically) posted there, you can safely add me back if you (understandably) masked me out.

When I was a kid, I would happily play around with both words and numbers – I still do. Both have their aesthetic appeal. Whether it is constructing and deconstructing mathematical puzzles or cryptic crosswords, they appear as small artefacts that reveal a grander architecture. Combine this with the serendipity of the internet, and Pi Day was just a hop, skip and jump away from Richard Feynman and pilish poetry. A couple of weeks ago, John Baez posted a link to Cadaeic Cadenza by Mike Keith; an epic work, albeit a short story, due to it being written entirely in pilish. Pilish is a form of…

I've determined that I won't write blogs about dumb science unless I encounter at least three in a row.  I probably won't actually adhere to that, but it seemed like a convenient excuse to write this piece. For the record, the first two were about gambling as serving an evolutionary function and that elite athletes are cognitively elite also.   As usual, these either resembled more "just-so" stories, or they represented totally obvious irrelevancies under the guise that something substantive was being stated. The third one in this category involves a study about tourist-fed…

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been chosen as Pope Francis, leader of the Holy See in Rome. That's all well and good, it's nice that heavily-Catholic South America is getting its due and I found it interesting that a Jesuit chose to name himself after a Franciscan. While many inside the Catholic church (and always those outside) will find plenty to criticize - he is against both abortion and euthanasia and preaches tolerance for homosexuality but does not endorse it - we have one of the most cosmopolitan Pope's ever. He's the son of immigrants and became a Cardinal in Argentina and now…

Are you a science undergraduate or graduate student (or even a post-doc) who has discovered you love science but aren't crazy about the idea of doing research in a narrow field?  Science is a big place and there are lots of other ways to be in the world of research without doing research. On  February 7th, 2013, Dr. Alex Berezow, microbiologist and editor of RealClearScience, explained how you can transition from the laboratory to the newsroom in a talk held at the University of Washington. Obviously many of the insights can apply to anyone in science who wants to do their own…

I believe in the wisdom of crowds. If I take one PhD in science and ask them to guess the number of pennies in a jar, it's not going to be close, but if I ask 1,000 regular people to guess, the mean average of their answers is going to be eerily accurate. This is the concept behind averaging polls too.  In 2008, a baseball statistical analyst named Nate Silver made a splash by correctly getting a lot of the electoral college results right. It wasn't that he got the Obama victory right - so did I, so did most people with a clue. Getting the states right is usually a little trickier…