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    Every time I post a comment I picture Adam and Ryan poking little voodoo dolls of me because I didn't start a new thread, so here is a thread about science
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      CommentAuthorHollisb
    • CommentTimeJan 18th 2009
     
    That is the most unflattering picture of Al Gore
  3.  
    How To Imagine The Tenth Dimension

    Once I attempted to illustrate this in a conversation with a writer friend of mine, to demonstrate how we as "three dimensional flatlanders" may not be able to see beings existing out independent in the forth or fifth dimension, while they would be able to look upon us as we might see the characters of Foxtrot or Garfield. Pretty quickly I ran out of napkins.
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  5.  
    When PR creates evil science

    This was an interesting interview, although when it is mentioned how rare agates are in comparison to diamonds and how for every Phd there is an opposite and equal Phd I kind of drifted off into an imaginary Research Wars video game for a few minutes...
  6.  
    Not to brag guys, but I just met E.O. Wilson!!!!!

    Our university has a lecture request site so I typed his name in around 46 times a couple years ago (he's my all-time favorite public intellectual, a dual-Pulitzer prize winner, and the father of Sociobiology) and this year he came and gave a talk on the importance of preserving the biosphere, why he thinks there are alien intelligences, what it feels like to be stung by Costa Rican fire ants, and how in the future gene sequencing will be so quick that people will be able to carry analyzer backpacks and go bacteria watching as they go bird watching today.

    He started of by declaring that the theory of evolution should now be A LAW. We have observed it in the laboratory and it exists as the only framework we have to describe the scope and variety of the organic complexity on the planet Earth. It was awesome to hear him actually make this argument in person.

    I got in line to have four of his books that I own signed, and when I introduced myself and thanked him for helping the Encyclopedia of Life project he stopped the 100+ person line and talked to me for three minutes straight about it!

    He is giving a second talk tomorrow for "Darwin Day" a the old capital, I think that I am going to skip out on class to grill him on why the hell he has changed his position on Altruism in kinship gene selection theory in the last three months.
  7.  
    Here are some E.O. Wilson quotes for everybody
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      CommentAuthordchamp
    • CommentTimeFeb 12th 2009
     
    You should dress up like a robot and heckle him, in the grand Iowa City tradition.
  9.  
    Happy Darwin Day everyone!

    I was afraid if I dressed up as a robot that I wouldn't get Charles Darwin birthday cake, so instead I just went as a normal audience member for the celebration. They were taking pictures with a cardboard cut out, selling Darwin bobble-heads and T-shirts, and singing him Happy Birthday, and E.O. Wilson was given a lot of free Darwin swag too. Here's how he started his lecture:

    "With apologies to those in the audience who may be theologians- both Jim Watson, one of the original discoverers of the structure of DNA, and I have agreed to a statement in the past during an appearance on The Charlie Rose show, and the statement is this:

    Charles Darwin was the most important human to have ever lived."

    So he went on to talk about the importance of evolution to our modern society and how consilience (all life and activity can be reduced to quantum physical interactions) has become widely recognized as being correct and then gave a brief overview of Darwin's life, and then it was time for questions, and the lecture host said that there was only one rule, that students be able to ask questions first, at which I jumped up in the aisle (this was in the room beneath the big golden dome in the old capital) and asked my altruism question- the first difficult or challenging question he had been asked since he got to Iowa City. He squinted at me for a second and then launched into a six minute hand-gesturing, citation laden evolution DIATRIBE. Then he stopped and said "and I know that I am going into a lot of detail about this, but this is really the most important and interesting question in biology, and if Charles Darwin were here today he would want to talk about this too. Isn't that right Charles?"

    and he reached over to the Darwin bobble-head that had been presented to him and gave it a whack so that it started nodding. Then he talked for seven more minutes about my question! There was barely any time for anyone else! I am floored. I don't know if he recognized me from last night and he noticed how all of my books by him were completely dog-eared or he just really agrees with my point of view, but I feel like a South American peasant who has had the Pope come to their tiny village on Easter Sunday and let one wear his hat. ALL THREE of my major departments had some of my past professors in the audience, so it was a bit like tap dancing in front of a room full of one's exe's who should never be in a room together in the first place. Am I dreaming right now? This seems a lot like a bizarre dream.

    "We were eating birthday cake, and talking about evolution, and E.O. Wilson and all of my professors were there..."
    •  
      CommentAuthorHollisb
    • CommentTimeFeb 12th 2009
     
    That's awesome, congrats Will.
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  12.  
    Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Dr Denisov was his counterpart Professor Lyn Evans, LHC project leader.

    "The race is on," he told BBC News.


    U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
    •  
      CommentAuthorHollisb
    • CommentTimeFeb 19th 2009
     
    Will:

    You know stuff about things.
    Thoughts on stevia as a natural sugar substitutue? Thinking about staying away from Splenda, aspartame, etc.

    Where I first heard of it

    For what it's worth, wikipedia entry
    stevia
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      CommentAuthordchamp
    • CommentTimeFeb 19th 2009
     
    Can't be any worse for you than aspartame (which IMHO tastes like ass-partame).

    Have any of you tasted the stevia sweetners? How is it?
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      CommentAuthorTheSasquatch
    • CommentTimeFeb 19th 2009 edited
     
    I've heard of stevia before, but generally I try to limit my intake of all artificial sweeteners for the reasons mentioned in the first page you linked to. Malaysia was hit pretty hard by the food crisis this year, it's too bad that pop companies are encouraging PureCircle to grow REb-A there "in serious volumes" instead of rice crops or something.

    There were separate wiki articles on the chemical composition so I clicked through to find this article cited. Do you notice how often the journalist is using the phrase "Established the Safety"? A couple food toxicology studies (sponsored by Cargill, a major interest) with a limited set of test subjects (which in this case were rats) over a small period of time can't really do that. People drink large quantities of sweeteners FOR DECADES, and if only one in every 15,000 experience side effects in the American market that is still going to be thousands of sickened or dead people. What side effects are likely if there are any?

    The ones mentioned in the implications column of the food industry article as "outdated studies" being overturned. "suggesting adverse effects of stevia or stevioside on male reproductive organs (1985, 1999) or on kidney function (1988, 1994, 1997)", "Refutes studies (1968, 1985, 1998, 1999) suggesting potential adverse effects on male or female fertility, or health of offspring ", "Addresses questions raised by two Taiwanese studies (2000 and 2003) suggesting that stevioside (purity unknown) lowered blood pressure in people with essential hypertension", "Addresses questions raised by a single-dose study (2004) suggesting that stevioside reduced levels of blood sugar after meals in people with type 2 diabetes"

    Who knows what the chemical structure is after they mix it with all of the interesting Pepsi or Coca Cola ingredients. If you are going for just adding the compositionally similar pure stevia that hasn't been given GRAS status by the FDA to your own food or drink you really only have the mental and physical health of the people of Japan to go on



    Now I drink yerba mate sometimes myself, so if, as these articles suggest, I am missing out on a mix-in 6x sweeter than sugar that can be naturally grown in Canada it would be great to know! I'm just willing to wait and let other people guinea pig it out for me for a bit so that I don't end up tied to some rocking chair in a personal care home without working kidneys by the age of fifty one mumbling softly to myself about "the glockenspiels".
    • CommentAuthorIII_Demon
    • CommentTimeFeb 19th 2009
     
    ok this has been bugging me... its always bugged me and has lately been gaining some attention... science is not at war with religion, and anyone who thinks so is doing it wrong. on both sides.

    in those articles, they keep calling it 'the god particle'

    and your quote:
    Charles Darwin was the most important human to have ever lived."

    reading between the lines on that one, the implication is that darwin, by coming up with evolution, disproved god. ... obviously you can argue circles around that idea forever if you want, but you have to at least admit that the idea is there, in some form.

    science and religion are not the same thing. they dont cover the same issues, they dont serve the same purpose. science overlaps with mythology, and people tend to keep their mythology tightly attached to their religion, but thinking that therefore the whole thing covers everything is incorrect and dangerous.

    religious people are at war with science and deny it, because they think its killing god.

    non-religious people are unfortunately largely still religious, they've just replaced god with science, and now they have faith in science instead of god. having faith in science is backward. science is based on doubt and skepticism.. the opposite of faith. science will never answer the ultimate spiritual/religious/philosophical questions, it is inherently incapable. religion will never be able to 'beat' science, because its not playing the same game.

    i could blab about this for days. i'll cut it off here. i just figured i'd hand will some fodder.

    GO WILL!
    •  
      CommentAuthorSillyYak
    • CommentTimeFeb 19th 2009
     
    stevia has very little research, but has not (as of yet) shown any harmful side effects. because it is derived from sugar (similar to splenda) is has no calories and blah blah blah. it's supposedly better than splenda (but i really don't know why) and has been recommended to diabetics for glucose control. drawback: it's kind of expensive. but hy-vee has a generic brand called "truvia" which may help defray some cost.
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      CommentAuthorTheSasquatch
    • CommentTimeFeb 19th 2009 edited
     
    They call it the god particle because of a guy named Lederman. As he put it in his book:

    This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God Particle. Why God Particle? Two reasons. One, the publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddam Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing. And two, there is a connection, of sorts, to another book, a much older one…

    -The God Particle, by Leon Lederman

    [Lederman then goes on to quote Genesis 11:1-9 , the Tower of Babel story about mankind dispersing. Finding the God Particle, he says, would be like undoing the confusion that followed.]

    E.O, Wilson after he made the Darwin comment went on to qualify it. Where Newton may have been considered one of the greatest physical researchers the reason that Darwin was and is so important in Wilson's view was that through natural selection he redefined the way we saw OURSELVES in our world- to an almost incomprehensible degree, unparalleled in magnitude or exactitude by any other individual.

    Wilson has written a book called "The Creation" where he reaches out to believers and asks them not to draw a religious dichotomy between people because it distracts from humanity's ultimate goals in the quest for our collective self-preservation and the formation of a better and more responsible society. That is probably why he was apologizing in the first place, for the benefit of those in the audience who disagreed and who think that Jesus or Mohammed are Abraham or Siddhartha or L. Ron Hubbard are the best.

    So neither of them are really trying to start an idealogical war. There are some like Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and P.Z. Myers who consider religion a poison on the Earth. Messianic religions in their view are simply Santa Claus for grown ups, and believing in these ridiculous things actually damages a human being's chance at happiness and health in a society because religion discourages rational thought and scientific progress. Pascal's wager has a hidden price, killing the planet and having all of your money taken by megachurch preachers who use it to buy themselves jets.

    Inversely highly religious people don't believe in atheists. Every atheist deep down inside really believes in god, and all of this posturing actually damages a human being's chance at happiness and health in a society because rationalism discourages faith and a relationship with the almighty.
    Not respecting pascal's wager means eternal damnation of the soul, and an increase in likely fetus-destroying behaviors.

    Science in the past HAS BEEN annihilated by religion. Everyone who thought that the Earth revolved around the sun got sent to judgment a little early back during Galileo, and miracles proved beyond a doubt that DEITY X was beyond all laws of space and time. In recent years though science has undermined religion like a hand grenade in a propane plant. Evo Devo, Astrophysics, Botany, Biochem, Paleontology, Meteorology, etc. Lighting, not Zeus throwing thunderbolts. Insanity, not demons possessing the mind. Eclipses, no need to sacrifice a chicken. As Paul says, if you get wrapped up in the mythology (that The Bible is the literal, direct, and true word of God) instead of the more spiritual or inter-relational aspects of faith you begin running into some serious conflict, and the "big religions' get busy fighting policy

    -stem cell technology, inhibited
    -genetic crop modification for drought zones and added vitamins and nutrients for starving people around the world, inhibited
    -EPA and NASA reports detailing the evidence of climate change during the Bush administration, inhibited
    -Science funding in the 2009 Obama stimulus package potentially saving our economy (estimated by the CIA to be one of the greatest threats to world stability), inhibited

    Both business AND religious interests are at risk of becoming sad anachronisms in the face of scientific advancement. Just as Exxon Mobile doesn't want new solar panel tech. the pull of religious lobbies could obviously be damaged by

    1. The creation of new life from primordial Earth's raw chemical components
    2. Discovery of life from other sources in the solar system, bolstering the Drake equation
    3. The successful hybridization of a human-animal hybrid (as Dawkins suggested in Edge)
    4. A unified physics creating E.O. Wilson's "consilience", allowing all life to be accurately reduced to material interaction (without metaphysics)
    5. Behavioral economics, game theory, and psycho-evolutionary behaviorism forming predictable LAWS of human behavior
    •  
      CommentAuthorTheSasquatch
    • CommentTimeFeb 19th 2009 edited
     
    6. invention of The Perfect Birth Control
    7. "Mind Transfer" technology allowing your thoughts to be felt by someone else or to be fed into a computer
    etc. etc.

    so it is a bit of a culture war. Many scientists believe that all of the big questions (outside of the unknowable by definition) can be answered with experiment and observation, so one can actually compare religion and science as competitors.



    A scientific philosopher named Kuhn countered this with the idea that science never really does anything useful in approaching the true nature of reality. Just as people switched from Newton to Einstein to string theory in physics every field is full of "innovators" waiting to upset common thinking and bring the next useless set of laws that is no closer to the real truth of things. We are never going to be able to observe the infinite universe in it's totality with the gazilibajilliion super tiny micro particles like Bosons all fracking with one another and sociology and psychology are just hopeless so we might as well give up.

    I classically counter this line of reasoning with the advance of technology. As time goes on humans have developed the ability to observe and record MORE information by virtue of the innovations we come across, so even if our view isn't perfect we are asymptotically approaching perfect understanding IN SCOPE with newer shinier electron microscopes and robo-landers and Erlenmeyer flasks every year. In mathematics we keep building bigger super computers that help us solve more complex equations, and better sensors and personality indexes to help us do this sort of thing. So if we were playing the same game with science and religion, theology is in trouble.

    Indeed, the Dalai Llama just said in 2007: "If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own world view. "

    and just this year the Vatican acknowledged evolution as the way that god created the world. This is a MASSIVE turnaround, but as proposed before in this thread- evolution is becoming a law. The human species is evolving as we speak.

    Science gets smacked now and then too, no one questioned Freudianism for a long time even though it had an easy explanation for literally ANY human behavior or outcome. Researchers are caught fudging results and stealing ideas all of the time, and many times a science can't really do what
    it claims it can do.

    The consequence of all of this may be a more exploratory relationship with our universe. Without the skepticism and questioning that science and good religious practice try to impart they really are just more mindless, conformity-demanding dogmas. Question your world!
    •  
      CommentAuthordchamp
    • CommentTimeFeb 19th 2009
     
    Too many words. Bad Will.

    I think Darwin was an important disruptive influence on Western science in the relatively recent history. However, I think there were many others who made large and small contributions to science and the scientific method.
    •  
      CommentAuthordchamp
    • CommentTimeFeb 19th 2009
     
    p.s. that is one seksi cockaroacha dance.
  22.  
    BzzzZZZzzzzzzZZZZZzzzzzZZZ!

    quite the coincidence that this tech is developing as "Watchmen" is coming out...
    •  
      CommentAuthordchamp
    • CommentTimeFeb 26th 2009
     
    I don't see what was wrong with Tesla's original solution.
    •  
      CommentAuthorTheSasquatch
    • CommentTimeFeb 27th 2009 edited
     
    [GASP] There really is a science fairy!


    Edit Note: Explanatory Time Warp!
  25.  
    •  
      CommentAuthorTheSasquatch
    • CommentTimeMar 10th 2009 edited
     
    Obama hates reproductive cloning- an otherwise very nice and well delivered speech, I think that cloning should be a viable option for people and hope that later when our capabilities develop there are re-examinations of the tangible benefits. Today human cloning is dangerous because we can't do it right, but I think that there is a lot to be said for "reproductive independence", and not forcing individual to combine their chromosomes haphazardly with another person if they would prefer not having their gene sequence sliced up and smooshed together with someone who may not even be genetically compatible. Normal reproduction has never bothered me personally but we DO lose a lot of healthy beneficial sequencing from genetic drift.

    For instance if the healthiest person that ever lived was alive right now, their genes falling in just the right way to be best suited for our modern environment, in four generations of normal reproduction the remaining data would be halfed and smooshed, halfed and smooshed, halfed and smooshed and halfed and smooshed with less healthy or more negative-mutation-prone genes. In reality our collective gene pool has been growing weaker for a while thanks to advances in medical technology like eye-glasses and appendicitis surgeries allowing more babies to be had by people who would have just died in caveman times (myself included), so "the healthiest person ever" with the best immune system and least chance of a child with birth defects or was probably back in 4000 B.C. somewhere in the Middle East or Africa, but the principle is contiguous; until we can perfect "GeneMod shots" to fix heritable problems people develop as they go along in life, I would argue a healthy person has a right to go A-sexual if they really want to.
    • CommentAuthorIII_Demon
    • CommentTimeMar 10th 2009
     
    i would have died around age 20 when i got in a car accident and my spleen exploded.... but then... there wouldnt have been cars capable of going 60mph into a tree, back when the medical science wasnt there to fix me. so i get to live. screw all you inferior humans, i'm gonna go breed or something.
  28.  
    And I would have died of E-coli infection at age 12, but besides that I must consider that any prospective children that I would have might inherit MY biological problems [mild dermographism, severe insomnia, and freakish tallness] and all of the genetic problems of my family [MS, paranoid schizophrenia, chronic depression, obesity, bi-polar disorder, autism, type I diabetes, type II diabetes, severe heart and circulatory problems, three thyroid syndromes, six different kinds of cancer, impotence, megalomania, anxiety disorders, myopia, hyperopia, blindness, strabismus, club foot, dementia, Alzheimer's, Klinefelter's, five sex disorders (not counting the impotence), AT LEAST twenty personality disorders, OCD, ADHD, drug and alcohol addiction, eczema, acid reflux disease, B12 processing deficiencies, migraine headaches, mental retardation, anemia, ridiculous allergies, skin lesions, sleep apnea, crooked teeth, delirium, seasonal affective disorder, hypertension, cyclothymia, anorexia, just generally being a jackass (which I have too), and god only knows what else I haven't been told about]

    and what if my kid inherits all of it? It would be like living with a member of the royal family... I'm gonna go not breed or something. Hooray Eugenics!
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  30.  
    Sigh. Not only is this free, it's also twice as good as the class that I paid a bucket of money to take. And the worthless things that I was getting for free... are now going to cost lots of money

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