Stand with 🇮🇱 🇺🇦
Older Retired White Guy. Buddhist.
"Non nobis solum"
Likes trees better than people. Books better than trees.
"We Be The Humans"
Joined Aug 2018
Opinion: Feminist Science Is Not an Oxymoron
Feminists have generated a set of tools to make science less biased and more robust. Why don’t more scientists use it?
"What we lose when feminism is minimized is an understanding of how science actually works."
By Rachel E. Gross
https://undark.org/2022/09/15/opinion-feminist-science-is-not-an-oxymoron/
Science and mathematics may never fully capture the physical universe. Are there hard limits to human intelligence?
"What is truly stunning about the fact that modern science and mathematics are formulated through a sequence of marks is its exclusivity: nothing other than these finite sequences of symbols is ever found in modern mathematical reasoning."
By David H Wolpert
https://aeon.co/essays/ten-questions-about-the-hard-limits-of-human-intelligence
Just Correlation: Sleep Apnea And Cancer Risk
There is correlation between that and obesity, diabetes, cigarettes, and alcohol. There is no plausible biological mechanism for why those would cause sleep apnea, it is just correlation - epidemiologists look at rows of inputs and columns of effects - and that is the problem with a new paper claiming a link to cancer.
https://www.science20.com/news_staff/just_correlation_sleep_apnea_and_cancer_risk-256224
(How many of these questions can you answer without looking them up?)
Who Wants to Be a Science Savvy Congressperson?
Nobody expects these candidates to calculate quantum wave functions or spit out the first 10 digits of pi, but reasonable answers to a few elementary questions on mathematics and science would nevertheless be reassuring.
by John Allen Paulos
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/08/who-wants-to-be-a-science-savvy-congressperson.html
(all the big data in the universe, don't mean squat, if you ain't got a theory.)
New Theory for Increasingly Tangled Banks
Theory has fallen out of fashion in the sciences, in favor of data collection and number crunching. But the conceptual frameworks provided by theory are essential for addressing society’s most complex and urgent problems.
By Saran Twombly, et al
Why do academic publications lack rigour? Taylor on the problem of woozles.
"Academia, according to James Stacey Taylor, is replete with woozles. These academic woozles are not fictional creatures they are, rather, fictional ‘facts’: propositions or claims that are taken to be true simply because they are repeated and cited so often without anyone checking to see whether or not they are true."
By John Danaher
https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2022/08/why-do-academic-publications-lack.html
Scientists Think They've Found a Shockingly Simple Way to Degrade 'Forever Chemicals'
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been referred to as “forever chemicals” because of their resistance to most biological and chemical degradation mechanisms. Most current methods use very harsh conditions to decompose these compounds.
Low-temperature mineralization of perfluorocarboxylic acids
Some of the best Science HOAXES !
We have collected some examples of science with the gobbledygook.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/08/science-with-gobbledygook.html
My Favorite
Math error: A new study overturns 100-year-old understanding of color perception
A new study corrects an important error in the 3D mathematical space developed by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger and others, and used by scientists and industry for more than 100 years to describe how your eye distinguishes one color from another.
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-math-error-overturns-year-old-perception.html
Paper not yet available
I always wanted to be an experimental physicist, to help design, build, and run the big toys. In collage one of my mentors said...
"Damn it, they keep building new accelerators and telescopes, don't they understand that each time they do this it triples the number of unanswered questions...."
“What I’m Mostly Afraid of Is That There Will Be Two Sciences—Democratic Science and Autocratic Science.”
The president of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Jerzy Duszyński, talks about his country’s efforts to help scientists from neighboring Ukraine, and what the future may hold for both Ukrainian and global science.
By Jerzy Duszynski, Molly Galvin
https://issues.org/jerzy-duszynski-polish-academy-sciences-ukraine-interview/
The Fingertip Galaxy: Reflecting Euclid in art.
The team behind ESA's Euclid mission has come together to create something special—a personal and collective galaxy-shaped fingerprint painting that has been attached to the spacecraft ready to launch into space.
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-video-fingertip-galaxy-euclid-art.html
Aircraft have the luxury of using a runway for braking to reduce speed. In contrast, birds must brake before they arrive at the perch—however slowing down to a safe speed while in flight risks stall, leading to a sudden loss of flight control. The researchers discovered that the hawks follow a flight path that slows them down to a safe speed but minimizes the distance from the perch at which they stall.
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-hawk-mid-air-prioritize-safety-energy.html
Paper:
James Poskett on Reframing the History of Science
In “Horizons,” a historian of science highlights the crucial achievements of non-Western scientists and thinkers.
By Dan Falk
https://undark.org/2022/07/01/interview-james-poskett-on-reframing-the-history-of-science/
Book:
https://bookshop.org/books/horizons-the-global-origins-of-modern-science-9781665072809/9780358251798
Whatever happened to the Bee Apocalypse?
Wild bees differ from honey bees in a number of ways. Honeybees live in colonies of several tens of thousands. They are social bees which means they like hanging out together at bee malls and have little bee block parties. No need to look that up, I'm a physicist, you can trust me on these things.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/06/whatever-happened-to-bee-apocalypse.html
(this one is also real, and might be helpful)
A Qualitative Analysis of Gaslighting in Romantic Relationships
Willis Klein, Suzanne Wood, Sherry Li
Gaslighting is an understudied form of abuse wherein a sane and rational victim is convinced of their own epistemic incompetence on false pretenses by a perpetrator.
(at first I thought this was a spoof, but no, real study.)
These researchers hooked a plant up to a lie detector. Asked if it was alive, the plant said “yes” but this was determined to be a lie. Also there was uranium involved for some reason. [PDF]
/nosanitize
Armchair science
Thought experiments played a crucial role in the history of science. But do they tell us anything about the real world?
‘It’s dazzling that you can think your way through to the solution without actually performing an experiment’
By Dan Falk
https://aeon.co/essays/do-thought-experiments-really-uncover-new-scientific-truths
To Watch:
Why does science news suck so much?
I read a lot of news about science and science policies. This probably doesn’t surprise you. But it may surprise you that most of the time I find science news extremely annoying. It seems to be written for an audience which doesn’t know the first thing about science. But I wonder, is it just me who finds this annoying?
Sabine Hossenfelder
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/06/why-does-science-news-suck-so-much.html
AI-designed enzyme devours plastic trash in days
The new enzyme works at lower temperatures than previous ones, which would make it greener, faster, and cheaper.
By Prachi Patel
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2022/05/ai-designed-enzyme-devours-plastic-waste-in-hours
Stand with 🇮🇱 🇺🇦
Older Retired White Guy. Buddhist.
"Non nobis solum"
Likes trees better than people. Books better than trees.
"We Be The Humans"
Joined Aug 2018