Richard Dawkins writes convincingly about the improbability of, well everything.
science
Entries tagged with “science”.
Richard Feynman once gave a fine commencement address referred to as “Cargo Cult Science” (named for the anecdote about unfortunately deluded people in the South Pacific building runways out of straw and coconuts in the hope they would attract loaded cargo planes to land, long after the war had ended). In it he argues through example against any sort of fudging of numbers or spoofing of scientific results, pointing to their poisoning the pools of real, honest science. “Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Recent bookmarks tagged with “science”.
- I Hate Your Paper - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences
- Bone Wars - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Bone Wars, also known as the "Great Dinosaur Rush",[1] refers to a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale). Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to out-compete the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and destruction of bones. Each scientist also attacked the other in scientific publications, seeking to ruin his credibility and have his funding cut off.
- BBC - BBC Two Programmes - The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion
- Charlie Brooker's Screen burn: Science Of The Movies | Television & radio | The Guardian
I chose to preview this under false pretences, glancing at the title and figuring it would be a myth-busting exercise in which scientific experts pooh-poohed Hollywood's lax grasp of physics, grumpily pointing out that if a sheet of glass hit David Warner's neck at 50mph, his head wouldn't really be sliced off as cleanly as it was in The Omen. I was looking forward to being told that you can't actually see laser beams in space for the 500th time. Instead, I was confronted by a 60-minute show about programmable motion-control cameras. And being a geek, I sat through it, only getting truly restless when they started discussing the frequency-hopping spread spectrum wireless communication system they were using. That's how nerdy this is.
- Expert: ‘Lazy researchers to blame for declining EU science optimism’ | EurActiv
The ESF boss blamed the EU research community for this, arguing that scientists are "often too scared of the public" to undertake the necessary promotion of their work that would make science and tech feature more prominently in mainstream society.
She scathingly went on to claim that many members of the research community are too "lazy and self-contented" to provide this important service. "Talking to the public requires a certain talent that not many scientists have," she said.
The solution from the policymakers' perspective, argued Makarow, is to gear EU strategies for "lifelong learning" towards feeding the public desire for more training and knowledge in this area.- The power of comics - simondobson.org
The goal of PhD Comics is to act as an encouragement to graduate students. For anyone who’s been through it — as I have — it’s overall an extremely rewarding, liberating intellectual, social and life experience; it’s also a lonely, frustrating, depressing, isolating and self-critical one. It takes an effort of will to believe that you’re making a contribution, making discoveries that others will find interesting and worthwhile. Even those with unbounded self-confidence — which most certainly does <em>not</em> include me, not now and certainly not then — will find themselves questioning their motivations and capabilities over the course of their PhD.
- Symphony of Science
The Symphony of Science is a musical project headed by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form. Here you can watch music videos, download songs, read lyrics and find links relating to the messages conveyed by the music.
- How do you read papers? - Gobbledygook Blog | Nature Publishing Group
In 2010 I want to use a tool that scans Pubmed or other databases for papers of interest based on the papers stored in my reference manager. The tool would give me a weekly report that can also be printed out for reading and note taking.
- Food for The Eagle - Adam Savage's speech to Harvard Humanism Society- Boing Boing
Prayer doesn't work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening. I've paid attention. I've pictured what I want to happen in my life. I've meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn't work for me about them. I've looked hard at problems and thought hard about their solutions.
I've concluded by this that someone is paying attention—I've concluded that it's me. I've noticed that if I'm paying attention to those around me, to myself, to my surroundings, then that is the very definition of empathy. I've noticed that when I pay attention, I'm less selfish, I'm happier—and that the inverse holds true as well.- CiteSpace: visualizing patterns and trends in scientific literature
CiteSpace focuses on finding critical points in the development of a field or a domain, especially intellectual turning points and pivotal points. CiteSpace provides various functions to facilitate the understanding and interpretation of network patterns and historical patterns, including identifying the fast-growth topical areas, finding citation hotspots in the land of publications, decomposing a network into clusters, automatic labeling clusters with terms from citing articles, geospatial patterns of collaboration, and unique areas of international collaboration.
CiteSpace supports structural and temporal analyses of a variety of networks derived from scientific publications, including collaboration networks, author co-citation networks, and document co-citation networks. It also supports networks of hybrid node types such as terms, institutions, and countries, and hybrid link types such as co-citation, co-occurrence, and directed citing links.- As Lost Ends, Creators Explain How They Did It, What’s Going On | Magazine | Wired.com
In 2004, ABC called on producer J.J. Abrams to create a prime-time drama that capitalized on the success of Survivor: something tropical, Cast Away-ish, and closer to Lord of the Flies than Gilligan’s Island. Oh, they asked, and could you make it a towering, mainstream megahit, please? What executives got from the guy best known for a brainy college soap (Felicity) and an even brainier spy soap (Alias) was Lost, a fiendishly obscure, cast-of-thousands epic about … well … to say it’s about people on a magic island is selling it short. To say it’s about Everything — which its adherents swear it is — is a bit grandiose. So let’s just say it’s about destiny. And metaphysics. And quantum physics. And leadership, torture, time travel, synchronicity, Skinner boxes, geodesic domes, polar bears, doomsday equations, comic books, the Casimir effect, and the no-less-potent Cass Elliot effect.
- Insane Clown Posse’s ‘Miracles’ Video Explained » MTV Newsroom
- Boom-boom! Internet solves big bang riddle - The Irish Times - Fri, Apr 02, 2010
No one though had to ask permission to get to the bottom of the Portland boom. No one had to sign off on the investigative journalist running his plea in the paper; no one had to ask map-makers for the rights to use their charts of the area. No one had to spec out a multi-week project to programme a pin-tacking system or leaflet local neighbourhoods to encourage them to use it.
- YouTube - Insane Clown Posse - Miracles
fucking magnets...how do they work?
“The real miracle is how they found a lens wide enough to fit that fat fuck in the shot.”- Calvin and Hobbes Dad explains science | s-anand.net
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