Science continues to be cool. How do you photograph bats drinking?
Science
Cool science
Literally – photos of glaciers from space – and figurative – using roads to map everything. That’s just roads, and the maps are remarkably complete.
Science is amazing!
Science Music
They Might Be Giants has a new album coming out next month: Here Comes Science, a science themed album for kids, with songs like The Ballad of Davy Crockett (In Outer Space), and Photosynthesis. It’s hard for me to explain here how excited that makes me, since you can’t see me bouncing up and down. (And no, video is not an option.) The portrayal of science and scientists in US media is generally very stereotypical, with nerdy white boys, old white male professors, or the occasional hot young woman who’s very smart but has no common sense. And in all cases, science itself is far too geeky to be interesting. And hard, let’s not forget hard. How can that cultural perception not contribute to the astounding percentage of adults in this country who are unfamiliar with basic science facts.
Maybe if those facts are embedded in a catchy pop tune they’ll stick.
(Better-quality mp3 here.)
Granted, dinosaurs have always been cool, but this album spans basic biology, physics, astronomy, environmentalism, and chemistry. Based on the bits that have appeared on YouTube already, TMBG has done an excellent job of portraying their subject material at an appropriate level without making it dorky or dull.
Fly me to the moon
Probably everyone knows that 40 years ago yesterday, Apollo 11 launched from the Kennedy Space Center.
Apollo 11 departing
There’s an understandably large amount of publicity leading up to the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing. What you might not know about are some of the interesting online resources associated with the anniversary:
- The NASA image gallery from which the above photo came.
- The Apollo 11 flight journal.
- The real-time+40 Twitter feed.
- More on moon landings.
- What if the Eagle landed on earth?
- This one wins: We Choose the Moon, a rebroadcast of audio transmissions, real-time+40, and excellent accompanying visuals and graphics.
- Images of the Apollo landing site from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (wow!)
I’ll be adding more as I find them, so check back if you are interested.
I missed the original by just under a year, but have been hoping for something comparable ever since. We as a society need some inspiring feats of science and engineering. We’ve accomplished many things over the past decades that are probably more important: mapping the human genome, personal computers, the internet, but nothing so universally awe-inspiring. What should the next challenge be?
WTF???
This is the kind of thing that I’m always ambivalent about linking to, since that gives the dimwits who write it more publicity, but sometimes it’s worth it just to make fun of them.
Let me introduce you to Project Pterosaur. Sounds innocuous, even interesting, doesn’t it? Not so. The goal of this project is “to mount an expedition to bring back living pterosaurs so that they may testify against Evolutionism”.
Well then.
I read that novel, but apparently the ability to differentiate fact from fiction is not a skill that is as widely practiced as one might like. The Bible is many things, but I was completely unaware before reading this article that it is also the most authoritative historical source on pterosaurs.
That premise, and a vivid imagination, leads to (illustrated!) statements such as: “During the Exodus, Israelites within sight of Moses’s brazen pterosaur-scaring device (pictured above) were safe, but many stragglers still perished from the persistent bites of the serpentine pterosaurs. (Artistic reconstruction by Peggy Miller.)”
The author feels that including as much pseudo-scientific jargon as possible will entice the gullible into believing his premises.
There are two main baramins of pterosaurs: rhamphorhynchoid and pterodactyloid. Rhamphorhynchoid kinds are small to medium sized (usually no larger than a sea gull) with long tails, short heads and necks, and teeth. Pterodactyloid kinds are medium to very large (in fact, they include the largest flying animals that ever lived) with short tails, longer necks and limbs, often crested heads, and usually lack teeth. It’s still debated whether these groups are monobaraminic or holobaraminic, and it is one of Project Pterosaur’s science goals to answer this question (if we find specimens of both groups, we can determine baraminicity by using Intelligent Design Theory to measure their specified complexity and apply the Dembski-Shannon equation to extrapolate the amount of relative informational loss due to genetic degradation from their perfect Creation.)
And note the use of “kinds” instead of “species”, because of course “species” is Evolutionistic.
There are some real gems here: “Another famous misclassification is that of the Puerto Rican chupacabra (“goat sucker,” after its fondness for attacking the flocks of local shepherds), which some researchers hold is a type of pterosaur. However, I am of the firm opinion that it is in fact a velociraptor.”
Ah, that clears it all up for me. Welcome to the skewed world of ethnographic pterosaurology.
Scientists who happen to be women
My favorite female naturalist didn’t make the New Scientist list of top ten most influential women scientists, but it’s still a pretty good list. (Bet you can’t guess who number one is? Damn, you guessed right.)
Rachel Carson made the list at number nine; she’s quite possibly responsible for my scientific career, and not for the usual reason. I had a battered and much loved copy of The Sea Around Us, and spent a lot of time poking around in the water (fresh) and swamps and woods in northern Michigan where I grew up. I’d completely forgotten that Carson was the author until watching the recent documentary A Sense of Wonder.
Really, though, it’s too bad that we need a list of top female scientists, and that so many of them were overlooked for major recognition that they deserved.
Science goes mainstream!
That’s what it means when we’re targetted by email scams, right?
*ELSEVIER:* *BUILDING INSIGHTS; BREAKING BOUNDARIES* *MANUSCRIPTS SUBMISSION* Dear Colleague, On behalf of all the Editors-in-chief of Elsevier Journals, we wish to Communicate to you that we are currently accepting manuscripts in all Fields of human Endeavour. All articles published will be peer-reviewed. The following types of papers are considered for publication: • Original articles in basic and applied research. •Critical reviews, surveys, opinions, commentaries and essays. Authors are invited to submit manuscripts reporting recent developments in their fields. Papers submitted will be sorted out and published in any of our numerous journals that best Fits. This is a special publication procedure which published works will be discussed at seminars (organized by Elsevier) at strategic Cities all over the world. Please maximize this opportunity to showcase your research work to the world. The submitted papers must be written in English and describe original research not published nor currently under review by other journals. Parallel submissions will not be accepted. Our goal is to inform authors about their paper(s) within one week of receipt. All submitted papers, if relevant to the theme and objectives of the journal, will go through an external peer-review process. *Prospective authors should send their manuscript(s) in** **Microsoft Word** **or PDF format to** **elsevier@fake.address** *and should Include a cover sheet containing corresponding Author(s) name, Paper Title, affiliation, phone, fax number, email address etc. Kind Regards, Emily Robinson(Prof.) PS: Pls. show interest by mailing *elsevier@fake.address* if your Manuscript is not ready but will be ready soon.
They get points for spellcheck, though it does have the erratic capitalization characteristic of scam emails. (Really, do these guys have any idea how much more profitable their schemes would be if they bothered to have someone edit them? They go to such great lengths to get the right graphics and format, and then the English sucks.)
Elsevier is a major journal publisher, but by no means spanning “all Fields
of human Endeavour”. If you send the real Elsevier a random paper without a specific journal selected, you will get it back in a week, rejected rather than peer-reviewed. I imagine if you send these folks a paper, you will get it accepted within a week, along with exorbitant page charge requests.
The real Elsevier would like everyone to know that “Elsevier does not solicit intellectual property from authors in this fashion, and does not utilize Gmail, Hotmail, or any other free third-party e-mail providers in communications with authors and editors.” What a relief!
A contradictory nation
Science, politics… all the fun all at once.
Among the 30 OEDC countries, the United States is number one in health expenditures, but 28 in infant mortality, and 24 in overall life expectancies. We also work the most hours per week, and are the third richest country. But then, we are obese, and don’t get enough sleep. (No time to do anything but work? How do you suppose that contributes to the life expectancy stats?) The full report is here.
Whatever it is we’ve been doing, it isn’t working, and it will continue to not work. We need to fix any number of things. The most urgent place to start is with universal health care. How can anyone read that we are 28th in infant mortality (better than only Mexico and Turkey) and not support access to medical care, and especially preventative care?
Speaking of medical care, here are two important swine-flu links: one and two. Though if you only listen to mainstream news media, you might like three better.
Completely changing the subject, Neil Gaiman provides the best commentary ever on the recent complaints about GRR Martin’s delays in writing the next “Song of Ice and Fire Book”. Let me quote:
“George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.”
Thank you, Neil. (I adore this man. From afar, and very politely.) (I would like to read GRRM’s book, but c’mon people. Go read something else while you wait!)
New technology, new milestones: the first Twitter from Earth orbit! (My favorite is still the Car Talk caller who was on board the space shuttle at the time. I even heard that one when it first aired.)
(I have 66 Twitter followers at this moment, and have made 1,112 updates. Is that good or bad, do you suppose?)
And finally, my latest musical obsession for you to enjoy.
Oddments
Yet another installment of “Other people’s stuff”. I’ve been out of town far too much – Saturday was the first morning in a month that I was actually at home. (Jacuzzi rooms win.) I had to make my own coffee, but the cat was delighted. All this travel and the associated preparations has put me behind on any number of projects, including (obviously) blogging. I’ve been saving interesting things, though, and will now put them here for your entertainment.
- New episode of Shadow Unit! And how much do I love you all? I’m blogging, and I haven’t finished reading it yet!
- From Oxford University Press: “ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment is available online for the first time in its publishing history. To celebrate this milestone, all issues back to volume 1 are currently available FREE online until 15th May 2009.” I like knowing that journals like this exist.
- “The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.” Planned launch is April 21.
- StarShipSofa has put together a podcast of all the Nebula-nominated stories. That’s a fantastic idea (and they have a great name).
- New Scientist reviews the forthcoming book The Natural History of Unicorns
by Chris Lavers and Joshua Blu Buhs.
Forsythia
