How to flip food like a chef
Chef Ben taught me this years ago, but h/t goes to Laughing Squid
Nate Silver, the Accuratest?
‘Pale Blue Dot’ animated
via Maria Popova at Brain Pickings
Fractal inspired Tree of Life
Rock Out like a Flapper to 1920s Jazz
If you are my age (or older) and have an inordinate fondness for the scientific arts, you probably have Carl Sagan to thank for that*.
If you think of yourself as a “science communicator”, you have Carl Sagan to thank for breaking ground on making that a respectable pursuit for scientists.
Today was Carl’s birthday, which seems like a good location in the space-time continuum to celebrate that he existed. You should also sing along to Dr. SETI‘s Carl Sagan themed drinking song, “Cosmic Carl”.
*Younger folk probably want to thank Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson, but they have to thank Carl Sagan for inspiring them. So, you are only one step removed.
You have probably heard about the new paper in PLoS ONE describing the diversity of microbiological species in the human belly button. Understanding within species variation is critical before we can get a real handle on between species variation in belly button microbial diversity. What you may not know is that our own Marie-Claire Shanahan provided one of the belly buttons used for this study. Marie-Claire is, as it says in the acknowledgements, “curious about the life on their own bodies and in what science can tell them about themselves.”
In fact, Marie-Claire’s belly button is the poster child for this research, at least in Canada. She was featured in a CBC video describing the work, which can be seen here (may only be visible in Canada).
Now that I live in South Carolina, I get asked “how do I like it there?” a lot. This usually code for “how do I like living in a rural, cultural backwater?” This is somewhat fair, as the Civil War did start here, but not exactly accurate. Like all things involving interactions between people, it is complicated. I could try to convince them that South Carolina is not what you expect with personal stories and character references.
Instead, I’m just going to point to the data from FloatingSheep.org documenting the spate of racist tweets surrounding Obama’s reelection that showed that South Carolina only ranked 24th (of 51 – DC was included) in tweeted racism. Not ideal, but better than many would expect. For comparison, my home state (Ohio) ranked 23rd*, the state where I went to college (North Carolina) ranked 19th, the state where I went to graduate school (Missouri) ranked 8th, and the nation where I did my post-doc (UK) isn’t exactly sure if they have ever seen a black man before (92.1% white).
So, yeah, its OK living here.
I also like NASCAR (Tony Stewart, thanks for asking). So, that helps too.
Note that the results are based on a pretty small set of racist tweets <400. So, they should be taken with a big grain of salt.
*From looking at the data tables, I think Ohio and South Carolina are technically tied.
In the wake of Obama‘s re-election, people are going to spend a lot of time first crowing over the success of Nate Silver‘s election forecasting at FiveThirtyEight.com, then telling us all why he didn’t do that good of a job. The point is not that Nate Silver is a genius. The point is that these methodologies can be tested. We can see how they perform. Then we can tweak them and see if they perform better. As a whole, they are not going to get worse. And, these statistical methodologies are slowly creeping into the public view.
The pundits don’t want this to happen. They make a killing saying things that can’t get checked. They don’t have to update their methods. Accountability is anathema to pundits. One’s “gut” is not amenable to validation.
We can see this in baseball. We all know (among the set of people who care about baseball) that the “Moneyball” or sabermetrics approach is more effective than traditional methods of evaluating talent, which is more effective than the random citing of statistics used by play-by-play analysts.
Nate Silver’s forecasting was not the only coherent system for analyzing the election, nor was it the most accurate. The publicity afforded by his association with The New York Times made his predictions the test case for legitimate math and reason. Math won. It always wins.
The Finch and Pea 