I’ve been hopping around the lab like a short order cook on the line for lunch hour*, but I can’t resist noting the degeneration of Higgs Boson headlines:
The real scoop, at Scientific American:
In short, the results, although preliminary, point with a high level of confidence to the existence of a Higgs-like particle…
What do you think of people calling the Higgs the “God particle”? Continue reading “The science journalism game of whispers”
A poem on the difficulty of seeing and comprehending the world without metaphor or without “posing” its parts in our mental constructs, Wallace Stevens’ “Add This To Rhetoric”:
It is posed and it is posed But in nature it merely grows. Stones pose in the falling night; And beggars dropping to sleep, They pose themselves and their rags. Shucks...lavender moonlight falls. The building pose in the sky And, as you paint, the clouds, Grisaille, impearled, profound, Pfft... In the way you speak You arrange, the thing is posed, What in nature merely grows. To-morrow when the sun, For all your images, Comes up as the sun, bull fire, Your images will have left No shadow of themselves. The poses of speech, of paint, Of music - Her body lies Worn out, her arm falls down, Her fingers touch the ground. Above her, to the left, A brush of white, the obscure, The moon without a shape, A fringed eye in a crypt. The sense creates the pose. In this it moves and speaks. This is the figure and not An evading metaphor. Add this. It is to add.
The first two sentences of this poem lay out the theme, our struggle to understand what “merely grows” using the only tools we have available, mental constructs, within which we pose and pose again the parts of nature. It should go without saying (but I’ll say it anyway), that this applies to scientists as much as it applies to the poet. Continue reading “Sunday Poem: Imposing poses on nature”
Vintage sci-fi cover art connoisseur Joachim Boaz has posted his favorite covers over at Science Fiction Ruminations. Go check it out.
This is fun, and I want to play too. Here are my five favorites from my paperback collection:
The exciting science news in this week’s issue of Science is that some cave art in Europe is much, much older than previously thought, dating back to the earliest humans in Europe. The new dates make it more plausible that some of this art was created by Neanderthals, although that is speculative.
While old cave art is cool, you may be wondering, why are they just now getting around to figuring out these old dates? The answer is, the technology finally got good enough to do it. The Uranium-thorium dating was done by scraping off a few milligrams of calcite deposits that had formed over the cave art. Since the calcite deposits formed on top of the art, dating those deposits gives you a minimum age for the art.
When Uranium Thorium dating was first invented, you needed tens of grams of sample, but the sensitivity of the technology has now improved 10,000-fold. You can take tens of grams of sample out of priceless cave art, but you can take a few milligrams.
And so, the new dates are not the result of some brilliant new, abstract, deep insight – they’re the result of amazing improvements in technology. Science is driven at least as much by technology as it is by ideas.
The answer is, of course, not much. A subject near and dear to my heart: Evolution, Entropy, and Information, over at Cosmic Variance, referencing John Baez’s great series on information geometry (latest entry here).
For a project I’m working on, I’ve lately been considering the various ways your DNA can be considered to contain information, and how we can use information content to read DNA sequences. Information theory has of course been used for a long time to find functional sequences in DNA (see this classic paper). This is what we call bioinformatics, but there are also more physical reasons to use information theory to understand biology. There are deep relationships between information, thermodynamics, and computation (PDF), which we can use to understand how the thermodynamic system of the cell processes information contained within DNA.
There will be more on this in the future, but in the mean time, go check out the links.
The Finch and Pea 