Author: Mike White

Genomes, Books, and Science Fiction

Low levels of literacy in creationist legislation

Maybe I’m suffering from observational bias because the only legislative bills that I tend to read are creationist ones, but the authors of such bills seem to have an uncommonly poor ability to write and think coherently.

From the NCSE, this creationist bill was dismissed in New Hampshire:

House Bill 1457, introduced by Gary Hopper (R-District 7) and John Burt (R-District 7), which would have charged the state board of education to “[r]equire science teachers to instruct pupils that proper scientific inquire [sic] results from not committing to any one theory or hypothesis, no matter how firmly it appears to be established, and that scientific and technological innovations based on new evidence can challenge accepted scientific theories or modes.”

And here in Missouri we’ve got a great one this legislative session, which tosses around a flood of technical-sounding words without much regard to consistency or precise definition: Continue reading “Low levels of literacy in creationist legislation”

Behind the climate change skepticism curtain

Document leakage in the battle over public opinion on climate change isn’t limited to hacked email accounts of climate scientists. The Heartland Institute, a deep-pocketed promoter of climate change skepticism inadvertently sent confidential fundraising materials to someone just posing as a deep-pocketed climate change skeptic, and Desmog Blog has done the document dump.

Apparently some of the documents are fake, but most have been confirmed as genuine. Ezra Klein gives a run-down of what’s there. His main conclusions: Continue reading “Behind the climate change skepticism curtain”

On the road and in your genome with Poisson

This will probably seem simple and obvious to many Finch and Pea patrons, but one of the mind-blowing features of nature, the real world, Plato’s cave, or what have you, is that very different phenomena often give rise to the same pattern, because they share a fundamental quantitative relationship. The world really does run on math. Some of the best examples of this are probability distributions, like the Poisson distribution, which is basically the law of rare events. I like to think of the Poisson distribution as the result of an infinite number of flips of some giant cosmic coin which only rarely, very rarely, lands on the side I’m hoping for.

The classic illustration of a Poisson distribution is the randomly-passing car problem. Continue reading “On the road and in your genome with Poisson”

Cormac McCarthy mixin’ it up with Sante Fe science

While I have my doubts about how much progress the permanent inhabitants of the Santa Fe Institute actually make, this is my kind of hang-out, progress be damned:

From Newsweek via The Daily Beast

The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by a group of scientists frustrated with the narrow disciplinary confines of academia. They wanted to tackle big questions that spanned different fields, and they felt the only way these questions could be posed and solved was through the intermingling of scientists of all kinds: physicists, biologists, economists, anthropologists, and many others. Continue reading “Cormac McCarthy mixin’ it up with Sante Fe science”

The Medieval Oxford Calculators

Back when calculators were people (PDF):

Oxford has such a long intellectual history that even the episodes that made it illustrious are liable to be forgotten. One such took place in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, when a group of Oxonians developed a battery of new techniques for dealing with philosophical problems, the strikingly mathematical nature of their approach earning them the epithet of ‘calculators’.

These were among the people doing first-rate mathematical physics before Galileo and Newton. They had funny names like Heytesbury and Swineshead, but they were quill and parchment wizards.