Category: Follies of the Human Condition

Food Sustainability – Science for The People

Science for The People, Episode #235: Food SustainabilityFood sustainability is a hot topic. Food everything is a hot topic. The most recent episode (#235) of Science for The People (née Skeptically Speaking) is exceptionally good* on this topic. Host Desiree Schell and guests Valentine Cadieux and Emily Cassidy cover standard topics of food sustainability, but address controversial areas like GMOs and “eating local” with nuance that gets beyond simplistic arguments over whether GMOs are safe or if “eating local” is environmentally friendly.

They also raise the issue of honoring food cultures as an important element of pragmatic discussions about feeding the ever growing human population. A potential result of our desire to provide adequate calories and nutrition to impoverished areas of the globe is the destruction of traditional food cultures in poor societies, while promoting those of rich societies – a kind of benign, cultural imperialism. Continue reading “Food Sustainability – Science for The People”

Sunday Science Poem: Believing is Seeing

Wallace Stevens’ “What We See Is What We Think” (1949)

640px-Garden_sundial_MN_2007How much of what we see depends on what we think?

In one sense, everything; seeing is not a passive process, but a sophisticated act executed by our neural circuits. In another sense, seeing is what we choose to see, as Harvard psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons demonstrated with their famous video of the gorilla walking across the basketball court.

But does the relationship between thinking and seeing go deeper than the involuntary side effects of our selective attention? Thomas Kuhn argued that it did, in his notorious chapter X from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (the chapter philosophers refer to, in a classic example of academia’s demented sense of humor, as the ‘X-rated chapter X’): Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Believing is Seeing”

The Economist weighs in on what’s wrong with science

This week’s Economist is out with a provocative article about how science goes wrong. It’s a good piece, raises some good points, and it reaches a conclusion that is completely the opposite of mine.

Science goes wrong, the piece argues, because “Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.” I don’t think this is true, and the old adage that scientists need to “trust but verify” actually doesn’t reflect how scientists throughout history have worked. Scientists have never been particularly interested in spending much time and effort verifying anyone else’s results – unless it advances their own research. Science is not founded on the idea that results need to be replicated – it’s founded on the idea that results need to be fruitful. A scientist’s new ideas and experimental results become accepted because they lead to success in other people’s labs. They lead to progress in other people’s research programs. Continue reading “The Economist weighs in on what’s wrong with science”

My Ada – #findingada

Image courtesy of South Carolina Governor's School for Science & Mathematics
Image courtesy of South Carolina Governor’s School for Science & Mathematics

As she is every Ada Lovelace Day, my “Ada” is Jenn Taylor. She doesn’t just talk about inspiring students to become scientists (in their approach to life or professionally), she does it. Every. Single. Day.

Here she is with her Advanced Genetics class. At the request of students (inspired by her college-credit introductory biology classes), Jenn created a college-level Advanced Genetics course at the South Carolina Governor’s School for Science & Mathematics. The material is challenging (I’ve seen the problem sets); but the students rise to the challenge, especially when they are given the confidence that they can handle it and the support when they need a little boost.

I also get to see her the time and effort she puts into recommendation letters, using her reputation and track record to makes sure students have all the opportunity they can handle when they leave her classroom.

Everyday is Ada Lovelace Day in my house.

Chance & Necessity in Baseball

I know people don’t like whiners…but the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Last night, my very clichéd gripe about the abuse of statistics perpetrated by broadcasters of playoff baseball spun into a discussion of statistics and probability, including the contribution of computational models from renowned and/or infamous UC Berkeley faculty. As one is obligated to do in such situations, I Storify-ed it (and continue to as the conversation, like the playoffs, is ongoing).
Image from xkcd by Randall Munroe (Creative Commons BY-NC 2.5)
Image from xkcd by Randall Munroe (Creative Commons BY-NC 2.5)