Category: Follies of the Human Condition

Why I don’t read science press releases…

…and you shouldn’t either. Larry Moran makes the catch.

The press release:

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have made a discovery that once again forces us to rewrite our textbooks. This time, however, the findings pertain to RNA, which like DNA carries information about our genes and how they are expressed. The researchers have identified a novel base modification in RNA which they say will revolutionize our understanding of gene expression…Although mRNA was thought to contain only four nucleobases, their discovery shows that a fifth base, N6-methyladenosine (m6A), pervades the transcriptome.

Continue reading “Why I don’t read science press releases…”

Sunday Poem

In honor of Walt Whitman’s May birthday, this week’s poem is “There Was a Child Went Forth”, which captures both Whitman’s omnivorous spirit, as well as the innate curiosity of children that lies, or at least should lie, at the root of every scientist’s drive to comprehend the world.

Contrary to what many think about the practice of science, the key to scientific success is not to master some authoritative corpus of knowledge; it is to know how to ask questions. The ever quotable Richard Feynman put it this way: “We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt.”

Children seem to naturally have this ability to recognize that they don’t know something, and to leave themselves open to new discoveries about what is real, and “the thought if after all it should prove unreal.” Continue reading “Sunday Poem”

Mandating open access science publishing

Suzy Khimm writes:

Taxpayers fund a ton of government research — and the results can get stuck behind a paywall that tops $20,000. Should they be able to see them without paying a second time around?

It sounds like a reasonable argument, but scientific journals make the counterargument that they add essential value to published research via their editorial and publication process, and thus they need subscription fees to stay in business.

The red herring in all of this is that the best argument for open access is that the public pays for research and thus deserves access. Continue reading “Mandating open access science publishing”

Book club: It’s a digital world and we just live here

Welcome to the first Finch and Pea Book Club. Grab your favorite brew and pull up a chair. Our inaugural book is George Dyson’s recently published Turing’s Cathedral. Have you read the book? Got an opinion? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

On the eve of World War II, when much of the world was beginning to mobilize its industrial and scientific resources in preparation for yet another exercise in mass slaughter, Abraham Flexner, the driving force behind the modernization of America’s higher education, wrote a plea for basic research, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” (PDF). Flexner argued that much of the transformational technology on which our society relies is the consequence of esoteric, abstract, curiosity-driven scientific research that was conceived without specific, practical applications in mind. George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral is the story of how the useless knowledge of abstract mathematics and logic led directly to the birth of today’s digital, computerized society, in the boiler room of that most pallid of ivory towers, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. Continue reading “Book club: It’s a digital world and we just live here”

Sunday Poem

This week it’s more of a prose poem, from the great Argentine author Julio Cortázar’s book From the Observatory. This book is a stream of reflections on two scientific images, one of an 18th century Indian prince who built a marvelous, Escher-like obsveratory; and the other of the epic migration of the European eel from continental freshwater streams to the Sargasso sea.

In this passage, the Indian prince Jai Singh “confronts the cosmic bull”, and is portrayed, not completely without irony, as someone who uses the scientific tools of his eccentric observatory to break free of human slavery to nature, or human slavery to superstition in the face of nature’s overwhelming force. In the book, Jai Singh stands in contrast to the pedantry of those myopic scientists who study the minutiae of the eels without any appreciation for the majestic scope of the eels’ life cycle.

Jai Singh must have dreamed something else raised like a guerrilla of the absolute against the astrological fatality that guided his lineage, that decided births and deflowerings and wars; his instruments stood up to a destiny imposed from outside, the pentagon of galaxies and constellations colonizing the free man, his stone and bronze devices were the machine guns of real science, the great reply to the total image facing the tyranny of planets and conjunctions and ascendants;

the man Jai Singh, little prince of a declining kingdom, stood up to the many-eyed dragon, answered the inhuman fatality as a mortal provoking the cosmic bull, decided to channel the astral light, trap it in retorts and spirals and ramps, clipped the nails that bled his species;

and all that he measured and classified and named, all his astronomy on illustrated parchments was an astronomy of the image, a science of the total image, a leap from the brink to the present, of the astrological slave to the man who stands in dialogue with the stars.