Category: Follies of the Human Condition

…but is it science?

Granted, this kid seems creative & entrepreneurial – the next generation of Maker; but why is building a marshmallow cannon science? I can think of a number of ways building and testing a marshmallow cannon could illustrate the scientific method. Successfully constructing a marshmallow cannon, however, is an engineering challenge – very suitable for a Maker Faire, but why is this a top Science Fair project?

In fairness to the marshmallow cannon, descriptions of the award-winning projects all sound like engineering or invention projects rather than exercises in the scientific method. I like gadgets and inventions, but is it small wonder that we are a scientifically illiterate society when even our Science Fairs don’t know what science is?

Darwin and Melville in the Galapagos

A little preview from a forthcoming Darwin Day essay on The Voyage of the Beagle, here are the contrasting styles of Darwin and Melville in their descriptions of the Galapagos. Melville’s imagery is impressionistic and improvisational, while Darwin’s approach to imagery depends, naturally, on observational precision and tight organizations of his thoughts, which can be just as successful as Melville’s more consciously literary style.

Melville’s description of the Galapagos from The Encantadas: Continue reading “Darwin and Melville in the Galapagos”

Skeptical Gnosticism

No, you do not pronounce the “g” in gnosticism – mainly because, well try it, you know that can’t be right. Gnosticism is a fancy word for a style of religion – a style with which you might be familiar from The Matrix. In The Matrix, people inhabit a material world created by imperfect and selfish beings that prevents them from living full lives. A few people have discovered the true reality behind “reality”. That knowledge (the gnosis of gnosticism or the red pill of The Matrix) brings great power (e.g., kung fu) and salvation. Continue reading “Skeptical Gnosticism”

Good science writing makes me purr

For my money (what little of it there is), good science communication starts with the familiar and gives it a twist. People connect with the familiar and are compelled by the twist. If you are doing it right, you don’t even have to bother telling people that you are educating them. Brian Switek gets it right in his article, “Why Margarita Can Purr, but Can’t Roar” for Wired: Continue reading “Good science writing makes me purr”

Faculty of 1000 going arXiv

So Azimuth tells us:

In math and physics we have the arXiv, but nobody referees those papers. In biology and medicine, a board called the Faculty of 1000 chooses and evaluates the best papers, but there’s no archive: they get those papers from traditional journals.

Whoops—never mind! That was yesterday. Now the Faculty of 1000 has started an archive!

• Rebecca Lawrence, F1000 Research – join us and shape the future of scholarly communication, F1000, 30 January 2012.

I’m all for giving this a try, but I still have a hard time seeing how some type of arXiv thing would work in the life sciences, simply because the life sciences are so damn big. Life scientists in academic research make up more than one third of all academic scientists. There are more than twice as many academic life scientists as physical scientists, and more life scientists than all academic physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, chemists, and earth scientists combined. As far as I can tell by my anecdotal observations, life scientists publish many short papers, as opposed to fewer and longer papers, which is the norm in other fields.