Don’t count the feathers: Dan Mangan, nature study and a surprise Charley Harper reference

The title alone of Dan Mangan‘s “About as Helpful As You Can Be Without Being Any Help At All”, from his 2011 album Oh Fortune, seems to be crying out for a comparison to graduate school experiences but that’s not nearly the most interesting thing about this song. Let me take you through my thought process on this one. Continue reading “Don’t count the feathers: Dan Mangan, nature study and a surprise Charley Harper reference”

Kids, don’t try this at home

No matter what your mother told you when you were twelve, the most surefire way to promote blindness is in fact to stare at UCSC Genome Browser windows all day.

I really should try to automate more, but sometimes it’s hard to avoid old-fashioned sequence gazing.

RealClimate schools WSJ on how to compare models to data

On how to decide whether your model is falsified:

The WSJ authors’ main point is that if the data doesn’t conform to predictions, the theory is “falsified”. They claim to show that global mean temperature data hasn’t conformed to climate model predictions, and so the models are falsified.
But let’s look at the graph… Continue reading “RealClimate schools WSJ on how to compare models to data”

Since corporal punishment in class is off limits, we need the NCSE

Social (not scientific…) controversy over science issues sometimes gives students a chance to act up.

Eugenie Scott has a guest post up at Real Climate on why the NCSE has taken up the issue of climate change in the classroom:

Imagine you’re a middle-school science teacher, and you get to the section of the course where you’re to talk about climate change. You mention the “C” words, and two students walk out of the class.

Or you mention global warming and a hand shoots up.

“Mrs. Brown! My dad says global warming is a hoax!”

Or you come to school one morning and the principal wants to see you because a parent of one of your students has accused you of political bias because you taught what scientists agree about: that the Earth is getting warmer, and human actions have had an important role in this warming.

Cormac McCarthy, science editor

Continuing on the theme of scientists and novelists:

From the Guardian:

McCarthy has long enjoyed a close interaction with scientists, keeping an office at the Santa Fe Institute, an independent research centre that also houses a host of scientists, founded by the Nobel prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. (George Johnson’s biography of Gell-Mann, Strange Beauty, reveals that McCarthy performed a line-edit on the entire manuscript of his The Quark and the Jaguar, “but Gell-Mann was too rushed and disorganised to take advantage of the suggestions”).

Gell-Mann disorganized… that makes me feel better about my own work habits. On the other hand, Gell-Mann is a genius.