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.

If the concept of entropy blows your mind, try quantropy

One of the eerie things about physics is that sometimes theories of very different phenomena end up having basically the same mathematical structure. Statistical mechanical probabilities arise from entropy maximization, and because of this weird analogy, perhaps you can think about quantum mechanical probabilities arising from some sort of maximization or minimization process. Except in quantum mechanics, you have to deal with complex numbers… what does it mean to maximize or minimize a complex number?

Go check out John Baez on the remarkable analogies between statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics and the idea of quantropy.

RegenArouse (When Supplements Work?)

Real drugs, with real physiological activities, have very real side effects. As a result, some drugs cannot be safely taken by some individuals with underlying conditions or who are taking other, incompatible medications. When “nutritional supplements” contain undisclosed drugs, potentially dangerous side effects and interactions cannot be avoided.  Individuals that cannot take a drug due to underlying risk factors may be more likely to be customers for these alternative treatments, placing them at even greater risk. To err is human. To have an undeclared drug in your supplement that happens to cause the same therapeutic effects claimed for your supplement is anything but divine.

The latest supplement to run afoul of the FDA’s “if you product contains a drug, it is a drug” rule is RegenArouse, a supplement for erectile disfunction, which was found to contain tadalafil. Continue reading “RegenArouse (When Supplements Work?)”

Why You Need to Read The Voyage of the Beagle Before You Die

In honor of Darwin’s Birthday, I lay out the case for The Voyage of the Beagle as great literature:

Sitting on a rickety homemade bookshelf in my living room are the fifty volumes of my Great-Grandfather’s Harvard Classics. Once a teenaged political refugee from the Russian revolutionary turmoil of 1905 and later an accomplished bacteriologist with Merck, my Great-Grandfather exemplified Harvard President Charles Eliot’s American middle class, “twentieth century idea of a cultivated man,” the kind of person for whom Eliot’s “five foot shelf of books” was intended. A respected Mr. among professional scientific peers of Drs., my Great-Grandfather was fiercely committed to self-education. I never met him, but I imagine that my Great-Grandfather would have subscribed to Eliot’s notion of individual and civilizational progress, progress that is the result of “man observing, recording, inventing, and imagining.” The Harvard Classics were selected to be a survey of how this process has played out over the millennia.

Eliot’s words, “observing, recording, inventing, and imagining,” describe several thousand years of human intellectual activity by invoking the process of science. This is appropriate because Eliot, and my Great-Grandfather, were living when the modern scientific view of the world was well on its way to world domination, becoming a new belief system with as much cultural heft as the major religions, and one whose conquest occurred even more rapidly than the spectacular rise from obscurity of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam over the last two thousand years. Continue reading “Why You Need to Read The Voyage of the Beagle Before You Die”

Spider Silk

So, hi, if you happen to be my mom, you might want to stop reading now. As the title indicates, this is a review of a book that is all about spiders. SPIDERS!!!

My mother does not like spiders. She really, really does not like spiders.

But I do[1].

I approached Leslie Brunetta and Catherine L. Craig’s Spider Silk with hope and dread. Hope that I might learn a lot more about spiders. Dread that the authors would mangle evolutionary theory with over-simplification while trying to use spider silk to teach the general public about natural selection.

One of these emotions was unnecessary and wrong. Continue reading “Spider Silk”