Drawing From Almost Nothing.

Imagine having to sketch a creature by description only or worse yet by fossil evidence and a best guess. A very hard thing to do. That's what scientists have asked a couple of artists to do, draw what might have been based on some old bones and genetic leftovers. It's one thing to let your mind play when creating fantastical creatures that are amalgams of real life animals that you can visit or see in a book or on the web but it's another to be commissioned to draw a thing that hasn't lived in millions of years and no one knows what it looks like.

A New York Times article, "Artists Mine Scientific Clues to Paint Intricate Portraits of the Past," describes just that. Scientists enlisted artists to give life to their discoveries, helping to communicate visually what they have discovered scientifically. A good read.

Share

UN opens Biodiversity Year with plea to save world's life-supporting ecosystems

Kicking off the new year with a little press release from the UN on the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity.

1 January 2010 – In a bid to curb the unprecedented loss of the world's species due to human activity – at a rate some experts put at 1,000 times the natural progression – the United Nations is marking 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity, with a slew of events highlighting the vital role the phenomenon plays in maintaining the life support system on Planet Earth.

“Humans are part of nature's rich diversity and have the power to protect or destroy it,” the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which is hosted by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said in summarizing the Year's main message, with its focus on raising awareness to generate public pressure for action by the world's decision makers.

“Biodiversity, the variety of life on Earth, is essential to sustaining the living networks and systems that provide us all with health, wealth, food, fuel and the vital services our lives depend on. Human activity is causing the diversity of life on Earth to be lost at a greatly accelerated rate.

These losses are irreversible, impoverish us all and damage the life support systems we rely on every day. But we can prevent them.

Read the entire UN press release here.

Share

Are Birthers Vicitms Of "Implicit Social Cognition"?

I read this article in Scientific American titled "Birth of a Notion: Implicit Social Cognition and the 'Birther' Movement." As you can imagine the comments got heated but not too crazy since nobody broke Godwin's Law and called anyone a Nazi. Oh wait, the writer did mention Nazis in the article so maybe that's a good strategy: mention Nazis in the blog post so no crazies start calling others Nazis.

Read the SA post and then come back to read my response.

The reasoning people in the comments section have expressed against the Lipinski/Kwan example is really flawed. One commenter said that if you rooted against Kwan you were labeled a conservative racist but that's not what the writer implied. The example showed how Kwan was label by a supposedly edited and vetted media outlet as not and American. What could have led to this assumption when the facts are easy to look up? (Watch the Olympics and the flag next to the contestant's name easily shows which country they represent.) The point was that a person named Lipinski vs. a person named Kwan made someone in the news organization assume that Kwan was not an American, thus the headline “American Beats Out Kwan” It did not say if you rooted for Lipinski you hated Asians or if you rooted for Kwan you hated the Polish. It simple showed how this assumption was made. It did not in any way make a judgment in that example as to whether the writer of the headline, fact checker or editor was Republican or racist.

In the end this article was about "Implicit Social Cognition" of people who believe the birther argument. Most people don't believe it and if you can argue that it's NOT mostly Southern, White, Conservatives who perpetrate this rumor and believe in it, then I'd like to see that evidence. So while, the opinion piece does draw some strong conclusions about racism using some questionable anecdotal examples, it is hard for any reasonable person to dispute that many if not most or all of the birthers are in fact racist. Otherwise they'd just say, I don't agree with the president of the United States, not question the entire legitimacy of his election based on thin rumors.

I definitely don't agree with the people who say that if you replace "birthers" with "truthers" you get the same logical results since the whole point of the piece is that a minority of people still cling to a belief that seems like an absurdity to a majority of people. I also defer to the fact that this minority is very vocal and gets lots of attention (squeaky wheel theory applies here.)

I think that there is scientific merit to this piece and because it addresses issues that are contentious (especially now with the news of how people are acting in town hall meetings and in sessions of Congress) it brings up intense debate.

Share

Three Science Influences

Steven Hill from the Testing hypotheses… blog wrote about his three science influences in a post titled, "Science inspirations." Alerted to this post by my one of my Twitter Profs (See my Mashable.com article), Andrew Maynard on Twitter (he's @2020science), I immediately wanted to comment. Although I am not a scientist in any way whatsoever, my deep love of science is evident to many who know me. Below I list the comment I made to his post about my three influences. I can't tell you how many more should be added to this list and I've probably forgotten a few that may or may not deserve to be in the top three besides these but I can annotate the list or do another one in the future.

I'm not a scientist at all but have a deep interest of science in all forms from the sidelines. That said, I was influenced by these three people in my love of science:

1) Carl Sagan - When I was in high school I read Contact and it's still one of my favorite books & I think a decent movie despite the flaws. Then I found out that Sagan was not only an author but a real astronomer and that "Cosmos" guy. It started lifelong love of learning about science that continues to this day.

2) Steven Spielberg - OK. Don't kill me for not picking all scientists for this list. But Spielberg's movies instilled in my a sense of wonder about the natural world. Jaws made me love the ocean animals, both scary and benign. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial made me wonder what was really out there in the canopy of the stars overhead as a kid. Indiana Jones made me think about cultures, myth and archeology. Fiction may not always get the scientific facts all right, but they do provide a great jumping off point for young minds to go further and find out about the physical world and sciences in real life.

3) My mother - My mom has always taught me the importance of education. She kept the house well-stocked with books that I discovered at appropriate times growing up (including the Carl Sagan book mentioned at #1 on this list.) She also was a bit of a Star Trek and Sci-Fi fan herself so I grew up with a parent who encouraged both critical thinking and fantastical imagining. She influenced me to aspire to many of the things I am today (for better or for worse) but one thing I know is that it is because of my mom that I love to read and learn as much as I do. Both are endeavors that bring bring me great joy and satisfaction no matter what.

Alternate: My high school Marine Biology teacher - This guy was funny and his passion came out in a way that I never expected. He was so into his science that he would crack bad jokes and puns about the subject even if he was the only one to get the joke. Everyone got a good grades in his classes because he really made learning about science fun, not rote.

Share

WolframAlpha

The search engine created by Stephen Wolfram author of "A New Kind of Science" has gotten much media attention. It launched on Friday, May 15, 2009. I am still playing around with it to find its utility besides simple curiosity. I am confident I will eventually find a real world use for it.

The website about page says that "Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone." Sounds good to me.

Stephen Wolfram is a pretty smart guy so I am sure this website can be put to good use. In the meantime I proposed this question:

"answer to life, the universe and everything"

To which Wolfram|Alpha responded:

"42"

So far, so good.

Share