The Education Life supplement of last Sunday’s New York Times contained a little blurb that claimed college students who majored in the humanities and social sciences were apt to become less religiously observant after college. According to the Times, you may credit or blame postmodernism because it stresses that truth is relative rather than absolute. Small solace, as far as I am concerned.
According to Inside Higher Education, Butler University has sued one of its own undergraduates, junior Jess Zimmerman, for defamation. The incident was also picked up by Stu Kreisman at the Huffington Post.
Details are murky, at least to me, but evidently the university had demoted both Mr. Zimmerman’s father, Michael Zimmerman, founder of Evolution Weekend, and his stepmother, Andrea Gullickson, the chairman of the school of music. When Professor Gullickson was demoted, Jess Zimmerman anonymously wrote a blog in which he accused the university of acting arbitrarily. The suit was dropped yesterday, but there is no guarantee that the university will not reinstate it.
(Photo courtesy LDEO)
September 29th, 2009 Project UPDATE
Courtesy the University of Oregon, which reports on Sept. 22nd that
After 30 days at sea and 16 days of successful seismic surveying of deep-sea hydrothermal ecosystems on the Pacific Ocean floor off British Columbia, researchers from two Northwest institutions have returned to dry land. Their mission to study the deep crustal structure of the Endeavour segment of the Juan de Fuca ridge had drawn last-minute opposition by environmental groups, who in court filings had sought to stop the seismic surveying because of potential harm to whales and other mammals. A portion of the ridge includes the Endeavour Marine Protected Area that was established to foster conservation and responsible scientific study. Canadian courts rejected the groups’ cases. Prior to sailing, the project – the Endeavour Seismic Tomography Experiment – underwent a thorough environmental assessment by Canadian and U.S. regulators. The timing of the expedition was chosen to minimize marine mammal encounters. During the survey, certified marine mammal observers monitored the region on a 24-hour per-day basis. “Not a single marine mammal was either visually observed or acoustically detected during the seismic survey,” said Doug Toomey, professor of geological sciences at the University of Oregon and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded project that was done from the research vessel Marcus G. Langseth.
Update continues below the fold…
Mark Aldrich of Smith College has posted a prodigious number of cartoons under the title “Cartooning Evolution, 1861-1925.” You may look at thumbnails listed under various categories: Darwin and Evolution, Evolution as Social Comment, Victorian Science, and The Scopes Trial as interpreted by northern and southern newspapers and national magazines. Each thumbnail has a link to a larger image. According to Mr. Aldrich, many of the cartoons are readily available from the Library of Congress and other sources.
Acknowledgement: Thanks to Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education for the reference.
A half-dozen actual photographs of now-extinct quadrupeds.
Thanks to my colleague John Scales for the citation.
I probably made my first purchase from Edmund Scientific in 1956, when they sold a lot of military surplus optics. Since then, they have grown into a fairly respectable supplier of scientific instruments to both professionals and hobbyists. I was dismayed, therefore, to learn yesterday that they also sell pseudoscientific instruments:
Remote Viewing DVD. Remote viewing is described as “similar to clairvoyance or ESP.”
EMF Ghost Meter for detecting “paranormal presences.”
3-in-1 Paranormal Research Instrument for hunting ghosts.
This is appallingly bad stuff, but especially so for a scientific supplier. It is as bad as lying to people about evolution. Edmund’s allows comments, and if you wanted to let them know of your opinion, I would not try to stop you.
Acknowledgment. Thanks to Glenn Branch for the tip.
Photograph by Michael Klaas.
Photography contest, finalist in the “Minerals” category.
Painted Hills – exposed strata of geological eras when this section of Central Oregon was a river floodplain. Colors are formed by layers of volcanic deposits that fell from eruptions in the Cascade Range 35 million years ago. John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Oregon.
Photograph by Adrian Thysse.
Photography contest, finalist in the “Minerals” category.
Huaxiagnathus orientalis – Compsognathid theropod.
Photograph by James Kocher.
Photography contest, finalist in the “Minerals” category.
Stromatolites – Fossilized colonies of filamentary cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) and other microbes. Gunflint formation, approximately 1.9 billion years old. Microscopic fossils are sheaths and external cellular secretions/coverings very much like modern cyanobacteria, which may be survivors from Gunflint time. Whitefish River, Lybster Township, Ontario, August, 1992.
Photograph by François Malan.
Photography contest, finalist in the “Minerals” category.
The center of the Milky Way galaxy, showing Kaus Australis, Kaus Media, Shaula, Lesath, Nunki, Phi Sagittarii. Ptolemy’s Cluster (M7), and the Lagoon Nebula (M8). Photographed from the ground in Sutherland, South Africa.
This is slightly off-topic and will reveal that I sometimes read Parade magazine, but readers of Parade recently voted “No” by a ratio of approximately 4 to1.
Photograph by Quentin Cobb.
Photography contest, finalist in the “Minerals” category.
Big Stalactite at Doolin Cave. Largest Irish stalactite in the world. At 7.3 meters long it contains 33 tonnes of calcite. The Burren, County Clare, Republic of Ireland, 1976.
Photograph by Virginia Pasek.
Photography contest, finalist in the “Minerals” category.
Fulgurite – Glass formed as lightning strikes sand or soil. Phosphate-containing sand was fused and turned into phosphite. This otherwise unknown natural phosphite explains the existence of phosphite-eating bacteria. In the center is a small granitic pebble that was trapped during the formation of the glass. A bolt of electricity traveled along its surface, leaving permanent evidence of its passage. Tucson, Arizona, 2007.
… but now the decision is up to you, our readers.
I’m back from field work, and have finally gotten enough time to get my photos web-ready after returning from Batholiths Onland. (see Blogging Batholiths: Part 1 for a summary of the 1st 8 days of the adventure, and a description of the scientific goals of the project; the part 1 photo essay is here.)
The updated photo tour includes reactions to the activist who tried to sabotage the project, finally getting some data, splendid photos from team members, and more. Part 2 starts off with a hike up to the gorgeous falls in Hagensborg, BC, and can be found here.
Comments may be left here or there, but nowhere in between.
Update: a piece about the failed attempt to sabotage the project, “Eco-warrior trashes seismic experiment” by Rex Dalton, appears in the 23 July 2009 issue of Nature.
Update, Aug. 5th, 2009: Forest fires have come to the region. More below the fold.
This post announces the (first annual? Who knows?) Panda’s Thumb photography contest. The winner will receive an autographed copy of
Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails), by Matt Young and Paul Strode.
The rules of the contest are simple:
Photograph by Alexander Clair. Dye transfer from Kodachrome* original.
Hyalophora cecropia – Cecropia moth, Rochester, N.Y., ca. 1950. For more background, see below the fold.
*Kodachrome has just been discontinued after approximately 75 years.
The 1960s were heady days in more senses than kids today might suppose. It wasn’t all Haight-Ashbury and pot and hippies with flowers in their hair. I spent a couple of years in the military in the early 1960s down at the Cape launching early versions of Polaris missiles into the Atlantic missile range, or sometimes into the Banana River if the range safety officer saw fit to push the destruct button. (As a side benefit I got to participate in the Cuban blockade in 1962 aboard a U.S. Navy ship.) Those were the Project Mercury years of the manned space program, and one would occasionally see one or another of the original seven astronauts around the Cape or in Cocoa Beach (anyone remember the Cape Colony Inn?), and we’d marvel at how they’d stuff themselves into a tiny Mercury capsule atop an Atlas rocket and blast away into near-earth space. Watching those launches in 1962 and 1963 I never thought then that I’d work on their successor systems and watch the fruits of that work take men to the moon.
As most readers of science blogs already know, the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter has just returned photos of five of the six Apollo landing sites on the moon, including one (Apollo 14) where the foot trails made by astronauts are visible! And those are preliminary images. The LRO team promises 2x or 3x better resolution when the orbiter is in its final orbit.
One of those sites is special to me. In the mid and late 1960s I was a member of a group in Honeywell’s Development and Evaluation Laboratory (later in the Systems & Research Center) that was charged with stress testing components of the Apollo Command Module control system. We tortured reaction jet controllers, abused thrust vector servo assemblies, and kicked around translation and rotation hand controls for months. We soaked them in vacuum chambers, cycling the temperature up and down on a 12-hours on, 12 hours off schedule, subjected them to over-voltages and under-voltages, shook them on vibration tables, and generally tried to see how bad we could treat them before they failed. Out of all that testing came the final versions that were installed in Apollo Command Modules and flew in them, including the version that flew in Apollo 11.
On the day that the Eagle – the Lunar Excursion Module associated with the Apollo 11 flight – landed at Tranquility Base, my wife and I had gone to the Minneapolis Humane Society to adopt our first dog, Beau. We got home in time to watch the television broadcast and see the blurry video of Neil Armstrong stepping off the LEM ladder. (R.I.P. Walter Cronkite, who broadcast the landing that day in 1969 and who died yesterday.) It was an amazing feeling – a combination of elation and relief – to know that the landing had been successful. All the people who worked on the manned space flight projects over the years after John F. Kennedy committed us to going to the moon within a decade were proud to have contributed to the mission. I sure was that day, and I still am. I left the Apollo program after our part of Apollo 11’s development was finished to work on other prototype spacecraft and aircraft systems, but knowing stuff I worked on took humans to the moon is something I’ll be proud of until I die.
I am currently in British Columbia, Canada, participating in the Batholiths Onland experiment.
Nominally, this large group effort involving over 50 scientists and grad students is for “a seismic refraction and wide-angle reflection survey across the Coast Mountains batholith of British Columbia, Canada.”
This rather terse description does not really do justice to the project, which has the purpose of discovering why continental mountain ranges are often made of granite instead of basalt.
Relevance to the Panda’s Thumb? (1) Real science involves real work; when is the last time you saw a creationist actually measure something, or use a shovel? (2) Real scientists think the earth is billions of years old. You just can’t scientifically reconcile these batholiths with a 10,000-year old earth without being more than a little schizophrenic.
Never let it be said that we are pure science nerds on PT. As is the case with all group blogs, PT has a back channel communication system in which we argue, discuss, argue, debate … erm, well, we talk about stuff. sometimes in vigorous disagreement. Mostly it’s about one or another topic relevant to the stated purpose of PT, but sometimes we wander.
For some reason a recent conversation wandered into limericks (is a limerick a limerick if it’s clean?), doggerel, and similar high-brow literary entertainments. In the course of the conversation one of the PT crew composed a two-stanza poem in macaronic style, in which the lines of the poem are in different languages but the meter and rhyme scheme are preserved through the language shifts. Most such works are in just two languages, but this particular one, which I won’t publish without permission, was in three languages. Were there no other reason for being a member of the crew, seeing that kind of creation pop up in casual conversation would make it worthwhile. Just thought you’d like to know. :)
