During the first presidential debate, John McCain once again made reference to the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project, a five-year study to which USGS has allocated $3 million to “study the DNA of bears.”
The Scientific American article linked above compares that $3 million, and its relative merits, to the $233 million “Bridge to Nowhere.” I [...]
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
Bear CSI
Posted in Current Events, Politics, Science on 29 September 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Approximating analog with digital
Posted in Science, Technology on 16 September 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Future technological advances may allow us to instantiate high-resolution models of our mindbrains on machine substrate, or even create de novo persons. Critics point out, quite rightly, that machines are digital while mindbrains are analog. From this insight, they conclude that machines won’t be able to recreate the detailed processing of neural wetware.
However, the critics [...]
Putting things in perspective
Posted in Culture, Environment, Science, Technology on 8 September 2008 | Leave a Comment »
“If climate change is a hoax, it’s the greatest hoax ever perpetrated, because everything we do to respond will make us more efficient, more productive, more entrepreneurial, more competitive, [and] more respected [in the world].”
– David Friedman, author of The World is Flat, and Hot, Flat and Crowded.
Aaronson on technology
Posted in Environment, Philosophy, Science, Technology on 7 September 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Robin Hanson on the Overcoming Bias blog links to Scott Aaronson’s review of The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil (which I’ve read, and whom I watched deliver a speech at the first Singularity Summit).
There’s a lot I could say about that review, and I will, but right now I just want to point out [...]
The Chinese gymnast age controversy
Posted in Current Events, Science, Technology on 21 August 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The interwebs are abuzz over a controversy regarding the ages of several Chinese women gymnasts. Critics point to several news reports, and even an official Chinese government web site, which listed Chinese gymnast He Kexin’s birthday as 1 January 1994 instead of the “official” date of 1 January 1992. That would make her 14 years [...]
The most unique argument for the existence of God that I’ve ever heard
Posted in Philosophy, Science on 14 July 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Recently, I came across a believer who offered a unique argument for the existence of God. He had been reading about the beam splitter experiments that confirm quantum entanglement. Specifically, he had read about the delayed-choice quantum eraser, where they don’t “observe” the system until some time after the experiment, and the nature of the [...]
The culture war heats up!
Posted in Culture, Religion, Science on 10 July 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Catholic League is trying to get PZ Myers fired from his job at UMM. His blog post on the matter has received almost over 400 comments in the first three hours after being published. Myers, as always, responds in his witty, acerbic, and articulate style. This is going to be interesting to watch.
Artificial DNA synthesized
Posted in Science on 7 July 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Scientists in Japan have succeeded in synthesizing artificial nucleotides and incorporating them into a DNA strand. You can view the paper online. You’ll notice, however, that the nucleotides were created by removing the imidazole ring from adenine and guanine, and by methylating cytosine and thymine. None of the changes affected the hydrogen donor-acceptor pairs on [...]
Most complete network map of cerebral cortex published
Posted in Science on 3 July 2008 | Leave a Comment »
An article titled “Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex” has been published in PLoS Biology. It is the work of collaborators from Indiana University, University of Lausanne, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Harvard Medical School. The abstract reads:
An analysis of the resulting large-scale structural brain networks reveals a structural core within posterior [...]
The Lensky-Schlafly debate
Posted in Science on 30 June 2008 | 1 Comment »
John Timmer at Ars Technica comments on the Lensky-Schlafly debate. Timmer is incisive as always.
Richard Lenski is a microbiologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, who holds a professorship at Michigan State University. He has been growing E. coli on glucose-limted growth media containing citrate for 20 years — over 44,000 bacterial generations [...]
