Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Science

  • Monks Have Their Uses

    Although, probably not those that you might expect. How about helping to save people trapped under earthquake rubble? It’s all to do with acetone, apparently…

  • Happy Birthday, PZ!

    From Richard Dawkins, no less, I learn that today is PZ Myers’ 50th Birthday. Have a good one.
     
    I’ve learned something else today from Professor Dawkins – how to pronouce Pharyngula correctly… All this time I’ve been saying faryngoola instead of faringula – to rhyme with singular…

  • The Shipping Forecast

    When I was a young boy, I remember lying in bed in the mornings listening to the Shipping Forecast on the radio, and hearing the melliflous tones of the BBC announcer intoning those evocative names: Dogger Bank, Cromarty, Forties, Fisher, Rockall, German Bight and the rest.
     
    And now, in these modern times, my brother has drawn my attention to something equally good: a web site that displays the real-time movements of shipping in the Irish Sea. My uncle (still alive at 101!) would love this. He used to spend many happy days aboard the boats of the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company crossing from Douglas to Liverpool and Fleetwood. Now he can watch the Ben-My-Chree as it crosses the Irish Sea.

  • Eliminative Materialism

    That’s a phrase that sounds intriguing. From this entry in Mind Hacks, linking to an interview with Patricia Churchland, to this entry in Wikipedia, it looks as though there’s enough material here to keep my mind boggling for years…

  • Eddies in the Entropy Stream

    There’s an article in the New Humanist this month on Frances Crick, written by Matt Ridley. At the heart of it is one of those sentences that, to me, are like the spoken equivalent of an earworm. In answer to the great question: what is life?, Ridley writes:
    Life is the use of linear digital codes to construct machinery that can cause eddies in the entropy stream.  
    Wow.

  • Happy Birthday, Charles!

    I realise that I’m a little late in adding my best wishes – so many other bloggers have got there before me – but Charles Darwin has his 198th birthday today. Only two more years to go, and then we’ll really put out the flags…

  • Read…

    …mark, learn, and inwardly digest. The Method is the Message (if I might paraphrase Marshall McLuhan a tad).

  • Anaesthesia Can Be Fun…

    BBC Four had a fascinating documentary on last night called Medical Mavericks. Presented by Michael Mosley, last night’s episode was devoted to the history of anaesthetics, and the range of colourful characters who discovered them. It turns out that many of them experimented on themselves first, a practice not without obvious dangers. Not to be outdone, we were shown Mosley being given nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and describing the results. He was also given a device with which he could self-administer electric shocks. Clearly unpleasant when he had not taken the gas, but once he had, the sight of him giggling and merrily pressing the button repeatedly was quite amazing.
     
    He traced the story of the pioneers – Humphrey Davy (who discovered nitrous oxide, but failed to appreciate its anaesthetic properties, instead he and his friends used it as a recreational drug), Horace Wells (nitrous oxide), William T. G. Morton (ether), and James Young Simpson (chloroform).
     
    Excellent programme and I look forward to the rest of the series. If it comes your way, do try and watch it. I don’t think you’ll be put to sleep by it.

  • The Exponential Function

    And in a related post to the maths underlying the report on global warming, here’s Dr. Albert Bartlett talking about Arithmetic, Population and Energy. As he says: I hope to be able to convince you that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

  • A Challenge

  • Turbine Placements

    Pruned has an intriguing post about a proposal by Mark Oberholzer to install Darrieus wind turbines into motorway barriers. The idea is that the wind from passing cars will drive the turbines and generate electricity. I can’t help feeling that you would have to choose the motorway carefully. Any traffic jams, and it’s not only the cars that would come to a stop, but also the possibility of power generation.

  • Even Apeldoorn Bellen…

    The Sea Launch rocket that blew up on liftoff yesterday was apparently carrying a Dutch telecommunications satellite. Hope they were insured. As the Dutch say: even Apeldoorn bellen (just ring Apeldoorn).
     
     

  • Saving Hubble

    This documentary film should be worth a look when it’s released…

  • The Fire on Apollo 1

    Phil, over at The Bad Astronomer, reminds us that 40 years ago yesterday, a fire on the Apollo 1 spacecraft took the lives of astronauts White, Chaffee and Grissom in just 17 seconds. Go and read it and remember them, and others like them.

  • Bad Journalism

    The Sunday Times ran a story a couple of weeks ago with the intriguing title: Science Told: Hands Off Gay Sheep. Unfortunately, for the journalists in question, their story was utter rubbish from beginning to end, as Dr. Ben Goldacre points out in today’s Bad Science blog entry. Still, when did a concern for the truth ever matter to a certain type of journalist?

  • And Yet Another Dose…

    It just keeps coming, doesn’t it? Another fine example of woo is Intelligent Design, and today’s Guardian has an article that claims Intelligent Design is science, and not faith. The article is written by Richard Buggs who apparently sits on the scientific panel of Truth in Science – the lobbying body in the UK for Intelligent Design. "Truth in Science" – another fine example of Unspeak – a phrase that suggests the complete opposite of what, in fact, that body is engaged in. 
     
    Buggs’ article is already being nicely dissected by the commenters and shown to be rubbish, but I can’t help adding a couple of observations of my own.
     
    His opening two paragraphs already contain a fine example of Unspeak in themselves. He starts by quoting James Randerson on Darwin:
    "It is true that complex things in nature look as if they have been designed. Darwin knew this. But the sublime truth about his theory is that it explains how complex things can come about without design."
    But then in his second paragraph, his paraphrase of that quote effectively shifts the goalposts:
    "But despite the brilliance of Darwin’s work, it is overoptimistic to claim that his theory explains the origin of all living things". 
    Note the phrase: the origin of all living things. He’s clearly implying "origin of life", and he knows full well that Darwin’s theory of evolution has absolutely nothing to do with origins – it’s about how complex things can come about without design – as Randerson correctly states. This sleight of hand is typical of Buggs, it seems to me. For example, one of the famous arguments of those supporting Intelligent Design is to quote the example of the bacterial flagellum. They claim that the development of the flagellum cannot be explained by evolution, it must have been "intelligently designed". Here’s Buggs, in a letter to the Times of 18 October 2006:
    "I do not know of a good evolutionary pathway for the development of the bacterial flagellum. In his latest book, Professor Richard Dawkins identifies a single possible intermediate step. This hardly constitutes a pathway".
    Buggs is either being disingenuous or he is a liar. The evolutionary pathway was proposed back in 2003, and has been further refined since then. Thus far, the hypothesis holds up. While there are discussions in the scientific community about the precise details of the pathway, these will be settled by scientific experiments and data – and not by a version of "Goddidit" as Buggs prefers to do. 

  • Augmented Cognition

    For those of us who are either fascinated, or alternatively scared shitless, by developments in technology that seek to augment our cognitive capabilities – have I got a link for you…

  • Steam-Powered Spacecraft

    BBC News reports on the recent successful launch trial of the experimental vehicle designed and built by Blue Origin, the private spacecraft company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos.
     
    The report says:
    Called Goddard, the retro-looking development vehicle is shown standing on four legs before blasting off in a cloud of smoke from thrusters on its base. The vehicle continues to ascend for approximately 10 seconds, reaching a height of nearly 300ft (90m).
    Well, looking at the videos on the Blue Origin web site, I don’t think it’s smoke at all. It looks more like ground dust to me. The interesting thing is that there really doesn’t seem to be any evidence of flame from the craft’s thrusters.
     
    All of which has led some people to speculate that the propulsion system is using hydrogen peroxide (hair bleach!). The hydrogen peroxide reaction produces simply oxygen and water, which at the high temperature involved, is in the form of steam.

  • The Dog That Didn’t Bark

    I see that Sense About Science has been rapping the knuckles of celebrities for talking pseudoscience instead of science fact. They’ve produced a nice little leaflet about the tendency of celebrities to talk twaddle.
     
    I’m disappointed though that the leaflet doesn’t mention the celebrity who has a solid gold track record of talking twaddle in this area. Who else but Prince Charles? His support for homeopathy and similar "alternative" medicines is shameful. And what a prime example of Unspeak that disgusting phrase "alternative medicine" is…  

  • Images of Wonder

    Phil, the Bad Astronomer, has his choice of the ten best Astronomy images of 2006. They are stunning, I agree, and his number one – the magisterial picture of Saturn, with a distant earth just peeping through the rings – is simply awe-inspiring.