It it’s not Scottish, it’s crrrrrrrrap!
“Our excavations revealed a fascinating glimpse into the cultural lives of people some 10,000 years ago – and now this latest discovery further enriches our understanding of their relationship with time and the heavens.”
There’s a paper at the Internet Archaeology online peer-reviewed professional journal (pay site, obviously).
I have long held that time is an emergent phenomena of our meat-based consciousness that has no reality outside our frame of reference. The link’s to an article, based on an extremely difficult to digest paper, about an experiment that attempts to solve the problem of time by testing the theory that time is an emergent phenomenon based on quantum entanglement. If time’s not real outside the observational cone of human experience, then it’s possible to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics and the problem of time is no longer a problem for mathematicians.
Honestly, the math’s way over my head. But the popular treatments are interesting, at least.
Went to a lecture at the Stroud Water Research Center given by Melinda Daniels, their new fluvial geomorphologist. There was wine, cheese and coffee (but I opted for a couple Guinnesses at dinner instead).
Fluvial geomorphology is a term coined by Luna Leopold to describe science concerned specifically with the influence of flowing surface water on the physical shape of the earth, primarily through the mechanisms of erosion and deposition. It differs from hydrology and limnology in that it focuses on the landscape, although it also involves the study of precipitation and the flow of water as dynamic primary processes shaping the land.
The talk was pretty good; Dr. Daniels spoke directly to the needs and concerns of local landholders trying to improve the quality of streams and rivers on their properties, as well as providing an interesting and informative talk for the room at large. We enjoyed it.
Man, despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and many accomplishments, owes the fact of his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. –John Jeavons
Global warming is the hipster way to say air pollution.
It’s like calling your car your “wheels”.
The Beeb is reporting that “abominable snowman” hairs analyzed by a British professor have DNA “identical to that of an ancient polar bear jawbone found in Svalbard, Norway, that dates back to between 40,000 and 120,000 years ago – a time when the polar bear and closely related brown bear were separating as different species.” Pesco is sure to be delighted!
Previous DNA tests on materials said to be from yetis have been less surprising; some hairs were found to be from a Himalayan goat, and a fingerbone stolen from a Tibetan monastery turned out to be human.
Professor Malcolm Burrows, of the Cambridge Department of Zoology, has described a pair of naturally evolved gears in nymphs of the leafhopper genus Issus. Unfortunately the actual paper’s been paywalled by Science magazine but there’s a ton of coverage on the intarwebs.
“We usually think of gears as something that we see in human designed machinery, but we’ve found that that is only because we didn’t look hard enough,” added co-author Gregory Sutton, now at the University of Bristol.
“These gears are not designed; they are evolved – representing high speed and precision machinery evolved for synchronisation in the animal world.”
Interestingly, the mechanistic gears are only found in the insect’s juvenile – or ‘nymph’ – stages, and are lost in the final transition to adulthood.
Adult leafhoppers have fully developed nervous systems and elytra that let them control their hopping to an incredibly fine degree. The gear structure found in the nymphs is believed to have evolved so that they can make powerful straight-line jumps before they are fully mature. Burrows and Sutton point out that while a geared system is not particularly fault-tolerant – losing any single gear tooth is crippling – such damage can be repaired by nymphs as they transition to their the next instar.
Cambridge has a Natural History Museum, so it must be a great place for a zoologist to work.
An interesting article in Discover Magazine about the work of the Rat Tickler led me to think about emotions and types of emotions. There have been many attempts at categorization; Jesse Prinz says everybody is wrong and every body is right which is a little too glib for me as a catchphrase, and a little too overwrought as a concept.
I often hear people say things like “the universe is made of math” or “faster than light travel has been mathematically proven to be impossible”. This sort of thing always annoys me, particularly when it comes from educated people.
Mathematics is a descriptive language, that attempts to model reality so closely that it can be used to calculate physical values accurately without direct measurement. It can also be used to make predictions that can be verified through experimentation.
Kurt Gödel’s work implies that this may be an inherently flawed approach to some enterprises; it’s possible that any language that can approach an accurate representation of reality must necessarily allow paradoxes (like Russell’s Antinomy, for instance). The answer to some questions may well be mu rather than true or false.
Math is wonderful. Despite its limitations, math is incredibly useful to humans, since it offers powerful “short cuts” in investigative and experimental procedures that can then be verified, if necessary, through physical experimentation and measurement. Most of us would have much poorer lives without math.
But math never “proves” anything. That’s not what math is for! Logic, reason, experimentation, observation, measurement – these are the sources of proof. Reason and logic can employ mathematics, just as a book can employ the English language – but when experimentation disproves a prediction made by a descriptive system like mathematics, we revise the math; reality does not magically reorganize itself to fit our incorrect description.
Some people believe that the Universe is comprised of a systematic computational architecture, that we perceive as physical reality. See Rechnender Raum, for example. Those people sometimes also believe that once we’ve got math really and truly figured out, our math will be equivalent to or congruent with reality. But nobody sane thinks we’re at that point yet, not even Wolfram, so the idea that something can be “mathematically proven” to be true in the real physical world is a conceit.
Dr Ewan Birney, of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, speaking to Fergus Walsh of the BBC, has stated: “The term junk DNA must now be junked. It’s clear from this research that a far bigger part of the genome is biologically active than was previously thought.”
I wonder if the scientists who refused to believe this 20 years ago even remember our many conversations on the subject… probably not.
As everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock already knows, CERN’s claiming that the LHC has found proof of the existence of the Higgs Boson. If true, it means that the standard model now adequately explains the properties of mass and gravity. The finding of the particle is very similar to the way that early chemists “filled in the blanks of the periodic table” by making the assumption that the model reflected a real state of affairs and looking for the missing pieces.
It’s sad that the USA has essentially shut down our particle physics exploration at the federal level, and it’s too bad the Tevatron didn’t find the Higgs boson in their last run for glory.
I’ve been asked to find and prepare a suitable spot to inter a man’s ashes.
The serviceberries are coming ripe, and I’m competing with robins and catbirds to get some. So far the birds are winning. I’m badly outnumbered.
Back when I used to do interesting work at the Academy of Natural Sciences, my friend Earle Spamer once showed me an old wooden table.
“This,” he said, “is the table where Edward Drinker Cope was flensed.”
Now, Earle’s got a good sense of humor (by my standards, which are admittedly low) so I was never sure if this was a joke, objective truth, or Academy apocrypha. There is a rather large corpus of Academy apocrypha.
Earle’s written lots of excellent stuff, including a natural history of the Colorado River and an analysis of the probable cladistic connection between Barney the Dinosaur and a dead salmon. But recently I noticed the Earle’s 1999 paper Know Thyself: Responsible Science and the Lectotype of Homo sapiens Linnaeus 1758 (in which he totally schools Louie Psihoyos and Robert Bakker) has become the standard reference behind the ICZN’s official designation of Carl von Linne as the type specimen for homo sapiens sapiens.
I could write up the homo sap type controversy (and name-drop Academy colleagues Gary Rosenberg and Ted Daeschler, who I also remember fondly) but somebody else already did a better job. Well, except that the author repeats the syphillis canard against Cope, which appears to have been disproven at this point.
So it seems that Earle has reached a rather significant scientific stature, and the tables in several scientific publications will have to be revised.