Category: Science

The means by which the universe understands itself.

Science Is Female

April 15, 2019

Too often, science has been assigned male. Or at least it’s assumed every major discovery or breakthrough has been achieved by men. And of course for so long it’s been set up so that only men really could. But, even so, a great many women have made significant strides and discoveries in science, much more than is often realized.

So let’s remember some of these awesome women in science. Such as…

Marie Curie
1867 – 1934
Poland, France

-Probably the only one you could readily name
-Originally Maria Skłodowska
-Why are these uranium minerals more active than uranium alone?
-Ah, it’s polonium and radium!
-And that’s a Nobel in Physics!
-Which was almost awarded only to Pierre and to Henri Becquerel before Nobel committee was told “Don’t you fucking dare exclude her!”
-Now isolated radium
-And now a Nobel in Chemistry!
-Explore more uses of radium. What could possibly go wrong?
-What do you mean aplastic anemia?!

Rosalind Franklin
1920 – 1958
UK
-Probably the only other one you could readily name
-Went from noticing coal has holes in it to x-ray diffraction
-Didn’t believe in DNA model building without sufficient data
-Wasn’t sure Photo 51 was sufficient data
-Unfortunately for her, Crick and Watson did not share this view
-Nor did they believe in not reading others’ semi-confidential data and stealing it
-Got trolled into workplace infighting
-Would fight you and win
-Died of ovarian cancer before she could win Nobel
-Is currently in afterlife, pounding her fist while waiting for James Watson, like “Call me Rosy again, motherfucker, I dare you…”

Lise Meitner
1878 – 1968
Austria, Sweden

-Responded to Vienna not believing girls should learn math or science with “screw you, I’m doing it anyway”
-So she got her doctorate at University of Vienna
-Max Planck’s lectures did not allow women to attend, but she did it anyway.
-She became his assistant
–Her hair did not catch fire.
-Discovered protactinium.
-Then had to get the hell out of Germany and flee to Sweden because World War II and Jewish
-Then something weird when a uranium atom got split in half…
-Nuclear fission!
-Except only her lab partner Otto Hahn got the Nobel for it. Typical.
-She did share the Enrico Fermi Award with him, though.
-Also, meitnerium.
-She begged for nuclear fission to not be used for destructive purposes.
-Spoiler alert: It was totally used for destructive purposes.

Rachel Carson
1907 – 1964
US

-Aquatic biologist looking at fish populations
-Author of books about the sea
-A wild overuse of DDT appeared
-Used “Silent Spring”
-It’s super effective.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer
1906 – 1972
Germany, US

-Got the unit for two-photon absorption cross section named for her.
-Figured out nuclear shell model.
-Second woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics
-Worked most of her career in unpaid and volunteer positions.
-Her facial expression above shows how she felt about this.
-She did finally get a full paid position at UC San Diego, three years after which she got the Nobel
-Equal pay for equal work!

Mary Anning
1799 – 1847
UK

-She unearthed and understood fossils, before people really knew extinction was a thing.
-Oh, look, an ichthyosaur!
-Wow, a pterosaur!
-Holy fuck, a plesiosaur!!!
-Male scientists: “These are huge finds!”
-Male scientists: “Oh, did you want credit for any of this? LOL”
-Mary Anning: “Have I mentioned those weird rocks you all can’t identify are actually fossilized shit?”

And many many many more. To be continued…

Pruitt the Faithful

July 8, 2018

A few days ago, Scott Pruitt resigned as head of the EPA, the latest departure in this revolving-door-like administration. In doing so, he penned a letter to the Orange Thing. Let’s have a look…

Mr. President, it has been an honor to serve you in the Cabinet as Administrator of the EPA.

And you use the term “honor” very loosely.

Truly, your confidence in me has blessed me personally

I wasn’t aware Orange Thing was capable of blessing people. Or of having confidence in them for that matter.

and enabled me to advance your agenda beyond what anyone anticipated at the beginning of your Administration.

Be it through catastrophic environmental damage or nuclear war, his agenda of turning our planet into a smoking husk will be realized much sooner than anyone would have thought, yes.

Your courage, steadfastness and resolute commitment to get results for the American people, both with regard to improved environmental outcomes as well as historical regulatory reform, is in fact occurring at an unprecedented pace and I thank you for the opportunity to serve you and the American people in helping achieve those ends.

In other words, we’re way ahead of schedule on that 2°C rise.

That is why it is hard for me to advise you I am stepping down as Administrator of the EPA effective as of July 6.

Now that wasn’t that hard, was it? Take note, Sessions! And Sanders. And Nielsen. And the rest.

It is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role first because I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity,

Someone has a cruuuuush…

but also, because of the transformative work that is occurring.

Look at those ice caps melt!

However, the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us.

Yeah, really, all the horrific accusations about you having a private e-mail server and running a child trafficking operation at a pizza restaurant- Oh, wait, that wasn’t you…

I believe these are yours.

My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people.

You talk to and about the Orange Thing as if his occupation of the White House is ordained by God or something-

I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence.

I believe that same providence brought me into your service.

Actually, Orange Thing appointed you- Oh, that’s what you mean. Weird.

I pray as I have served you that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people.

No entity real or imagined anywhere ever has enough power to make the Orange Thing an effective leader. All you’re doing is feeding his already dangerously high narcissism by speaking to and about him like some god-king, for reasons I’m not really sure I want to know.

Thank you again Mr. President for the honor of serving you

You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

and I wish you Godspeed in all that you put your hand to.

Because when you’re famous they let you do it.

Your Faithful Friend, Scott Pruitt

This has been Day 46 of the 100 Days of Summer, Round 18.

Bird Battle

May 8, 2018

So, in this year’s second hockey related pleasant surprise, my Washington Capitals beat the Pittsburgh Penguins last night to advance to the Eastern Conference final. Yay!

I could discuss the six-game series and the plays and the sending the puck around and what all else hockey entails. Perhaps just lavish praise on the Caps players for breaking a 20 year DC sports curse. Perhaps, since I turned 35 two days ago, this new age means good luck for my teams, as on my birthday I went to the Nationals game and, what rarely seems to happen when I go to the game, they won! Last night too, though I wasn’t at that one, what with me having other stuff to do and the game being way the hell across the country in San Diego (with its very real risk of spontaneous swarms of bees).

But instead I’m going to devote this to the best thing ever…

The National Zoo in DC and the National Aviary in Pittsburgh going at each other on Twitter about the superiority of their respective team’s bird mascots! Enjoy! (Clicking the image opens the original tweet.)

Continue reading “Bird Battle”

Eclipse 2017

August 21, 2017

So like everyone else in the country, I spent a good part of my afternoon looking at the sky. The DC area is north of the path of totality, so we didn’t get the full coverage and had to settle for a maximum of 80% moon blockage scheduled at 2:40pm. I procured a proper viewer and started to watch.

1:17pm: Moon begins to cross the sun. (Right on time!)

1:45pm: Sun resembles cookie with bite taken out of it.

2:15pm: Crescent sun!

2:35pm: Skinnier crescent sun, almost time for peak…

2:38pm: Almost…

2:39pm: Oh crap…

Big Clouds: “HEY, YOU GUYS! Can we join the party?”

…

This has been Day 90 of the 100 Days of Summer, Round 17.

Environmental Progress

December 15, 2015

Where does anyone get this ridiculous idea that being more environmentally friendly means impeding human progress? As if it’s one or the other. As if wanting to reduce pollution is against technology or something.

I’ve seen some of my friends make this sort of claim, particularly libertarians. And it’s pure political posturing, and as with most or all political posturing, it makes no sense.

Here’s a thought. Maybe a new technology that is more environmentally friendly than its predecessor is in itself a form of human progress. What an idea!

Instead of this whole “you want to reverse climate change? how dare you disparage the invention of the telephone!”, or, more to the point of what people who say this are really thinking, “how dare you impede a business’s right to destroy the planet!”, how about “hey, climate change is a problem, we need renewable energy, let’s embark on finding ways to solve these problems via, you guessed it, new science and technology!”?

This is obvious if you think about it for five seconds. Though if you’re just trying to make some political point, thought has nothing to do with anything.

Immunity Intact

December 5, 2015

I hate it when anti-vaxxers and intactivists are talked about together as if they’re basically the same thing. Unfortunately, there is plenty of overlap, from those who see both issues as part of some “natural parenting” movement (more on that another day).

Anti-vaxxers are against vaccinations. Intactivists are against infant circumcision.

Those against both see it as some issue of infant body integrity, a thing I can get behind. But there’s one gigantic difference.

Vaccinations are actually extremely necessary, to save the baby and anyone around said baby from preventable diseases. This much is fact. When anti-vaxxers deny these life-saving vaccinations to their children, they are not protecting their children’s rights to their body. They are condemning their children to serious illness, a very severe violation of their rights and an abandonment of parental responsibility. And why? Because vaccines contain ingredients they can’t pronounce and that’s scary to them?

Circumcision, on the other hand, is not at all medically necessary. There is no prevention of life-threatening illness involved in it, unless you count the ridiculous grasping of straws like “uh, we think circumcision might possibly maybe prevent HIV (even though condoms would still be necessary so it doesn’t matter)”. And even so, most of the time it’s done for cosmetic or religious reasons, and people are really goddamn attached to these cosmetic or religious reasons, so this unnecessary barbaric practice continues. This is a painful violation of a child’s body that serves no real purpose and must be stopped.

Vaccinations save lives. Circumcisions are just “durr, foreskins are gross”.

Really no comparison.

The Rest of Life

December 3, 2014

There’s a quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson floating around, from an appearance with Bill Maher a few years ago, where he recalls noticing that the backgrounds of many Congressmen and Senators is law. And that he wondered “where are the scientists? where are the engineers? where is the rest of life represented?”

I’ll admit when I started writing this, already intending to speak on this quote, I hadn’t heard/seen the quote in context. When searching for the exact text, I instead found the above-linked video and heard his whole spiel. He precedes the above discussing that, with all these politicians having a law background, being trained specifically to argue, they are trained to basically argue their side and never come to an agreement. Okay, I may or may not be summarizing it well. Just watch the video and let him speak for himself!

The context doesn’t change what I intended to say, though. In fact, it just confirms it. He asks where the scientists and engineers are. I’ll tell you where they are… being awesome scientists and engineers and not wasting their time with political bullshit!

You know what’s extremely expensive? Scientific research. Even the smallest simplest research is really damn expensive, let alone the dizzying costs of medical research or the astronomical costs of, well, space exploration. But it’s all worth it, even the research that turns out to be a dead end, because it’s the noblest cause of all. It’s gaining information and developing things with that information to make our lives better, to advance, to reach untold unimagined heights. There is no greater investment in humanity and in, well, all of life and the universe.

By contrast, you know what else is really expensive? Political campaigns. Politicians are always raising money to beat the crap out of their opponent. We’ve got people dying from cancer, Ebola, AIDS, and countless other maladies and afflictions, which many millions spent in research can do something about. What do politicians spend millions on? Running mind-numbing advertisements calling their opponents douchebags.

So I’d say we’re better off with the scientists and engineers continuing to be scientists and engineers!

Of course, before I heard the rest of Tyson’s speech, my point was going to pretty much end there. He’s right, though. It makes sense. Politicians are trained to argue incessantly, so that’s exactly what they are doing, with their campaign funds, with their House and Senate votes. They don’t want to make the world better. They just want to pretend they do in order to get money and votes, in order to beat the Other Guy, to defeat the Other Party.

He’s implying that, if more politicians had backgrounds in science and other fields, we may have politicians who don’t have that urge, who are more interested in facts and solutions and improvement than in demolishing one another. It’s certainly plausible, right?

Then I remember Ben Carson, former neurosurgeon now vocal Tea Partier who may or may not try to run for President in 2016, who equated ObamaCare with slavery.

Yeah, never mind. :irked:

Metrication

September 9, 2014

Why the hell do we say “a thousand kilometers”? Why don’t we say “one megameter”? Because it sounds weird? It only sounds weird because it’s not in common use. The metric system comes with all these lovely prefixes for whichever power of ten off the basic unit you’re using, but for some reason we limit ourselves roughly to kilo and milli, if that. Centi only gets to shine when followed by meter. I see 10 milliliter containers and such quite a bit, but never once is it called “one centiliter”. Why not? That’s what it is, isn’t it? Even considering the circumstantial necessity of keeping decimal places constant, you’d think it might show up at least sometimes. And I never see any big vats of things labeled as “one kiloliter”.

Distance from Earth to the Sun? About 150 million kilometers? Pfft. What do you need all them extra decimal places for? Try 150 gigameters!

Why should bytes have all the fun?

Don’t even get me started on the sheer neglect suffered by all 10 centimeters of the decimeter. Or of all 100 meters of the hectometer, who only seems to show up when squared. You know, it’s a hectometer and it’s a square so it’s a… wait for it… hectare! I totally get it! 😀

Although metric ton does sound more badass than megagram. Metric ton is also the basis of the fun-to-say metric fuckton. Does megafuckgram have the same ring to it? These are the important questions.

Isn’t this fun? Hell, I haven’t even gotten to our lovely little friends micro and nano, who make some tiny scientific appearances, such as the ever-present 200µL (that’s right, mu not u!) pipette tips. But these prefixes get their attention where warranted. They just don’t come up often in common use because things tend to be bigger than that. They’re just hiding out at the cellular and molecular levels. Biding their time.

So, yeah, that’s the beauty of the metric system. For the super super super big and the super super super small, there’s a prefix to fit your measuring needs! Yay metrication!

Now if only we could go the whole nine ya- er, the whole 823 centimeters, and give some of these prefixes more attention.

Failing that, might as well be using imperial! Maybe I’ll start referring to a thousand inches as a kiloinch… :cute:

It’s Not for Believing In

May 7, 2014

I hereby decree…

Anyone who says they “believe in science” needs to be slapped.

Let me explain.

Specifically, I’m referring to when people declare this belief in place of a religious belief. Such as when asked what their religious beliefs are or to describe their secular humanism, they might say something like, “No, I don’t believe in any all-powerful gods. I believe in science.”

And it’s annoying because this person who thinks they’re affirming science so strongly is actually greatly misunderstanding a most basic thing about it. Which is… science isn’t something you “believe” in. Science just is. It is fact. It’s like saying you believe in the existence of Canada or horses or diabetes. You just sound silly saying you believe in something that’s pretty undeniably real. As if a diabetic Canadian equestrian were standing right in front of you.

Furthermore, when reducing science to a mere “belief”, you’re playing the ignorant religious fundamentalists’ game and slightly validating their beliefs in unprovable divine things (or disproved things they stubbornly cling to), allowing them to deliberately deny real scientifically proven things as just some other belief they personally don’t hold, or to just insist their actual beliefs should be given the same credence.
Continue reading “It’s Not for Believing In”

Best of 2012?

January 1, 2013

So I was at Barnes and Noble yesterday and looking at the science books, when I see a few that are compilations of the best science articles of 2012. Sounds neat. So I took a look. Good stuff for the most part.

And then something about brains… I had a bad feeling about this one. So I flipped to it…

*headdesk*

Yup, you guessed it. It was more “teen brain” bullshit. It starts off about how we all know teenagers are reckless and stupid and whatever other choice stereotypical traits. And says this is because their brains are still developing.

Stuff we hear over and over. But then the realization that this was a best of the year thing. That right alongside advances in real stuff like molecular biology or analytical chemistry, you get this teen brain bullshit being touted as some great discovery.

This is what’s in the mainstream and influencing policy and encouraging discrimination and making the lives of my young friends more and more difficult. While guys like Robert Epstein and Mike Males are still mostly unheard of. Shit.