April 12th, 2012
At the Edge of the Solar System
Alain Doressoundiram & Emmanuel Lellouch
205 pages including index
published in 2008
In 2006 the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto, long the ninth and last planet in our Solar System from being a planet into a socalled dwarf planet, a new category not just meant for Pluto, but also a half dozen other planets that had been recently discovered at the edge of the Solar System. With the number of planets rapidly rising and estimates raging from a 200 to 2,000 more to be discovered as well as the general feeling that Pluto, only one fifth the mass of the Moon just did not fit in with the rest of the classical planets, this new categorisation was needed, halfway between true planets and asteroids or comets, now classified as small Solar System bodies.
Surprisingly for such a dry subject, the reclassification of Pluto led to a huge amount of media coverage and some controversy; many people, including myself, saw the argument as somewhat specious or had a sentimental attachment to the idea of the classical nine planets. They now were confronted with the reality of the Solar System being massively more complex than they had suspected, with our knowledge of the very edges of it having expanded massively since even the late seventies. Which is where At the Edge of the Solar System: Icy New Worlds Unveiled comes in: an introductionary text book about these discoveries and how they were made.
Read more…
Categories: books and books review, Science
Tags: Alain Doressoundiram, At the Edge of the Solar System, Emmanuel Lellouch
February 17th, 2012
As the number of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children grows in the US, so does the number of pediatricians who refuse to treat them. Over at the inevitable comment thread at Metafilter, one pediatrician explains the realities of vaccination and the risk your children run if they’re not vaccinated:
Sometimes I work with families for whom the reality of the morbidity and mortality of these diseases is extremely limited. In my education, I do focus on morbidity because families will not hear that they are putting their children at risk to die. The injuries from these diseases are often more concrete, even minor injuries like the significant scarring of varicella, or persistent airway disease from pertussis. Refusing MMR exposes male children to infertility risk, all children to acquired heart defects. Refusing HiB, even if your child does not die from meningitis, will surely result in acquired neurological, cognitive, vascular, and extremity injury once heroic efforts have saved the child from meningitis death. In the case of HiB, many currently practicing providers lived through the complete horror of internship and residency in children’s hospitals’ meningitis wards where babies were dying all around them that could not be saved. My current attending talks about the weeks when HiB vaccine was, then, introduced and the wards closed up, one by one. And he gets freaking teary-eyed about it, even now. Refusing pneumococcal vaccines like Prevnar opens all of us up for more of the same–the current Prevnar 13, for example, covers for 48% of invasive meningitis.
Families do not believe they are accountable to their own children–that they answer for their scars and acquired disabilities. But they do. Injury from actual vaccine is an incredibly small and fully reported risk. Any parent can go to the CDC site, at any time, and monitor vaccine injury. But the risk of acquiring a preventable childhood disease by refusing to vaccinate is nearly certain in that child’s lifetime. It’s as if a family made the decision to let their infant lay across the backseat, unbuckled, without a carseat, because they decided they would simply just drive very carefully.
My sympathies all lie with the doctors, though I can spare some pity for those parents who, genuinely wanting the best for their children, are taken in by one of the bullshit merchants preying on their fears and insecurities, their greed masqueraded as concern. But vaccination is not new, not controversial and has been used for a long long time, has slain some of the greatest childhood killers: smallpox is gone completely, polio almost, measles in rich countries is an inconvenient childhood disease, nothing to be worried about. That very same success ironically now makes continuing vaccination programmes vulnerable to indifference as parents wonder what the point is, if these disease are gone or under control. But they are still necessary and not vaccinating doesn’t only put your own child at risk, but other people’s children too…
Categories: sciencebollocks, wingnuts
January 24th, 2012
Back when he was writing Halting State Charlie Stross already complained that reality was overtaking his imagined futures and with the sequel, Rule 34 this process only accelerated.
Today The Pirate Bay announced it was going into fab distribution, setting the first steps to making another of Charlie’s predictions come true:
We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.
The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.
Incidently, one of the things Charlie predicted widespread use of 3-d printers/matter fabbers would be used for is the distribution of particularly nasty, highly illegal sex dolls. Hope this doesn’t come true too…
Categories: geekdom, Science, science fiction
January 19th, 2012
That’s the question Robert left on my review of Kraken:
Here’s a challenge for you, if you want it. Suppose you had $500 to spend on science books for a high school library, what would you buy? I’ve got a small budget, so I want to get the most bang of the buck
Which books I would recommend? Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science to get some inoculation against quackery. Any of Richard Fortey’s books on evolution and geology, particularly Life and The Earth, but also Trilobite, Chad Orzel’s How to Teach Physics to Your Dog which is a popular science book on quantum physics, any of Ian Stewart’s or Martin Gardner’s books of mathematical puzzles, Gabrielle Walker’s Snowball Earth just to show how cool Earth’s long prehistory has been, any of Richard Dawkin’s recent books in which he doesn’t bang on about religion.
Which books would you recommend?
Categories: books and books review, Science
January 17th, 2012
Kraken
Wendy Williams
223 pages including index
published in 2011
This was a bittersweet pleasure to read. As an homage to Sandra I wanted to read some of her favourite books and writers this year and Weny Williams’ Kraken was one of the last books she was really enthusiastic about. I had gotten it for her as part of an Amazon order in June of last year, when it still looked she was going to beat her illness and to cheer her up in hospital. Once she had read, she was keen on me to read it too to see what I thought, but I never made the time to do so, having so much else to read. It’s something I regret now, as I would’ve liked to discuss this with her, but at the same time it is nice as well to be able to read a book that reminds me so much of her. Sandra loved squids, octopuses and every kind of cephalopods; they were her favourite animals and any book on them that was any good had her favour.
And Kraken is quite good. At some twohundred pages without the index it’s not an indepth treatment of Cephalopoda, but it is a good look at what makes these creatures so fascinating. The cephalopods are invertebrates, part of the molluscs, with octopussies and squid traditionally seen as evil devil beasts that as soon drown a sailor as look at them. Yet the more we learn about them, the more fascinating they’ve become. It’s quite clear that many of them are incredibly smart, well adapted to their surroundings and with some amazing abilities — most possess chromatophores, coloured pigment cells under conscious muscular control which they can use to camouflage themselves or even “speak” with. They’re curious, they’re playful and in short, they remind us a little bit of ourselves.
Read more…
Categories: books and books review, Science
Tags: Kraken, Sandra, squid, Wendy Williams
May 17th, 2011
Having a relatively old blog means you can see certain subjects coming back again and again over the years. One of such is the sheer stupidity and nastiness of Satoshi Kanazawa. In 2006 I posted about his bizarre theory that Asians cannot do science properly, two years later about his masturbatory fantasies of having Ann Coulter in charge of the War on Terror. Today he’s back in the news again for saying that evolution made Black women unattractive, especially to middle aged evolutionary psychologists paid to spout scientificesques excuses for prejudiced bullshit.
Not to long ago the London School of Economics was pilloried for taking money to let one of Khadaffi’s sons study there. Yet I think the LSE should be more ashamed for having Kanazawa on its staff…
Categories: sciencebollocks, wingnuts
Tags: Satoshi Kanazawa
