The World's Fair

The Saints have Won the Super Bowl: Some Science Analogies

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:59:31 -0500

Between the Saints and Mardi Gras time: Louisiana is in full celebration right now. Some of the "cultural" elements on view during the Super Bowl reminded me of parallels in the culture of science:

1. The Super Bowl champions are always called the "World Champions" - even though this is a solely US sporting event. Reminiscent of how some researchers who find something genuinely interesting about their biochemical system will give their paper a title that implies universality: Finding: Protein X takes up water when it binds its substrate. Paper title: "Water Uptake During Enzymatic Function". Finding: Protein Y folds faster than protein X. Paper title: "Kinetic Control of Protein Folding in Eukaryotes".

2. Is it becoming more of a tradition to trot out old rock and roll bands at halftime? - The Who this time, The Rolling Stones a couple of years ago. Reminiscent of some Keynote addresses at scientific meetings?

3. Before he won the Super Bowl, Drew Brees was just a "good, solid quaterback." After he won the Super Bowl, ESPN spent enormous amounts of time talking about how he really should be ranked as among the top QBs of all time. Sort of like what happens to a "good, solid researcher" when he or she suddenly gets a Science or Nature publication.

4. Tracy Porter's "game clinching" interception and touchdown in the fourth quarter: this is the figure you save for late in the paper, when you know the reviewers or your colleagues are going to be wavering, and then voila, time to go home.

5. The Saints win the Super Bowl? A paradigm shift? Need more be said?

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When 6 year olds come to a research laboratory...

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:03:49 -0500

So, today 22 Grade 1's and 2's came to my lab.

So what to do? What to do? That's a lot of kids in a full on laboratory settng. I've written about this activity before, but here goes again.

Thankfully, this is where ScienceBlogs rocks, since I had happened upon an awesome post by Janet over at Adventures in Science and Ethics that was all about the simple act of "just adding water" to see what happens.

The only difference here, of course, is that we got to do it at a real lab, so it was wonderful to see the kids get a real hearty dose of science culture as it were.

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Making business cards and being a science geek at the same time.

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:34:03 -0500

So, I'm going to TEDactive next week, and it looks like it's one of those conferences where the networking will be particularly beneficial (maybe even more so than the talks). Which means, I really should get some business cards.

And since I have trading cards on the brain, why not make business cards with a distinctly biodiversity theme. Anyway, it's been years since I've had business cards, mainly because sometimes I don't think my head could handle any more email or correspondence, and I've always figured that the act of putting my contact info on little pieces of paper out there in the world, could possibly lead to that place where my head might actually explode.

Still, I have to admit that making business cards (or in my case, mini-cards) is kind of fun, especially when you have folks like Ernst Haeckel lending a hand in the glorious art department (mental note to myself - I should put some of his stuff on the phylomon site - I wonder if that's allowed?).

Here's one above, and there's two more below (I used zazzle.com. I figured this way I could even make a series of different cards as inspiration strikes me! Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

The Dance of the Louisiana State Science Fair, Or: Notes from the War on Science in Louisiana

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:55:42 -0500

When the most recent LSU budget cuts were handed down by the Louisiana governor a couple of weeks ago, one of the items that went on the chopping block was the Louisiana State Science and Engineering Fair, which has long been sponsored and hosted by the university. In a state with a creationist governor, and a state that recently became a national embarrassment by passing into law one of the Discovery Institute's new pseudonyms for teaching creationism, it is extraordinarily frightening that the State Science Fair might be canceled. Although it was indirect (the governor just forced the budget cuts, he didn't actively target the science fair), it does, however, make it a lot easier to push for creationism if you hinder the ability of the students in your state to become scientists.

Thankfully, after a couple of weeks of scrambling, the Science Fair is now back on. But it was not a direct route.

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This post is for those who have always wondered when their Pokemon card playing skills would be finally used for good and not evil.

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:12:12 -0500

Well, now it can be used for the Phylomon project. You know, the one where we're hoping we can guide an open source project into a free and massive card collecting game that is fun and even perchance (oh no, here it comes...) educational.

Now that we're at a stage where we're confident that the mechanics of obtaining images is sound (check out the submissions pool here, and the few from this pool that we've already lined up for beta testing as shown below), we're ready to move onto other crucial components of the project.

Namely gameplay and content on the card.

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Another science song writing challenge... Give me some good latin names to work with!

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:20:53 -0500

O.K. I just re-strung my guitar and it's sounding oh so pretty right now. As well, my delayed Christmas present is also arriving soon (a Fender acoustic bass - woo hoo!).

In any event, it's high time, I started to write another silly science song. I've done a few already and they're peppered around the World's Fair somewhere (of note were all the really nice comments for my mitochondria song). Actually, if you are geeky enough to want to check them all out, here is a link with all four of them to date.

So, what to write about? What to write about? Well, given it is the International Year of Biodiversity, and that my own lab is moving forward with the phylomon project, how about a song about biodiversity? I can already picture the first few lines:

There's you, and me. Within biodiversity. Connecting us together, in this world.

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The Forbin Project in Practice: One Household Appliance at a Time

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:18:03 -0500

Although it's not Dr. Forbin's Colossus (one of the first AI systems to attempt to destroy the world on film --note the "on film" please), it is quite irritating, and the result might eventually be the same: We recently replaced our oven - why? the computer went out on it. We recently replaced our washer -- it was quite difficult to find a new washer without a computer in it, a computer that would be exposed to warm, wet vibrational conditions every day. We just disconnected the waterbath from our microcalorimeter - why? the on-board computer that controls the $ 3K water bath went out and kept shutting the whole $ 90K system down (what? a computer in a warm, wet environment? why would it have a problem?). It would have been nicer to be doing calorimetric experiments rather than troubleshooting this un-needed on-board computer problem for the past couple of days.

When I replaced my car, why did I get rid of the old one? the computer went out in it. When we performed microgravity experiments on NASA's Vomit Comet with over $200,000 of equipment in the most equipment harsh environment I personally have yet worked, what was the only piece of equipment that had a problem? I wonder, could it be: the computer? It actually fried itself and blew a circuit breaker on the plane, in flight - thankfully they isolate the equipment power from the plane's power.

We are creating tons of cast off home and lab appliances that are in perfectly good working order, except for the fact that the computer went out on them, and virtually no company on Earth makes replacement on-board computers for their appliances for more than a few years before they move on to their next model, and the next computer controlled appliance: Toaster? Blender? Why does my refrigerator have to have a computer in it? Obviously so that I'll have to replace it in 2-3 years instead of 10. Some things need computer control, some things really just don't. Destroying the world, one washing machine at a time.

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Sharing Wonder: Jennifer Kaban

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:30:55 -0500

O.K. Now that we're back in the swing of things - Here is talk number five from the TEDx Terry talks event I helped organize. This might seem like a talk about science, but if you think about it, there's a lot of the humanities when it comes to fully appreciating something as magical as wonder.

- - -

Name: Jennifer Kaban

Talk Title: "Sharing Wonder"

Notes: Unclassified Student

Topic: Jennifer believes that the most precious gift we can give each other is a sense of wonder. And she believes that the best way to achieve this is to share the world of science with non-scientists. She thinks maintaining wonder becomes more important as we move along in life, as we move away from childhood, through and then away from academia, and into the real world. Because its out there, in the real world where most of us live out our lives, wondering who we are, where we came from, and how we got here. These questions, taken out of the existential context, are the exact questions science asks.

There are so many things that happen around us, that she feels, science can only help us to appreciate more deeply. The way a flower grows, how it evolved; how our brains talk to our bodies, and how easily this can be disrupted or altered; how we dont really know how we, our earth formed, or how matter, for that fact, came to be, and how we may never know, but gosh darn, were going to keep on looking.

As it did when we were children, she believes, as adults, a sense of wonder is the best motivator we have. So much of our lives are filled with the mundane, she thinks its imperative to build excitement in the world. To look around and appreciate what we have, together, on one planet, in this cosmos. Without this sense of wonder, she thinks, we get lost as individuals and as a species. But with wonder, we keep going. We keep thinking, we keep growing, we keep asking, we keep existing, together.

Links:
http://www.triumf.ca/
http://terry.ubc.ca/tedxterrytalks

Filmed by Craig Ross at TEDx Terry talks 2009 (October 3rd, 2009). Video edited by David Ng.

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But do you LIKE "The Big Bang Theory"?

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 12:59:10 -0500

A next step beyond believing in it (or any well established theory -- e.g. Evolution) is to ask: do you like it? (and here I'm talking about the real thing, we'll deal with the television show later).

Einstein didn't like it. So much so he made his self-proclaimed "biggest mistake" trying to work around it.

Over on Oscillator, Christina quotes a great line from the biography of Barbara McClintock:

"Good science cannot proceed without a deep emotional investment on the part of the scientist. It is that emotional investment that provides the motivating force for the endless hours of intense, often grueling labor."

So, does the way you approach the science change depending on whether you like (love, hate) the theory or model on which you are working?

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Do you believe in the Big Bang?

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:28:41 -0500

Writing about gravitational waves and the fact that waves from the big bang might still be bouncing around the universe (see January 10th post) reminded me of an odd science-and-religion overlap that happened in one of my classes recently. We were studying a play about Ralph Alpher's work on Big Bang nucleosynthesis and cosmic background radiation (the play is called "Background" and is by Lauren Gunderson).

Anyway, one of the questions on the exam about this play was: define "nucleosynthesis". The answer is that Big Bang nucleosynthesis is the formation of several different elements (including deuterium, helium, beryllium, and lithium) from protons and neutrons during the first 2-5 minutes after the Big Bang. What was interesting was that one student gave exactly that answer, then added "if you believe in the Big Bang," while another gave almost the exact answer but wrote "after creation" rather than "after the Big Bang".

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Do you kind of wish Pokemon cards had REAL creatures not FAKE creatures?

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:55:53 -0500

If so, you should join this facebook group. Or to discuss further, please go to http://friendfeed.com/phylomon.

Here's part of what started this group and project: a friend of mine passed on this "letter to Santa:"

It quite nicely demonstrates an issue with advocates of biodiversity - that is, what can we do to get kids engaged with the wonderful creatures that are all around them? They obviously have the ability and the passion to care about such things, but it appears misplaced - they'll spend a ton of resources and time tracking down fictional things, when they could easily do the same with the very wildlife around them. As a bonus, if they do learn a little more about biodiversity, they will hopefully appreciate their surroundings a little more, not to mention the possibility of just being outside a little more. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Hela? What did you think when you saw that four letter word?

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:50:40 -0500

Was it one of these (From wiki)?

In any event, hopefully you picked the one about Henrietta Lacks. If you didn't: then you really need to get yourself a copy of this book, entitled The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and written by Rebecca Sloot, to find out why you should have. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Howdy Y'all. Did anybody else just feel that gravity wave?

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:08:47 -0500

Greetings from Louisiana State University. By some odd fluke, I've been asked to blog here at the World's Fair (who says the world is fair?) while the venerable Ben goes emeritus for a while. Don't worry, you still have Dave!

Anyway, just so you're not too surprised, here's the usual kind of posts to expect from me: inappropriate humor, vicious attacks on anti-science conservatives, heart-warming stories about puppies and kittens, celebrity gossip, movie reviews, unauthorized peer review, pharmaceutical industry general disrespect, and lots and lots of art-and-science stuff.

So, let's start with a post that doesn't really fit any of those descriptions: a visit to the Louisiana Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (known to its friends as LA-LIGO, or around here as just LIGO).

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Biodiversity in your latte drink.

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:47:35 -0500

I don't drink lattes myself, but these are pretty cool and fitting for the IYB.

(From Flickr member, tonx) Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Happy New Year everyone, and Happy International Year of Biodiversity!

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:52:12 -0500

Hope everyone had a nice holiday, but I guess it's now back to the grind with a brand new year. For myself, I'm pretty stoked with a number of things coming up that will focus on this thing we call "Biodiversity."

And why is this? Well, basically, 2010 has been declared by the United Nations as the International Year of Biodiversity.

I also think it's going to be an interesting year for me coming up, because of the following:

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