News & Views from an Embedded Systems Designer
IMHO, the Associated Press has a better article about a Grim Reaper cat than the New England Journal of Medicine. 😦
Read the articles for yourself and see which one you think is better.
AP – Oscar the cat predicts patients’ deaths
NEJM – A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat
PS – The cat should have been named Rube instead of Oscar.
On July 10th 1856, Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan, Croatia.
In 1884, Tesla came to the US and began working for Thomas Edison. While Edison was a good inventor/businessman, Tesla was a truly great Electrical Engineer/Scientist. This distinction is why he won the “War of Currents” against Edison in later years. Wikipedia has an excellent biography with many references and links. In 1960 the SI derived unit of magnetic flux density was named the tesla in his honor.
Orac at Respectful Insolence Has awarded the Crank Trophy to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for his pseudoscience stand on autism. If Mr. Kennedy has a science advisor he needs a new one, if he’s rollin his own he needs more education or a good science advisor.
On this day in 1824 (June 26th) William Thomson was born in Belfast, Co. Antrim, Ireland. He was the younger brother of James who was the first Giant Birthday I celebrated on this blog. In recognition of his important work on an absolute temperature scale the SI base unit for temperature is named the Kelvin. For more information see the links below.
Biographies:
Wikipedia
Eric Weisstein’s World of Scientific Biography
Physics World – PhysicsWeb
University of Glasgow – Lord Kelvin Online
Lord Kelvin: An Account of His Scientific Life … – Google Books
Publications by Lord Kelvin:
The Second Law of Thermodynamics: Memoirs by … – Google Books
Many papers from the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London and the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh are available from Google Books. Here are a few samples:
On the Electrification of Air – Royal Society of London
Leakage from electrified Metal Plates … – Royal Society of Edinburgh
Electrification of Air and other Gases … – Royal Society of London
The 63rd meeting of the Skeptic’s Circle is up at Relatively Science. As usual all the linked posts are excellent and I encourage you to read them.
These two posts I had not seen before the circle and I found them to be excellent:
Junkfood Science: Processed foods arent real food
Action Skeptics: Paranormalists Are Running Out of Ideas: Rods
Bug Girl has another excellent post on the DDT and Malaria control issue. It is written so that even a non-biologist like me can grasp the situation easily. Great job again Bug Girl, I encourage everyone to read it and become informed about this pseudo-controversial issue.
(pseudo-controversial = tiny to no controversy among scientists, yet pushed by conspiracy theorists and politicians)
Today June 13th is another Giant Birthday, James Clerk Maxwell was born in 1831 at Edinburgh, Scotland. There are number of good biographies on the web (see list below) so I will not bother writing a summary biography for this post.
Maxwell’s greatest contribution is his grouping and independent derivation of equations originally developed by Gauss, Ampere, Faraday and others into what is commonly referred to as Maxwell’s Equations. This and his other work in physics has been so instrumental in the advancement of our understanding that I feel he ranks right up with Newton and Einstein in importance to science overall. In the now nearly obsolete CGS system, the derived unit of magnetic flux was named the maxwell in his honor.
James Clerk Maxwell’s importance to physics is highlighted by these quotations from other giants in science.
Albert Einstein –
“The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field”
“The work of James Clerk Maxwell changed the world forever”Max Planck –
“He achieved greatness unequalled.”Carl Sagan –
“Maxwell’s equations have had a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents.”Richard Feynman –
“From a long view of the history of mankind – seen from, say, ten thousand years from now – there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.”
Biographies:
Wikipedia
National University of Singapore
University of St Andrews
James Clerk Maxwell Foundation
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
EdinPhoto
The number of ridiculous things I encounter on mail lists and web sites is truly astounding. A little over a year ago I first encountered DDT misinformation on an engineering mail list. The misinformation was coming from some of the members who believe in popular conspiracy theories, don’t seem to grasp the basics of science and, generally don’t seem to want to look at evidence before jumping to conclusions. I generally ignore their wacky posts after learning my lesson long ago that I won’t change their minds regardless of how much evidence I present refuting their claims.
Fast forward to this year and I see that the DDT misinformation is proliferating and some people are equating Rachel Carson to Hitler and Stalin. This is way over the top, so I figured I had better start investigating the situation in greater detail. What I’ve found is that there is no logical basis for the allegations. The best places to start researching for yourself are DDT posts at Deltoid (Tim Lambert’s blog) and, DDT Posts at Bug Girls Blog. They both link to the allegations and refute them with links to actual evidence.
More Information:
Latest entries on this at Deltoid and Bug Girl’s blog:
Reaction to Tierney’s bad science
DDT, Junk Science, Malaria, and the attack on Rachel Carson
Short Biographies of Rachel Carson:
Rachel Carson
TIME 100: Rachel Carson
WHO report on DDT:
DDT and its derivatives: environmental aspects (EHC 83, 1989)
Info on Raptors and DDT:
Patuxent Science Notes, DDT and Birds of Prey
Conservation of Raptors
There are an excellent set of blog posts by Orac and Dr. Novella today.
Dr. Novella’s post, The CAM Double Standard, causes me to fear for the future of health care in the U.S. I really hate that we taxpayers are shelling out money to anti-scientific research through the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It sure seems to me that a lot of people want to take us back to the 19th century for our health care model. Read his article for the worrying details.
Orac posted “Clinical research” on dichloroacetate by TheDCASite.com: A travesty of science, it is his latest update on the, too long running, DCA is a miracle cure crap. I feel so badly for the patients and their loved ones who are grasping at straws with DCA sold through the BuyDCA website.
Reading through these posts and the linked pages I spotted a quote that can be an example for those trying to determine if something is bogus. A good way to spot bogus claims is to simply use a dictionary. The term I encountered is “aerobic oxygen”, without even looking in a dictionary I was pretty sure that adjective doesn’t go with that noun. Looking up aerobic on Webster’s site gives:
Main Entry: aer·o·bic
Pronunciation: “er-‘O-bik
Function: adjective
1 : living, active, or occurring only in the presence of oxygen
So the definition for the phrase “aerobic oxygen” is, oxygen that is active, or occurring only in the presence of oxygen. Clearly any thinking person will see that is ridiculous.
Over at Wikipedia they say:
Aerobic is an adjective that means “requiring air” (where “air” usually means oxygen).
This gives the phrase a definition of, oxygen requiring oxygen, or, oxygen requiring air. This is equally silly, perhaps the purveyors of “aerobic oxygen” mean something else but if they do they should really look up the correct adjective in a dictionary.
Nope, I just did a Google search for “aerobic oxygen” and the second two sites are clearly frauds looking to confuse prospective targets by mis-using the English language. The third result is an FDA notice from 2003 entitled “Cyber Warning Letter to Aerobic Oxygen USA”. Sadly, this FDA letter seems to be just a notice for them to change their site a little so that the fall under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act becoming exempt from FDA regulation.
BTW – the first site in the Google search gives a malware warning, thank you Google.
The Alliance For Science 2007 National High School Essay Contest has announced the winners, first place goes to Gregory Simonian. I have just read his essay and found it to be excellent, give it a read then head over to his blog to congratulate Gregory.
I haven’t read the other essay’s yet but I plan on reading as many as I can because it makes me feel hopeful for humanities future to read works by rational critical thinking young people.
Paul Hutchinson's Blog 