Category: Science

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Happy Birthday Celcius

Anders Celsius was born on November 27th, 1701 in Uppsala, Sweden. If you don’t already know and love the Celcius temperature scale (previously known as centigrade) then you must be a US citizen and have not studied any technical subjects in depth. 😉 The commonly used SI derived unit for temperature is named Celsius in his honor. There are many good biographies available on the web so, I won’t write up a separate one here, see the following links.

Biographies:

History of astronomy in Uppsala

The Sky over Berlin

Project Galactic Guide

NNDB

Scandinavica.com

Wikipedia

Other Articles about Celcius:

Celsius – Wikipedia

Daniel Fahrenheit, Anders Celsius Left Their Marks, Alaska Science Forum

Who Invented the Thermometer – Fahrenheit Celsius and Kelvin Scales.

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Happy Birthday Hans Oersted

orstedHans Christian Ørsted (Oersted) was born August 14, 1777 in Rudkøbing (Rudkjobing), Denmark (island of Langeland). Oersted received a doctor of philosophy degree in 1799 from the University of Copenhagen. Like many of the great scientists of late 18th and early 19th centuries, Oersted studied many fields including chemistry, aesthetics and physics. In addition to his scientific work he also was a published writer and poet.

The discovery that puts Oersted on my list of giants was the connection between electricity and magnetism. The details of how this discovery happened are uncertain with three accounts by Oersted as well as information from students who were present at the time. See the biographies and articles linked below for some of the variations in the story. What seems clear to me is that although he was not specifically experimenting with a compass near a wire carrying an electrical current, he immediately recognized the significance of the observed effect. Oersted had seen the compass needle move and through later experiments and analysis demonstrated clearly the deep connection between electricity and magnetism, what we refer to today as electromagnetism. For this important work he received the prestigious Copley Medal from the Royal Society of London in 1820. His work was recognized in 1930 by naming the SI unit of magnetizing force (magnetic field strength) the oersted.

Biographies:
Wikipedia
Eric Weisstein’s World of Scientific Biography
NNDB

Atrticles:
Oersted and the Discovery of Electromagnetism by Frederick Gregory, Department of History, University of Florida
Oertsted and Ampere by Dr. David P. Stern

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Coulomb's Birthday

Charles Augustin de Coulomb was born on June 14th 1736 in Angouleme, France. Coulomb worked as a military engineer for 20 years after graduating from the military school at Mezieres in 1761. During this time when most engineering involved only practical numerical solutions he applied physics and mathematics to the study of mechanical engineering problems. While the advanced solutions weren’t applied by many of his engineering peers, they were instrumental to the rapid advancement of mechanics in the following centuries.

The enormous body of work produced by Coulomb over the next twenty years includes major advances in our understanding of electricity and magnetism. His work during this period that most impacts my job was the development of Coulomb’s law. To honor this great engineer and scientist, the SI unit for electric charge is named the coulomb.

Biographies:
Wikipedia
University of St Andrews

coulomb

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Sesquicentennial of the public debut of Darwin's Big Idea

One Hundred and Fifty years ago today on July first 1858, Charles Lyell and Joseph Dalton Hooker read a paper to the Linnean Society of London. The important paper was: On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection, By Charles Darwin, Esq., F.R.S., F.L.S.., & F.G.S., and Alfred Wallace, Esq.

Thus began 150 years of amazing advances in the biological sciences that have improved our lives and life spans enormously. Sadly, this also marks the start of 150 years of denial and willful ignorance by fundamentalist religious people.

Read more about the event at this post by Richard Carter, FCD of The Red Notebook blog. While you’re there sign up to become a member of The Friends of Charles Darwin.

Paul Hutchinson, FCD

Charlie is my Darwin

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Free research resources

I’ve found a couple of great technical research sites and both offer full content PDF downloads for free. The first is from Penn State CiteSeerx alpha here’s the opening description from their about page.

CiteSeerx is a scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. CiteSeerx aims to improve the dissemination of scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge.

Tip of the hat to f5r5e5d for sending me there to get a great old PSRR op-amp paper.

The other research site is Google Patents here’s a quote from their about page:

Google Patent Search covers the entire collection of issued patents and millions of patent application made available by the USPTO—from patents issued in the 1790s through those most recently issued in the past few months. We don’t currently include international patents, but we look forward to expanding our coverage in the future.

IMO, Google’s system to be the easiest to use complete patent search around.

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Expelled reactions

Randy Olson, creator of the excellent documentary film Flock of Dodos, has weighed in with a post and a lively debate in the comments, Meet Ben Stein, the New Spokesman for the Field of Evolution. I was particularly impressed with JuliaL’s comment in that thread.

Extremely effective as propaganda.

I went to see the movie this weekend because I can’t expect to have any credibility in discussing it with my church friends if I haven’t seen it.

I’m comfortable with the context of witty debate, and, viewed as part of that context, Myers and Dawkins were clever and surprisingly mild-mannered.

I’m also familiar with the context of conservative Christian conversations about religion, and in that context, Myers and Dawkins look cold, callous, arrogant, and hateful.

Myers takes something that the audience treasures as the most valuable element of their lives, the source of comfort in pain and tragedy, the source of the ethical and social systems they live by, and compares it to a trivial hobby (accompanied by ad by an old clip of an ugly, foolish-looking woman knitting). The very off-handedness of his comment reads as a powerful insult. The method by which one is dealing with the death of a child, the way in which one makes life-altering decisions, all a trivial hobby? That doesn’t come across so much as a put-down of religion as a dismissing of the pain, hopes, and lives of the people themselves.

…

As a Christian who is entirely comfortable with the scientific Theory of Evolution, I hope that very few of my fellow church members see this movie because I think its effect may be hard to counteract. I’m sorry to see today so much scienceblog discussion focused on money – for the fundamentalists, this is an investment in missions, not a source of income – and so much less focused on what a powerful tool this movie is for turning a religious person who has known and cared little about the evolution/ID struggle in public schools into a determined advocate for ID.

Sadly I think she’s correct about the reactions to the film by conservative/fundamentalist Christians, I recommend you read the whole comment. 

Michael Shermer received a letter demonstrating some of the harm Expelled is doing by spreading lies. Richard Dawkins wrote a wonderful reply, ‘Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein’s lying propaganda’

A young Christian wrote an interesting post, Expelled, or Why I Won’t Be Seeing It.

Blake Stacey has put together a list of people actually harmed in the evolution/creationism wars in his post, Creation, Power and Violence.

Scientific American has many articles about Expelled, here are two to get you started. Ben Stein Launches a Science-free Attack on Darwin and Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know.

Peter Manseau wrote a review for Science & Spirit magazine, Is I.D. Ready for Its Close-up?

Blue Collar Scientist has quotes and links for Some Expelled Reviews.

Skeptico comments on Ben Stein’s appearance on the Craig Ferguson show, What’s Ben Stein Smoking? Seriously, has Ben lost all his brain, expecting evolution to explain things in other unrelated fields of science, WTF!

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An odd definition of what is pure science

Someone posted a few good links pertaining to the time_t year 2038 problem and an engineer posted the following statement. (PIC refers to Microchip’s PIC family of micros)

THIS is a perfect example of how pure science affects the PIC world.

WTF, he thinks the creation of a computer programming data structure is pure science! This engineer has absolutely no idea what science is, sigh. What he should have said is, this is a perfect example of how large computer programming affects the PIC world. Conflating large computer programming with pure science is ridiculous.

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Good stuff from the blogs I read and an admin note

First the administration note, do to blog spam driving me nuts I’ve decided to close the comments on old posts that attract blog spam. If you encounter an older post with closed comments that you would like to contribute to, send me an email using the address that is at the end of every page at my main site. Assuming your contribution is relevant I’ll manually add it to the comments of the post for you. If it’s irrelevant I’ll reply explaining why I am not posting the comment.

Now for the good reads from the blogs I read:

Blake has posted an excellent round-up of the real discrimination going on in the ridiculous ID/Creationism vs. Science non-debate. Science After Sunclipse » Creation, Power and Violence

I mentioned it in previous post but now the NCSE has fully launched their Expelled Exposed web site. Check it out for the excellent information on the topic.

Bob’s post this week is a must read for anyone involved in hiring IT consultants, The Truth About IT Consultants.

Via Mark from the Denialism blog I wound up at this three part series, Contrary imaginations. – By Daniel Engber – Slate Magazine.

And last but not least, Tim’s post Scientists 2, Teens 0, Journalists -2, points out the two silly reports this week trying to make it seem like kids are smarter than adult scientists. Please people, join the reality based community and keep your rational thought processes in place. Contrary to what TV wants you to believe, it is extremely rare for a child to make a useful contribution to the advancement of knowledge. In fact other than Emily Rosa I can’t think of a single case and her contribution was not a giant breakthrough on a complex topic just a bright child pointing out that some of adults are too easily falling for magic tricks and thinking they are real.