He doesn’t…

Dylan was telling me last night how he is looking forward to doing chemistry. I was the same at his age, but I soon learned that physics was much cooler.

These days, it’s biology that excites me.

I only wish I understood it a little more.

How come they don’t have science education programmes like this over here?

Both Tom and Jeff sent me links to Ted talks last week. I just watched Jeff’s one:

We Must Win The Oil End Game

It’s must see-TV. Even if you are not interested in oil or science or politics, go watch it.

Watching Tom’s one now…

Oh! Hai!

Every now and then something finds exactly the right spot on my funny bone and I laugh and laugh and laugh. There something about Absurdist Humour in the Monty Python (“Where is that fish?”), League of Gentlemen (”Those are local things. For local people.”), Not the Nine O’clock (“Ball? Or Aerosol? Neither. It’s for my armpits.“) tradition that makes my cheekbones hurt once I start laughing. The way they layer silly on sophisticated on silly on sophisticated and on and on and on until you lose track of which layer you are at and eventually it doesn’t matter because your cheekbones hurt.

I fully understand that most people either don’t get it or don’t find it funny - but I do. I expect there is a gene for it. My son has it. My wife doesn’t.

The lolcats craze started with I can haz cheezburger? and reaches the very pinnacle of silly intertwined with sophisticated with its oh hai!s and its buttsecks and its lolrusses wiv no bukkits and its PENIS GOES WHERE? and I can’t get enough of it.

The latest advances in the lolcats art are pushing the envelope of silly sophistication. Try on Lolcatsbible (the whole bible translated into Kitteh Pidgin) for size:

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

6 An Ceiling Cat sayed, im in ur waterz makin a ceiling. But he no yet make a ur. An he maded a hole in teh Ceiling.7 An Ceiling Cat doed the skiez with waterz down An waterz up. It happen.8 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has teh firmmint wich iz funny bibel naim 4 ceiling, so wuz teh twoth day.

9 An Ceiling Cat gotted all teh waterz in ur base, An Ceiling Cat hadz dry placez cuz kittehs DO NOT WANT get wet.10 An Ceiling Cat called no waterz urth and waters oshun. Iz good.

Lolscience balances out the religion with some quantum physics and philosophy. (WARNING! It’s very obscure!):

kthxbai!

What would America be like if science were permitted to inform decision making, and if scientific issues that concern the world’s future were a natural part of a broad national conversation?

The campaign to have a presidential debate focussed on science is gathering steam.

It’s unrealistic to expect candidates to actually know anything about science but, surely, it’s not unrealistic to expect them to know the importance of science, or how science works or how science should inform policy?

It’ll never happen of course because so many of the republican candidates (and their constituents) are anti-science…but…we can dream…

It makes me wonder: Who was the last president who was not a lawyer or a general?

“The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now far exceeds the natural range of the past 650,000 years and it is rising very quickly due to human activity.”If this trend is not halted soon, many millions of people will be at risk from extreme events such as heat waves, drought, floods and storms, our coasts and cities will be threatened by rising sea levels, and many ecosystems, plants and animal species will be in serious danger of extinction.”

…

“The prime goal of this new regime must be to limit global warming to no more than 2 ºC above the pre-industrial temperature, a limit that has already been formally adopted by the European Union and a number of other countries. Based on current scientific understanding, this requires that global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by at least 50% below their 1990 levels by the year 2050.

The Bali Declaration

Ever played Brain Age? Remember the one where you have to remember a sequence of numbers that is flashed briefly on the screen and you have to tap them in order after they disappear? How fast could you do it? This fast?

Researchers in Japan showed that humans and young chimps could both perform the task wit 80% accuracy when the images were displayed for 7 tenths of a second but performance dropped off dramatically for the humans as the exposure time was reduced. The chimp in the video still achieved 80% accuracy when the images were displayed for only 2 tenths of a second. [AP]

Since today is international blog action day, I thought I’d join the bandwagon advocating for a presidential debate focussed solely on science.

From Matthew Chapman at richarddawkins.net,

I am advocating for a Presidential Debate solely on the subject of science, and I hope you will join me in trying to bring this about. Had such a thing occurred during the election in 2000, perhaps we would have discovered that George W. Bush believed “the jury is still out on evolution.” In this election, we have been provided with an excellent reason to ask for a scientific debate by the fact that three Republican candidates for president, Brownback, Huckabee, and Tancredo indicated that they do not believe in evolution. For them the jury seems not to be out, but to have rendered a verdict against the theory.

[snip]

Is this level of ignorance shared by other Presidential candidates, both Republican and Democratic, in other scientific matters? If so, we have a right to know. We are, after all, in a completely new situation. To quote entomologist Edward O. Wilson, human beings are “the first species in the history of life to become a geophysical force.” Through industrial pollution, the destruction of our rain forests, over-fishing, over-hunting and so on, we can destroy just about all life on earth. This is a problem that cannot be solved without an understanding of science, most specifically biology.

It has been said that the biggest predictor of success of a nation in the global marketplace is scientific literacy [cite?], wouldn’t it make sense to elect presidents who know something about science?

I am always surprised by how long mammals have been around.

Let’s compress all of earth’s 4.5 billion years of history into a single year, such that the earth would have first formed on January 1 of this year, and the present — the here and now — would be represented by the stroke of midnight on the last day of this year, December 31. On this scale of time the first primitive microbial life forms appeared on earth in late March, followed by more complex photosynthetic microorganisms in mid- to late-May. Land plants and animals emerged from the sea in mid-November, and the first mammal drew its breath on Thanksgiving Day. Dinosaurs appeared on earth on the morning of December 13, but then disappeared forever on December 25, at 7:30 p.m. Coincidentally, or not, just a moment before, a six-mile-wide asteroid hit the earth near the Yucatan peninsula and plunged the earth into what some scientists have described as a thousand years of winter’s hell.

     Human-like creatures appeared in Africa sometime during the evening of December 31, around dinner time, maybe 6:30 p.m. or so. Homo sapiens appeared on earth at about five minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve, in the midst of the last great ice age. Rome ruled the Western world for five seconds — from 15 seconds to 10 seconds before midnight on the 31st. And as the ball begins to drop — Columbus landed in the New World three seconds to midnight, the United States was founded one and a half seconds before midnight, and 13 men with 13 prayers and 13 dollars met in the frontier settlement of Hamilton, New York to found Colgate University just slightly more than one second before midnight, at the end of this eventful year.

http://www4.colgate.edu/scene/nov2000/april.html