The Instapundit recently linked to this article about new battery research.
Apparently some nano-tech research done at Stanford's Department of Materials Science and Engineering indicates that it might be possible to increase the life of a rechargeable lithium-ion batteries by a tremendous amount. The article mentioned the possibility of reaching a 40-hour life.
That's fantastic compared to current (excuse the pun) batteries. I agree with Professor Reynolds: "Bring it on!"
Something else occurs to me; is it possible to scale this technology up? Forty hours at 40 mph could give an electric car a 1600 mile range. Forty hours might be unrealistic (at least at first) but the possibilities are intriguing.
You just can't make this stuff up!
A former French military air traffic controller says a fragment of Comet Schwassman-Wachmann will hit the earth in two weeks.
Better yet, it's all Bush's fault:
He concludes the May 25 event is tied in to the Bush administration's policy of preemptive use of nuclear weapons against Iran, and the effect of nuclear weapons on the realms of higher intelligences.
First Katrina, then this. What's next?
DAYS SHORTEN, LEAVES FALL OFF TREES, BUSH TO BLAME!!
A big thanks to Professor Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy for the original link.
Foreword: Dean Esmay writes about A Voice of Sanity on Intelligent Design. After I finished writing this, I was surprised by my conclusions. As opposed to Dean, I'm agnostic, and believe there are "things on Heaven and Earth, undreamt-of in your philosophy." On the other hand, I still insist on scientific rigor when processing ideas.
So where does that leave me?
-Scott Kirwins
So you've got the debate between steady-state evolution vs. catastrophic evolution all sussed out, Scooter? You'd better write Science and let them know! :)
Point being that there are many areas of uncertainty within the overall theory. Painting the basic theory as unassailable begs the question. We may find encounter data in the next fifty to one hundred years which calls at least some of the current assumptions into question. Einstein developed a theory which strongly altered Newtownian physics, but not until new data was introduced.
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Of course, this means that many areas called science, aren't, including psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and so on. You can call them studies, disciplines, or even areas of expertise. They just aren't science. JDS, alas, drops the ball with the claim "the value one places on science is, in itself, a philosophical view." Untrue.
Real science is -as I said above- measurable, repeatable, and subject to mathematical analysis. Real science (in fact) deals in objective, not subjective concepts. This is (as has been mentioned previously) why science cannot address the issue of God. There are no "God fossils" lying around, and He has been recently uncharitible in providing a convenient miracle to confound the skeptics. ;-) We are therefore forced to rely upon unpleasant facts, logic, and statistical analysis.
I would, therefore, like to take issue with Martin's
That turns out not to be the case. An actual statistical analysis gives only one of two results: reject, or cannot accept or reject. I have to add that the latter is sometime referred to merely as "not reject," but I find that unclear, with an implication that "not reject" is equal to accept.
It works like this: one tests a hypothesis (say: smoking causes lung cancer) by creating a null hypothesis opposite to the starting hypothesis. In this case the null hypothesis would be "there is no connection between smoking and lung cancer." The next step would be in analyzing the statistics, which (the results have been established for years) show that there is a relation between smoking and lung cancer. We then reject the null hypothesis. This allows us to accept the original hypothesis, at least to the extent that we use further analytical techniques to further test it.
Please note that you can't use this approach to "prove" a hypothesis; the best you can do is not reject a hypothesis. You can view falsification as winnowing the scientific wheat from the inaccurate chaff.
I suppose I should point out here that a 90% level of confidence doesn't mean the research is 90% confident; rather it means that 90% of the time, the actual (as opposed to statistically estimated) value will fall within a specific interval. To take a common example, an approval rating of 35% [+-3%] for the president, with an established confidence level of 90%, means that 90% of the time the actual approval rating of the entire country will fall between 32% and 38%.
What most folks miss is the immediate corollary: 10% the actual value will fall outside of that range. This means that 10% of the time one (incorrectly) rejects the null hypothesis. For the above example, this would have meant that there was no relationship between smoking and cancer, despite the data indications.
This is known as a "Type I error:" incorrectly rejecting the null hypothesis. A "Type II error" is when you fail to reject a null hypothesis. Again, note that a Type II error doesn't mean one has incorrectly proved a hypothesis, but merely that you failed to reject it. It is, in other words, not evidence to the contrary.
I just came across an interesting analogy while double-checking my memory: this is similar a court decision, wherein "guilty" is the definite rejection of a false hypothesis, and "not guilty" is failure to reject. Most people equate "not guilty" with "innocent," which are both legally and semantically different. One may fail to convict an actual criminal due to lack of evidence. One may fail to reject a false hypothesis for the lack of data.
What this boils down to is that -scientifically speaking- one may disprove a false hypotheses, but not positively prove a true hypothesis.
So those who say that any scientific theory -evolution, for example- has been "proven" are incorrect in their statement. It would be more accurate to say that the theory in question accurately explains the known data. Also note that I do not say that they are wrong, but rather inaccurate. A proper respect for science tends to instill respect for semantics as well. :)
This common confusion about statistics is also reflected in the common confusion about probability, as the study of any state with a lottery can attest. One of the more popular (bad) arguments is "argument by unlikelyhood."
You can even see this in political discussions, wherein one disputant makes the claim that event X was so improbable that it is only logical to assume that conspiracy/criminality/take your pick is the only possible answer.
The first problem with this is that these arguments never establish actual probability distributions before the fact, which begs the question. How unlikely is an event? Say someone rolls two dice 108 times. Furthermore, the roller gets "snake eyes" (two 1's) three times. An observer then immediately claims the dice are loaded, since there's such a low chance of rolling two 1's, which is non-quantitatively true. But an objective examination of the probability distributions shows that -in 108 throws of a pair of honest dice- one should expect precisely three sets of "snake eyes." This is a simple example. Generally, one must specify the probabilities before an event, not after.
Another area of confusion is trying to estimate after-the-fact probabilities. Our example: every US dollar bill has a serial number consisting of a letter, eight digits, and another letter, e.g. B11895196B. What are the odds of my having that particular dollar bill?
(For those completely unfamiliar with probability, the probability of a combination of statistically independent events is equal to the product of the separate events. In the above example, the probability of rolling "snake eyes" is 1/6 x 1/6 or 1/36. The probability of rolling three 1's with three dice is 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6, and so on. The probability of picking out two B's out of a bag of SCRABBLE tiles (assuming a single tile for each letter, and replacing the tile between picks) is 1/26 x 1/26, or 1/676, which is about 0.14%)
Someone who knows a bit about basic probability would reply "well, that's a series of independent probabilities, so you multiply 1/26 x 1/10 (6 times) x 1/26, and get 1/(26 * 1,000,000 * 26), or 1/676,000,000. Thus our math wizard answers that the author has a one out of nearly seven hundred million chance of having that dollar bill in hand. A very unlikely event, indeed!
There's only one problem with that: the actual answer is precisely 1.0.
How do you resolve this apparent paradox? Simple: the event has already occurred. That is, I already had the dollar bill in hand when I phrased the question! (Literally. I took one out of my wallet to get the example serial number.)
In other words, the probability of an event which has already occurred is always 1.0, or 100%. Therefore anyone who argues that event X (having already occurred) is suspect, because the event is statistically unlikely, is providing an argument which is statistically irrelevant.
...Which -now that I think about it- seems to shoot a pretty big hole in ID. Whoops. On the other hand, I doubt this would impress them very much, as they reject the classic definition of science I presented above, in terms of "real" science is that data which can be measured, analyzed, and reproduced. If you can't use the math, don't call it science.
Actually, if you go here, and read some of the arguments presented by the Discovery people, you'll find they're hyping philosophy over science, preferring metaphysical hot air (but I redund) over objective, measurable reality. Basically, they attack real science as "positivistic," and try to vitiate the elemental concepts of measurability, observability, and falsifiability.
Instead (assuming that Steve Meyer's article is representative of the whole) they try to make ID acceptable by formulating "philosophical" definitions of science which allow the introduction of supernatural intervention via appropriate definitions.
By the nineteenth century, attempts to distinguish science from non-science had changed. No longer did demarcationists attempt to characterize science on the basis of the superior epistemic status of scientific theories; rather, they attempted to do so on the basis of the superior methods science employed to produce theories. Thus science came to be defined by reference to its method, not its content. Demarcation criteria became methodological rather than epistemological.(emphasis added) In other words, Meyer prefers the philosophical, subjective approach -arguing about "true" vs. "false' knowledge- as opposed to the modern, objective approach, which still relies on measurement and analysis, despite what he has to say about it, such as his complaint that Newton's laws did not "explain" gravity
First, many laws are descriptive and not explanatory. Many laws describe regularities but do not explain why the regular events they describe occur. A good example of this drawn from the history of science is the universal law of gravitation, which Newton himself freely admitted did not explain but instead merely described gravitational motion. As he put it in the "General Scholium" of the second edition of the Principia, "I do not feign hypotheses" -in other words, "I offer no explanations." Insisting that science must explain by reference to "natural law" would eliminate from the domain of the properly scientific all fundamental laws of physics that describe mathematically, but do not explain, the phenomena they "cover." For the demarcationist this is a highly paradoxical and undesirable result, since much of the motivation for the demarcationist program derives from a desire to ensure that disciplines claiming to be scientific match the methodological rigor of the physical sciences. While this result might alleviate the "physics envy" of many a sociologist, it does nothing for demarcationists except defeat the very purpose of their enterprise.In other words, Meyer insists that a natural must explain the ultimate "why" of a process, as well as the process itself.
I could go on, but basically the above article (and again, by extension the ID position) relies on philosophy and fancy tap-dancing about definitions instead of science.
True, Carl Sagan once observed that the scientific process does include at least one metaphysical concept: the world is a rational place, and operates according to physical laws, which can be derived and comprehended by human beings. So far, that assumption has withstood examination.
The odd thing about this is that I have no theoretical objection to God, I just expect His works to follow the known laws we have derived from our (aha) God-given faculties. If you check up the Roman Catholic position these days, the Pope decided a few years ago that evolution was compatible with Christianity, as long as one posited some sort of "divine spark" inherent to the speciation of homo sapiens. It's gonna be bloody difficult to test the idea, though!
A major part of the confusion in this debate is, I fear, yet more confusion about terms. This isn't really about science, or the "philosophy about science" (what the fubar is that, anyway? how can you get philosophical about the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics?) It's about control of the political entities in our lives.
In this case, it is the question of who runs the local school. Is it the local community, the county, state, or federal authorities? Jerry Pournelle has repeatedly pointed out that the best answer to this question is to reduce authority to the smallest denominator; in this case the local school board. As the good doctor has pointed out, this will no doubt result in some very silly-looking reading lists, but that's the cost of liberty. The beauty of this approach is that 90% of the worthless dolts (er, politicians and lawyers) who interfere now, can't.
This isn't a case for the courts, nor even for the state legislature, as long as the school isn't breaking any laws. Certainly it's none of D.C.'s business.
The problem is that everyone likes to talk about liberty, but they hate to let other people exercise it. Simply put, the left breaks out in hives about "God in the classroom," while the right wets their pants about "sex in the classroom." Here's a new idea: let the parents decide. It's their kids, and it's none of our business. If you're that worried about it, work on your own kids first. If you don't have any, shut the Hell up, as it's literally none of yours.
Two NASA scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke, believe that they have found strong evidence of life on Mars.
Stroker and Lemke -both working in NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, say they have found methane signatures and other indicators which parallel results found in certain underground caves on earth.
NASA researchers (including Stroker) went to the Rio Tinto in southwestern Spain in 2003 to study an underground microbial system wherein the organisms eat sulfide minerals and excrete sulfuric acid. This makes the water of the Tinto highly acid, which in turn causes iron to be dissolved into that water, giving it a reddish color, like a red wine. Hence the name Tinto.
The above linked article does not say whether the Rio Tinto organisms are anaerobic, or capable of living without oxygen, but the researchers feel that something similar may exist on Mars in underground caves. Evidence to support their case comes from several sources, including this March 2004 discovery of an iron-bearing mineral called jarosite by Mars rover Opportunity, which might indicate the existence of something similar to the Rio Tinto organisms.
Puppy-blender Glenn Reynolds observes that "If it's not green-skinned alien babes -- preferably with White House press passes -- the Big Media folks probably don't care much."
Well, that would certainly get my attention, yes.
I have to say that Frank J. has become the American answer to Terry Prachett.
You doubt me? Read his primer about black holes!
'Nuff said...
NASA has some fantastic images from the Cassini probe here.
Wow. What I wouldn't pay to take a vacation where that was my window view...
That gallant adventurer, Blackfive, recently posted some links to absolutely lovely microscopic photos of his favorite drinks.
I personally enjoyed the Tequila..
These scans come from a website called Molecular Expressions. The site includes a Microscopy primer, a marvelous teaching aid entitled "Science, Optics & You," and of course pictures of teeny tiny things, some of them measuring only microns across.
What I thought was really cool was the information that chip designers like to draw pictures on their chips!! These guys obviously have too much time on their hands.
Still, I enjoyed:
The California license plate,
Dilbert,
this Cincinnati Bearcats logo,
a Coat of Arms on a Hewlett-Packard chip,
a lovely Osprey,
the RoadRunner (meep! meep!),
and finally, one of my favorites,
Tux the Linux Penguin.
How cool is that? This is a great website to get the kids interested in science.
Highly recommended.
A marine biologist in Taiwan was transporting a beached whale cacass to National Cheng Kung University in Tainan City when it exploded.
According to Wang Chien-ping, a professor of marine biology at the university, this was the largest beached whale on record in Taiwan.
Yet another metaphor for the Dean campaign... Heh.