Monday, October 19, 2009

Monday Science Links

This week's science:
  • At The Rennaissance Mathematicus is a nice post on Newton, alchemist: Newton’s biographers in the 18th and 19th centuries had presented him as the brilliant, rational, mathematical father of modern science a man who had guided the world into a modern age freed of superstition and wizardry. The man whom Keynes discovered in his unpublished manuscripts was a very different animal indeed, a man of very strange beliefs and practices who appeared more at home amongst the necromancers of the Renaissance than the mathematical physicists of the twentieth century. Newton was an alchemist!

  • At Bad Astronomy Phil shows us two planets from a third: The picture was taken in May 2003, but its impact has not lessened with time. It shows Earth and Jupiter in one shot as seen from Mars!

  • At Bioephemera Jessica is angry: This fall, Montana opened a sport hunting season - on wolves. Yeah - the same wolves that wildlife biologists have been working so hard (and spending lots of federal money) to successfully reintroduce to restore the Yellowstone ecosystem. So what happened? It really isn't that surprising: hunters have already killed nine wolves in the wilderness area near Yellowstone's northern border - including both the radio-collared alpha and beta females of Yellowstone Park's Cottonwood wolf pack. Uh. . . oops.

  • At Cocktail Party Physics Jennifer talks about lies and lie detectors: So it's not surprising, then, that lie detection has a long and colorful history. It has its roots in instruments of torture, most notably during the European Middle Ages, when it was believed that subjecting the body to extreme physical agony would force the victim to blurt out the truth. (We now know that this is far from the case. An Italian Enlightenment thinker, Cesare Beccaria, wrote in 1764, “By this method, the robust will escape, and the feeble be condemned. These are the inconveniences of this pretended test of truth.”) In 1730, Daniel DeFoe suggested it might be possible to measure someone's heart rate to detect deception.

  • At the Sandwalk Larry Moran talks about aspects of Jerry Coyne's book: Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne is one of the best popular books on evolution. If you can only buy one book this year then this is the one to buy. It contains an excellent explanation of all the basic facts about evolution. I'm not going to review this book, instead, I'm going to comment on just two things that interest me: how Jerry Coyne treats the mechanisms of evolution (natural selection and random genetic drift); and how he treats speciation—his area of expertise. I'll also discuss Richard Dawkins' treatment of these two topic in his book. (That's four separate postings.)
Enjoy!

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2 Comments:

At 6:16 PM, October 19, 2009 Blogger C. L. Hanson had this to say...

Speaking of posts on science books, I just wrote about Nick Lane's Life Ascending.

 
At 4:43 AM, November 10, 2009 Anonymous Term Papers had this to say...

Thanks for sharing this informative article really like it...!

 

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