Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness:

• Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math tackles the question just what is math?: This hits on one of my personal pet peeves. Math really is a beautiful thing, but the way that math is taught turns it into something mechanistic, difficult, and boring. The person who posted this question is a typical example of a victim of lousy math education. So what is math? It's really a great question, and not particularly an easy one to answer. You'll get lots of different answers depending on just who you ask. It's a big enough thing that you can describe it in a lot of different ways, depending on your perspective. I'm going to give my own, and you can pipe in with your own in the comments. To me, math is the study of how to create, manipulate, and understand abstract structures. I'll pick that apart a bit more to make it more comprehensible, but to me, abstract structures are the heart of it.


• Bec at Save Your Breath For Running Ponies muses on the Dawson's Bee and its sex life: Now listen, brawny Dawson’s Bee, this isn’t the dark ages. This isn’t that bit in Double Dragon where you have to kill the boss and then pummel your brother to death to get that girl with the unrealistic proportions to go home with you. Girls aren’t interested in how many dudes’ faces you can thrust your stinger into and they’re certainly not interested in how many other girls you can accidentally decapitate in the process. But they do kinda like it when you email them pictures of cats reflecting sentiments that are relevant to the minutiae of their daily lives, or sitting up like humans. Sure, they’ll still mate with you in the middle of a freshly laid-out killing field, but they’re not going to like it.Your best bet is to take a leaf out of the minor males’ book, borrow someone’s laptop, and set it up somewhere close to the mouth of some girl’s burrow* (but far enough away from the death match to protect the screen because it’s not yours). Then if the girl manages to get past the murderous throng she’ll be like, “Hey, what are you doing?”


• Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy talks about spirals in the sky: That is not a different view of the Norway spiral light; it was taken in Russia over a day later. It looks like the Russians are testing more rockets, and creating more lights in the sky. Despite the lunacy involved with the last time we saw spirals in the sky, this picture is clearly of another Russian missile test. To recap: a weird spiral light thingy in the skies over Norway last week was caused by the sub-based rocket launch of a Bulava missile, a new system being tested by the Russians. The spiral(s) were due to the rocket spinning and venting some sort of gas, though the details are still being determined. It may have been done on purpose as part of a gyroscopic-stabilization move, or it may have been spinning out of control. The former would explain why the spiral is so beautifully symmetric..


• Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology goes a bit off topic with carnivorouse, worm-like amphibians in London (with freaky pictures!): On Monday 7th December the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) hosted the one-off event 'The Secret World of Naked Snakes' (part of the ZSL's 'communicating science' series): a whole meeting devoted entirely to those bizarre, poorly known, limbless, worm-like amphibians, the caecilians. The meeting was attended by over 100 people, which really isn't bad going, especially when some of the organisers expressed fears that the event would only be attended by (to quote David Gower) "A handful of caecilian freaks".


• And Carl Zimmer at The Loom again takes on George Will's error-laden columns: Long-time readers of this blog will be aware of my Ahab-like obsession with George Will’s global warming errors in the Washington Post–and the Post’s hollow claims to have carefully fact-checked him. I confess that I’ve let a couple of his more recent columns slip by. But I had to stop to blog about his latest take on global warming, in which he jumps on the recently stolen emails among climate scientists. He does a remarkable job of making no sense at all.

Enjoy!