Science: May 2005 Archive Page

In popular conception, mathematics is the ultimate resolvable discipline, immune to the epistemological murkiness that so bedevils other fields of knowledge in this relativistic age. Yet Philip Davis, emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown University, has pointed out recently that mathematics also is "a multi-semiotic enterprise" prone to ambiguity and definitional drift.

Earlier this year, Davis gave a lecture to the mathematics department at USC titled "How Do We Know When a Problem Is Solved?" Often, he told the audience, we cannot tell, for "the formulation and solution of problems change throughout history, throughout our own lifetimes, and even through our rereadings of texts."

Part of the difficulty resides in the notion of what we mean by a solution, or as Davis put it: "What kind of answer will you accept?" -- Margaret Wertheim --Definitional Drift: Math Goes Postmodern (LA Times)

Interesting... the author saved "Dare we say it: Math is becoming postmodern" for the very end of her essay, but the headline writer gave it all away up front. Because I went into this article expecting to read about mathematics as a postmodern phenomenon, I was disappointed to find that claim only hinted at, not fully supported.

This isn't a criticism of the essay, but rather an observation of the different rhetorics of newspaper headlines (which are designed to grab the reader) and the classical essay (which is designed to build slowly to a conclusion that rewards the committed reader).

For those of you who don't know what Mono is... let me explain. It is known to most ignorant people as "The Kissing Disease." This, of course, makes anyone who has it appear to be a whore or a gameshow host. But, this isn't a proper representation of how the disease is actually spread. I certainly didn't get it through kissing (I more than likely caught it from my roommate Jon, or from just general overwork). But the disease is actually spread through saliva and mucus. So you could really call it the "Blowing Your Nose Into Someone's Mouth/Licking Someone's Eye/Sticking Your Tongue In Someone's Ear/Sneezing on Someone Else' Tongue/Pouring a Cup of Your Spit into Someone's Coffee" Disease. That's a little more fitting. --Mike Rubino --Thank You Epstein-Barr (Tranquility Lost)

An SHU student, who I've never actually had in a class, offers this as his end-of-term excuse. (Tongue in cheek, of course.)

After finding food, scout bees returning to the hive dance on the vertical walls of the honeycomb. A round dance indicates the food is very close, within 35 yards or less. A figure-eight pattern indicates that the food is farther away. The bee indicates the distance to the food by how long it dances; it indicates the food's richness by how vigorously it dances; and it indicates the food's direction by the angle the dance deviates from an imaginary line drawn from the current position of the sun to the dance floor. The code is complex and detailed. --Wendy M. Grossman --Decoding Bees' Wild Waggle Dances  (Wired)

Apparently the "waggle dance" has only been a theory until this research tested it with tiny, tiny radar units. I didn't know that.

The World's Energy Problems Solved by My 7-year-old (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

For months now, my son has been requesting, for his bedtime stories, books about chemistry and energy. We just finished one on windmills.

These aren't kiddie picture books -- they are thin, but they are chapter books, packed with statistics and chemical equations. For a while, Peter was making up stories about Atom City, a place he invented where anthropomorphic molecules of oxygen, carbon and hydrogen run around sharing electrons and exchanging energy.

Here's what's on his mind lately.

Save Earth-made Energy Sources

Dictated by Peter Jerz (age seven)

Anybody know about those coal power plants or other fossil fuel burning stations, and all the people who know there is only so much the Earth can make? Well, if we run out, how can we get energy? So save some fossil fuels.

But here are two power stations that may be able to use energy that lasts until the end of time. Wind power plants, and water power plants (hydro-electric power or power stations that use water to turn their turbines). So on this weblog, you can find out how you can save some fossil fuels. And now, here are ways of doing it.

Close some coal power plants that may make pollution or get rid of some fossil fuels the Earth created.

Some furnaces could burn other things besides natural gas, perhaps use wood instead. (Maybe you could just use a few fans so you don't waste too much wood.) Since oil may last for only thirty-five years, close a lot of oil burning places. Also, natural gas may last for sixty years, so you can keep a few more natural gas burning plants open. Since coal can last for the next six hundred years, you can have a few power plants open, but make sure you can save it so it can last even longer.

And so now you've learned about what I am thinking of the Earth.

Perhaps you should think seriously like I do.

Goodbye, and see you on the next weblog or email.

Okay Daddy, that's about what I wanted for my weblog.

Have you saved it yet? Because I think I want to put one more thing.

By the way, my name is Peter Jerz. Bye bye.

You know Daddy, if you let [Humanities Division chair] John Spurlock see that, I bet you could earn another fifty dollars.

Stopping Pollution

The cons of using fossil fuels:

For one thing, fossil fuels could make pollution, and they could be rare. Another thing is, that you could run out of fossil fuels. Another thing is that mining some fossil fuels could be dangerous. And for another thing, pollution could destroy the environment. (In some movies, pollution can make monsters). Fossil fuels could be expensive to start a business with. Even though some states and countries may have lots of it, then it could run out if they keep burning it up for energy. Coal could last for the next six hundred years. Natural gas for the next sixty years. But there may be only oil for the next thirty-five. Natural gas and oil may not last for very much longer. Coal dust can be dangerous to lungs in mining. Another thing. Try to make safe energies, and non-pollutive ones, too.

Well I guess that's what I wanted to put down. Those are probably good reasons for someone so young, I guess, Daddy.

You can send it.

Provided it is fed with cubes, the robot can create a copy of itself within a few minutes.

To build a replica, a 'parent' robot bends down and places its own uppermost cube on the table next to it. This becomes the base of the 'child' robot. The parent then picks up a new cube, using electromagnets powered from contacts on the surface of the table, and stacks it on top of the child base. During this process, the child bends down to help the parent add cubes whenever it becomes too tall for the parent to reach. In the end, two four-cube columns stand next to each other. --Andreas von Bubnoff --Robots master reproduction (Nature)

There's a video that teaches about what the birds and the 'bots do. I think it only counts as "reproduction" in a very loose sense... it's more like "final assembly," aided by humans who (between takes) carefully stack the components in precisely the location the robot needs to pick them up. That reminds me of the robot that fuels itself by digesting the bodies of insects, but who depend on humans to feed the insects to them.

"Robots master reproduction"? Hardly. We're still a long way from the rebellion depicted in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).

The video is still interesting to watch. If nothing else, these bots could play a mean game of Tetris.

''You cannot overestimate the passion that engineers and scientists of that generation have for the slide rule," said Douglas, carefully sorting these precursors to the calculator with her white curator's gloves. --Jonathan Abel --For curator, slide rules are cutting edge (Boston.com)

Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: "It's pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It's the news value that is most important."

He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review - despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.

As a result, says Prof Spencer, flawed research is finding its way into the leading journals, while attempts to get rebuttals published fail. --Robert Matthews --Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming' (Telegraph)

This is my favorite conspiracy theory.

I spend so much time trying to drill into the heads of my students that information published in peer-reviewed academic journals is more valuable in a term paper than random stuff you find on the internet. But here's another reminder that the peer-review process is only as good as the peers doing the reviewing.

The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the "masculine" toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls. Both sexes spent equal time monkeying with the picture books and other gender-neutral toys.

Because vervet monkeys are unlikely to be swayed by the social pressures of human culture, the results imply that toy preferences in children result at least in part from innate biological differences. --Larry Cahill --His Brain, Her Brain (Scientific American)