Nehaveigur

Category: Science

  • Project Habakkuk

    In his memoir I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier, Max Perutz describes his work on a secret project during World War II to build an aircraft carrier out of ice. Project Habakkuk relied on strengthening the ice by adding sawdust, which increased its strength, as well as an on-board…

  • Bionumbers

    I’m a geneticist by profession, but too often, I realize that I don’t know some of the basic facts. How many RNA molecules are there in a typical mammalian cell? I don’t even know the order of magnitude. The Bionumbers database is great for looking up this sort of thing.…

  • Coherence Tradeoffs

    There is an optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation, that a too-unified society is a disadvantage, and a too-fragmented society is also a disadvantage Jared Diamond Previously, I have written about the idea that singletons are hard to achieve. Singletons are agents that can enact their goals and maintain a high…

  • Adaptationism

    The next time you’re in a room full of biologists and you want to start a shouting match, ask them about junk DNA. While everyone agrees on the importance of protein coding genes and the regulatory sequences that control their expression, there is little consensus if the majority of the…

  • Why Do We Like Music?

    Why do we like the things we like? For some, such as food or sex, the answer is obvious. Without them, we wouldn’t survive or reproduce. In order to make sure we comply with its wishes; our body uses a carrot and stick management approach consisting of rewards (e.g. sweet taste) and punishments…

  • Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken MacLeod

    Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken McLeod are two of the most interesting contemporary science fiction writers. Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and MacLeod’s Intrusion are among my favorite novels. Here the two of them talk about global warming and space travel. One notable quote by Robinson on private space travel: An individual…

  • Apollo

    We have concrete plans to return to the moon. Artemis 2 is a crewed mission scheduled for a lunar flyby in September 2025, and one or two years after that Artemis 3 will perform the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. One of the most remarkable things…

  • Where are the Aliens?

    Jim Rutt discusses the Fermi Paradox with writer and physicist Stephen Webb (podcast). Webb proposes 75 solutions to the Fermi paradox. You can read my take on one of them here.

  • Assumptions for Extraterrestrial Life

    Out of Kevin Kelly’s twelve assumptions for extraterrestrial life, I agree with the first nine. However, he gets his tenth, and most important, assumption wrong: 10) The only reason for an advanced civilization to visit another planet is to see if there is another civilization which has invented things it…

  • Voyager’s Golden Record

    Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is the human-made object most distant from Earth. It carries the Golden Record, a selection of sounds and images representing humanity. Its full contents are archived here. The Golden Record may survive for five billion years, which means it may be there after Earth and…

  • The Nobel Disease

    That someone as accomplished as Fred Hoyle could come up with an implausible theory, like solar activity causing influenza, points to a bigger truth: Even highly accomplished and intelligent people are wrong. If you go to the shelves dedicated to cold remedies in your local drug store, you’ll find Vitamin…

  • Sunspots and Influenza

    Fred Hoyle was an accomplished astronomer but also came up with a few controversial theories that didn’t take off, not that there’s anything wrong with that. For example, he proposed that the archeopteryx fossils are forgeries and that flu pandemics are caused by solar winds driving interstellar virus particles towards…

  • On Two Planets

    On Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz (or Laßwitz) may be the first science fiction novel to imagine an alien invasion. Published in 1897, it’s about Martians travelling to Earth aboard sophisticated spaceships to study humanity. They have superior technology and a more enlightened culture than Earth, but even so, they…

  • There Exists No Loom

    Upon this age, that never speaks its mind, This furtive age, this age endowed with power To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find What swims before his prow, what swirls behind – Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,…

  • AI Tutoring

    I’m increasingly encountering the belief that capable leaders have become rarer or have even disappeared. While most often observed in the political realm, some argue that there are also fewer scientific leaders. Erik Hoel makes the point that today there are fewer geniuses of any description. I don’t think it’s…

  • Pale Blue Dot: A Very Small Stage

    From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived…

  • Pale Blue Dot: A Restless Few

    For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has…

  • Gagarin

    Gagarin says, in ecstasy, he could have gone on forever he floated ate and sang and when he emerged from that one hundred eight minutes off the surface of the earth he was smiling Then he returned to take his place among the rest of us from all that division…

  • The Paleobiology Database

    In every way (except responsiveness) superior to the map of California fossil sites I’ve previously made: https://paleobiodb.org/navigator/

  • Power Table

    The only sort of power that ultimately matters is of course physical power, defined as energy per unit time. I’m not used to thinking about power and lack any concept of what a watt or kilowatt is. To remedy this, I made the table below. A more comprehensive but also…

  • Goodhart’s Law

    When a metric becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good metric. In other words, if a system can be gamed, it will be. For example, the advancement of academics being determined by how much they publish creates an incentive to ignore quality and to publish a many low-impact…

  • Of Ants and Men

    The 2015 documentary Of Ants and Men (PBS) on Edward O. Wilson is beautiful. He was a biologist connected to nature not only intellectually but also, as the documentary reveals, on a deeper, emotional level. One of the biggest scientific controversies of Wilson’s life was due to his advocacy of…

  • Conferences

    I’ve attended dozens of scientific conferences, from small meetings with 100 participants to enormous ones with 10,000. Locations include tucked-away venues like Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Wellcome Genome Campus and Asilomar, the terminal-sized conference centers of large cities like Los Angeles or Washington D.C., and university campuses, hotels and…

  • We Don’t Know

    Admitting that we do not know, and maintaining perpetually the attitude that we do not know the direction necessarily to go, permit the possibility of alteration, of thinking, of new contributions and new discoveries for the problem of developing a way to do what we want ultimately, even when we…

  • Animals in Translation

    Our senses continuously collect data including sounds, smells and visual input, but at any given time we’re consciously aware of only a tiny and heavily filtered fraction. Why is that? Why can’t our consciousness deal with a larger proportion of the input data? Why can’t we pay attention to many…

  • A Microscopic Topic

    I am a paramecium That cannot do a simple sum And it’s a rather well known fact I’m quite unable to subtract If I’d an eye, I’d surely cry About the way I multiply For though I’ve often tried and tried I do it backwards… And divide. Jack Pelutsky: A…

  • Central Limit Theorem

    Plato, despair! We prove by norms How numbers bear Empiric forms, How random wrong Will average right If time be long And error slight; But in our hearts Hyperbole Curves and departs To infinity. Error is boundless. Nor hope nor doubt, Though both be groundless, Will average out. J.V. Cunningham:…

  • Exploration

    We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time T. S. Eliot: Exploration

  • Placebo

    No can do. I am doctor not of medicine, but Latinity. I am the future, singular, indicative. The first person. What do you take me for? If is a real condition. If I’m a pill, then you are double blind. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Spoonful of sugar,…

  • Nature’s Infinite Book of Secrecy

    In nature’s infinite book of secrecy A little I can read. William Shakespeare

  • The Righteous Mind

    I know I’m late to the party, but Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, published in 2012, contains some important ideas. Haidt’s assertion that “anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason” (page 104) neatly summarizes the book’s first part. What he means is that we don’t make judgements based on reason.…

  • Daniel Dennett Has Died

    Philosopher and scientist Daniel Dennett is dead. His book on Intuition Pumps, or thought experiments, is one I hope to return to here.

  • Map of California Fossil Sites

    I made an interactive map of California fossil sites based on data by Don Kenney.

  • The Maniac

    Biographies are a waste of time. There’s little to be gleaned from the lives of those we admire. The details of someone’s childhood or their private lives rarely hold any explanatory power for their achievements. If there is any generalizable insight, it can be summarized in a few paragraphs. The…

  • Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve

    This is an unusual book. I’m not aware of any other attempt to analyze literature using big data and statistics. For example: Ernest Hemingway, together with the world’s English teachers, warns against the use of adverbs. He argues that adverbs, especially those that end in –ly, are a sign of…

  • The Anthropic Principle, But Even More So

    It didn’t have to be this way. The laws of nature could’ve been different so that life wouldn’t have emerged, humans wouldn’t have evolved, and there’d be no-one to wonder why things turned out this way. Yet we exist, and think, and observe the universe. Therefore, the universe could only…

  • Spiders on Drugs

    Effect of different drugs on cobwebs

  • Improbable Destinies

    Is there such a thing as destiny? How resilient are outcomes to changed starting conditions? This was the question that Stephen Jay Gould asked in his 1989 book Wonderful Life. If we travelled back in time to the Precambrian period before animals were a thing and restarted the tape of life, the kind of…

  • Can AI Solve Science?

    To this ultimate question we’re going to see that the answer is inevitably and firmly no (Stephen Wolfram).

  • The Second Kind of Impossible

    Short version: Paul J. Steinhardt’s The Second Kind of Impossible is the best science book I’ve read in a long time. Long version: Crystals are formed by identical, neatly arranged building blocks. One example are the stacked water molecules that make up ice crystals. Quasicrystals are different and Penrose tiling is a…