Scientopia. BEHOLDE! Giant’s Shoulders Edition 26: Fools, Frauds, and FAILURES. Greetinges, all ye who enter here. Beholde, before you doth appear A moste unusual carnivale! And this one hath a grand moral. This speakes of fools, failures and fraudes. Those findings no longer we applaude. So some One, come ALL! Science large and smalle Right here is one displaye The good the bad, the happy the sad, old science is here today! (Also, it gives me a chance to speake like thise. So welcome one and all to the Giant's Shoulders Special Edition: Fools, Frauds, and FAILURES. Let's start with the FOOLS. Now obviously, most of these people weren't FOOLS, but they did postulate some foolish things.
For example, many people believed in the 1500's and 1600's that astrology had a lot of influence on medicine. If astrology is one major thing you think of when you think of old-timey foolish beliefs, then alchemy surely is another. And here's a foolish belief of which Sci had never heard. (It's an iguanadon, isn't it? You think the way we thought dinosaurs looked as funny? The FRAUDS.
John Grant's 'Corrupted Science' | Skulls in the Stars. While I was in a bookstore over the holidays, I stumbled across a relatively new publication by author John Grant, Corrupted Science: Fraud, ideology and politics in science. I snapped it off the bookshelf without a second thought (well, one second thought, which I'll mention below), because I'm fascinated by frauds, crackpots and crazies in the sciences. I just finished the book last night, and my highly unscientific verdict... amazing!
If you care to hear a few more details than that, look below the fold... Corrupted Science is a follow-up to Grant's earlier work, Discarded Science: Ideas that sounded good at the time, which I haven't read. Grant himself is a Hugo-award winning fantasy author, as well as a non-fiction author of books on fantasy, film and animation. Other books have touched on this subject. In a book of amazing breadth, Grant covers all these topics, and more. The last chapter is what made me snatch the book off the shelf. Neurotic Physiology. Blame Bashir for this one. In a previous post, I talked about how I wasn't yet free of academia. How it's still got hooks in me, in the form of papers that need to be published, and that won't get published until I get them out.
Bashir noted that it was like Borg. Borg, for those not familiar, are characters in the Star Trek universe. The most quoted phrase is 'resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.' Borg are partially cybernetic and act as part of a "hive" controlled by a queen. In particular, consider the character Seven of Nine, from Star Trek: Voyager. (Seven of Nine. De-assimilating from the Borg does, in a way, remind me of academia. Obviously academia does not give you cybernetic implants in grad school (though if they are, they'd BETTER come with the health plan and a decent increase in stipend).
There are so many things about academia that I have assimilated, and that, via slow and sometimes painful surgeries, I have to get rid of. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. There are HOW many types of Female Orgasm? Sci has covered a bunch of stuff in the past on the subject of female orgasm. That mysterious thing which so few appear to understand, and which always seems to be the one subject about sex that women's magazines avoid like the plague (seriously, tons of articles on how to please HIM, but nothing on how to please HER?). Anyway. hypotheses abound on the female orgasm. What it is and why we have them. And what KINDS women can have. And then. (From here) King et al. The idea behind this study actually wasn't to identify how many types of orgasm there were. What they ended up doing was taking data from a previous survey (they obtained permission from the participants) of 503 women.
They also had the women rank their PHYSICAL sensations for their orgasms, as well as where they felt the orgasm was located (deep inside, shallow, etc). They then added up the numbers for each particular orgasm, and noticed that the orgasms broke down into FOUR different types. (Yeah, I know, click to embiggen) I. Friday Weird Science: EveryBODY…Rock your BODY | Neurotic Physiology. What is Dyscalculia? How Does it Develop? Nearly everyone has heard of developmental dyslexia - a learning disorder characterized by poor reading skills despite otherwise sufficient schooling - but have you heard of developmental dyscalculia? Many people have not. Here is part 2 in a week-long series on this lesser-known learning disorder. (See part one, and a companion post on comparative numerical cognition in humans and animals at The Thoughtful Animal) If we're going to seriously discuss a developmental learning disorder, the first thing that might be done is to define it.
Prevalence studies have been carried out in various parts of the world, all with (surprise!) The manifestation of developmental dyscalculia generally changes with age and grade. The best kind of study of a developmental learning disorder is one in which the same groups of individuals are studied over the course of months or years, in what is called a longitudinal study. Image source. Shalev, R., Auerbach, J., Manor, O., & Gross-Tsur, V. (2000). What Are The Origins of Number Representation? : The Thoughtful Animal. This post considering the evolutionary origins of numerical cognition, specifically in terms of the approximation of large numbers, is meant as a companion to this week’s series on the developmental origins of numerical cognition and developmental dyscalculia, at Child’s Play.
What are the origins of number representation in the mind? Are there any innate building blocks that contribute to our understanding of mathematics and number, or must everything be learned? Number is an important domain of human knowledge. Many decisions in life are based on quantitative evidence, sometimes with life or death consequences. Figure 1: Fight or flight? By now you probably have come to expect that I’ll be arguing that there are several innate “building blocks” of cognition that give rise to more complex mathematics. Surely, humans have something unique that allows us to do things like multivariate regression and construct geometric proofs, however, but let’s start at the beginning. Figure 2: Results. On becoming Birkin and letting go of Gainsbourg. The attitude of defiance of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of their femininity.
In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that they do most obviously exist. --Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex As a scientist, I take seriously the idea that our expectations about the world shape not only our understanding and perception of it, but our engagement with it. A Coincidence Last week, I had the pleasure of reading an article in the NY Times on the social construction of gender in Afghanistan ("Facing Social Pressures, Families Disguise Girls as Boys in Afghanistan"). But -- this brings me to an altogether different point.
"Really? " Why, why, why? Speaking French like a Frenchman.