Science
Talking About Mengele’s Skull
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(via Richard Helmer)
What you see is from an article over at Cabinet Magazine about the identification of Josef Mengele, Nazi Experimentalist, from his skeleton found in Brazil in 1985. It is a moving story of how science allowed the positive identification of one of the world’s most horrendous war criminals, and how science allowed many people’s minds, who had been scared that the skeleton was a fake, to be put to rest. It is also happens to be the story of the real beginning of the age of forensic science in criminal investigation and trials. Without the methods and techniques used, and explained cogently to the public, for this investigation forensic science would not be what it is today.
Clyde Snow speaks of bones in a rather flamboyant manner. In the manner of a rhetorician employing the trope of prosopopoeia—the figure that artificially endows inanimate objects with a voice—he refers to skeletons as if they were both alive and speaking, and gifted with a special capacity for truthfulness: “Bones make good witnesses. Although they speak softly, they never lie and they never forget.”24
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Using tables and formulas he had developed of the topography of skulls based on work with hundreds of them, Helmer enhanced the skull to add the thickness and shape of the face which had disappeared with death. Using thirty separate pins, each secured with clay to the surface of the skull and tipped with a white marker at the point where the skin would have been, he recreated the missing contours. This allowed him to compare the skull and the photographs “to the closest millimeter.”26
As Joyce and Stover tell the story, the pin-studded skull and the photos were then displayed side-by-side in front of
two high-resolution video cameras
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Having satisfied himself, Helmer presented the work to his colleagues. “The pin-cushion skull came into focus on the television monitor with the photo superimposed onto it. The sight was unnerving. It took a moment for the eye and brain to process the peculiar image. They were seeing a human as no one in life could, as if the skin were a ghostly film.”28 The match was perfect. It was the image that would convince the public, a photograph wrapped over an object, an image of life over an image of death.29
Love the Science and Science the Love
0The Unicorns of the Hydrocalypse have brought us this wonderful video about what really goes on in Science Labs:
If The Story is Good Enough They Will ALL Listen
0One of the main reasons I got into podcasting was because I was interested in the stories behind mathematics. I have approached this in a few different ways with the podcasts. With Combinations and Permutations we cover a specific topic and in between the tangential conversational strands and crazy non sequiturs I try to make sure that the story of the topic, be it a mathematician, a problem, or a discipline, comes out. With Strongly Connected Components I am more than anything else there to find out the story of the person I am interviewing , the story of why they do and the story of what they do. The story has been the most important way of making humans understand the world around them for the longest time and I think it may be the way to once again make people engage with the sciences and mathematics, if we can make our story interesting enough people will pay attention again and, not only that, they will want to understand. I am not the only person who thinks this thankfully; Randy Olson, in The Scientist, recently wrote an article entitled Tell Me A Story of Science discussing this very topic. From the article:
But maybe you’ll say, “Storytelling is just for fiction.” Sorry, but that’s not true. This is a shortcoming of today’s science education—the failure to make scientists realize they are storytellers, every bit as much as novelists. They just don’t like to admit it, or really even think about it. They tend to think stories mean Star Wars and Harry Potter. The truth is, stories are as equally important in nonfiction as fiction. They are the way we understand our world.
4 Billion Dolalrs for Math and Science, I say Yes Please
0There is more information available for the Obama Administrations “Race to the Top” to help better fund math and science education. The real kicker to this information is a pledge of over 4 billion dollars for this boost to math and science education. The money alone will not be enough but if used correctly and applied in inspired ways it really could help the USA regain some of its lost standing as an innovator and creator of science. From a ComputerWorld article on the “Race to the Top”:
Obama is seeking to improve math and science education through a number of initiatives, the largest of which is a $4.35 billion for the “Race to the Top” fund announced this month.
The money, which comes from the $787 billion stimulus, is designed to create incentives for schools that develop science, technology, and engineering and mathematics programs, known collectively as STEM subjects.
Among the things the White House will do to encourage students is to hold an annual science fair that will bring together winners of science fair contest nationally. Obama said students who design the best experiment, hardware or software deserve the same recognition that athletes receive. (ComputerWorld via IntMath)
And The World is Still Here
0Huge, and fantastic, news: The LHC has had COLLISIONS.
Geneva, 23 Nov (THAINDIAN NEWS) Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the lookout for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb
I wish to also point out that no black hole was created that swallowed us up and the earth did not just explode, in other words the LHC did not kill us. YAY!
President says Science is Fun
0It is nice to know that the president of my country has decided that math education is as important as I think it is:
President Obama has launched an “Educate to Innovate” campaign to improve the participation and performance of America’s students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This campaign will include efforts not only from the Federal Government but also from leading companies, foundations, non-profits, and science and engineering societies to work with young people across America to excel in science and math.
See more on Educate to Innovate
OK, Academia Does Have Some Advantages
0Randall Munroe over at the amazing and wonderful webcomic XKCD, which if you have not read all of his comics you should really go over and start with comic 1 panel 1, posted this great comic explaining the differences between an incredible result in the academic spehere and the private sector making, at least in my mind, a rather good argument for the worth of working for the academy.
Important Architectural Information
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Now I just need to know how to build my Black Hole Shelter for when the LHC finally comes online.(via boingboing)
Fossil Fuels Kill
0Turns out that fossil fuels are dangerous even when we are not around to burn them:
FOSSIL fuels have a new crime to live down. A frenzy of hydrocarbon burning at the end of the Permian period may have led to the most devastating mass extinction Earth has ever seen, as explosive encounters between magma and coal released more carbon dioxide in the course of a few years than in all of human history.
Around 250 million years ago, the so-called “Great Dying” saw 70 per cent of species wiped out on land and 95 per cent in the oceans. A clue to what may have triggered this disaster lies in solidified magma from this time, which is widespread in an area of Siberia where coal is also abundant.
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“You’re basically going to have something like a fire fountain every few kilometres or so over this vast moonscape that’s erupting, with flares going high into the air and columns of smoke and fly ash,” says Sleep. The ground would be “covered with coal tar and coal fragments and pieces of basalt”, he adds.
Dust injected into the stratosphere would cause drastic cooling. That would quickly switch to warming as the dust settled out of the atmosphere, leaving nothing to counteract the greenhouse effect of the increased CO2. The climate might have swung between heating and cooling as new eruptions injected yet more dust into the stratosphere. “The climate is just going to go completely unstable,” says Sleep, who presented the idea last month at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon. (New Scientist via Bruce Sterling’s Twitter)
