The U.S. Naval Observatory has a lunar eclipse computer that you can use to get the viewing times and locations in your town this evening.
Some helpful concepts here.
Enjoy!
Category: science
A Real “Natural Experiment”
Evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson provides a fascinating description of how we can learn about evolution from geographic separations in "The Repeater" at The Wild Side, her newly resumed blog at The New York Times.
Her writing is lively and fascinating. Add her to your bookmarks, and think about this book
The Fish Within Us
That title belongs to a fascinating article in Newsweek by Jeneen Interlandi on some parts of the history and the current state of human genetic evolution. Focusing on the work of Neil Shubin:
But while world headlines marveled at the idea that our own hands were somehow descended from these fish fingers, Shubin began exploring the anatomical vestiges of our previous lives. If we evolved from fish, he reasoned, our body design should look more convoluted than rational. Over the next few years, he found ample evidence to support his claim: our veins meander inefficiently, our knees give out easily under the weight of bodies they were not designed to support and our brains are clumsy upgrades from earlier models.
I suppose that proponents of "intelligent design" must now confront the unintelligent parts of our makeup. (There are earlier discussions of this problem in, for example, The Blind Watchmaker.)
Shifting to the work of Henry Harpending, the article then considers the pace of evolution today:
The findings have turned some traditional assumptions on their heads. For decades, biologists believed that human evolution had ground to a halt about 10,000 years ago, when the dawn of agriculture and technology gave us unprecedented control over our environments and made us masters of our own destiny. But rather than slow evolution down, those advances, Harpending says, enabled humanity to hit the accelerator. With better technology, our ranks have swelled from millions to billions. This has driven us to colonize more and different regions of the globe. More people mean more mutations, and more environments mean more things to adapt to. Migration into the Northern Hemisphere, for example, has favored adaptation to cold weather and less skin pigmentation for better sunlight absorption.
Enjoy!
Econophysics
Picking up on the theme of the post on neuroeconomics, another field attempting to build bridges to economics is physics, in the form of Econophysics. Quoting from its Wikipedia page, econophysics applies ...
theories and methods originally developed by physicists in order to solve problems in economics, usually those including uncertainty or stochastic elements and nonlinear dynamics. Its application to the study of financial markets has also been termed statistical finance referring to its roots in statistical physics.
For more background, see this site or this blog. The payoff would be similar to the case of neuroeconomics--if you can link the economic problem to an analogous problem in the natural sciences that has been more thoroughly investigated, then the results of those investigations can be brought to bear in the economic problem as well. It may not be the most promising avenue of research, but academia thrives on experimentation and risk-taking in the realm of ideas.
The January 2008 issue of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control is a special issue on "Applications of Statistical Physics in Economics and Finance." In their introduction, J. Doyne Farmer and Thomas Lux discuss some of the reasons why the field has been slow to catch on among "mainstream" economists:
The contact between econophysics and economics has, however, been hampered by several factors. The very different culture of scientific publishing in physics and economics has generally prevented publications from econophysics in economics journals. This is partly a matter of style of presentation, but it also reflects fundamental differences in the epistemology of the two fields, in particular different views about the objectives of science. Physicists have a very different view about how work should be presented, and in particular about mathematical rigor (which they generally disdain). In addition, physics has a laissez-faire attitude about publication, believing that it is better to err on the side of letting as many new ideas in as possible, and to let the market eventually decide what is good and what is bad through a Darwinian process that selects what is useful and forgets what is not. As a result there are many econophysics papers of poor quality, which shocks economists. When combined with the fact that the best econophysics papers are published in journals that most economists never read, this body of work remains almost unknown outside the sphere of econophysics.
Communication between physicists and economists has been poor. Physicists are perhaps the only group of scientific professionals who are even more arrogant than economists, and in many cases the arrogance and emotions of both sides have been strongly on display. Many physicists have given the impression that they think that economists know little or nothing about their business, at the same time that they are asking for admission into their club. Many economists have reacted with apprehension to what they view as an attempted invasion by aliens, and have scornfully rejected any work by physicists out of hand, without bothering to have even a passing familiarity with it.
There seems to be a lot of truth in that assessment, and perhaps some of it is also applicable to the field of neuroeconomics as well. If you are interested in the links between economics and the sciences, the first article in that special issue, "Classical Thermodynamics and Economic General Equilibrium Theory," by Eric Smith and Duncan K. Foley, seems to make progress on establishing the parallels across economics and the relevant natural science. (See this working paper if you cannot access the journal directly.)
Let Me Not Rephrase That
From the preface to the second (1996) edition of The Blind Watchmaker
Authors naturally hope that their books will have lasting rather than ephemeral impact. But any advocate, in addition to putting the timeless part of his case, must also respond to contemporary advocates of opposing, or apparently opposing, points of view. There is a risk that some of these arguments, however hotly they may rage today, will seem terribly dated in decades to come. The paradox has often been noted that the first edition of The Origin of Species makes a better case than the sixth. This is because Darwin felt obliged, in his later editions, to respond to contemporary criticisms of his first edition, criticisms which now seem so dated that the replies to them merely get in the way, and in places even mislead. Nevertheless, the temptation to ignore fashionable contemporary criticisms that one suspects of being nine days' wonders is a temptation that should not be indulged, for reasons of courtesy not just to the critics but to their otherwise confused readers. Though I have my own private ideas on which chapters of my book will eventually prove ephemeral for this reason, the reader--and time--must judge.
Sometimes, your first argument is your best argument, and rephrasing it in response to a confused question, comment, or critique only weakens it.
From Our Friends at Scientific American
The latter refers to this study in Accident Analysis & Prevention. Here's the surprising result:
As some have noted, in percentage terms, it seems to be a small impact.
Tit for Tat
Continuing on my Richard Dawkins theme, I came across this period piece, in which Dawkins responds to some early misunderstandings about his pathbreaking work in The Selfish Gene,
As an example of this, he discusses Robert Axelrod's seminal work in the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma, in which a simple tit for tat strategy turns out to be extremely effective. The reasons for its success, as Dawkins summarizes them, are that:
- It is nice. It seeks to cooperate initially.
- It forgives quickly after retaliating.
- It is not envious. It does not measure its status in relative terms. It cannot win in an individual game against a single opponent, and it cannot do well unless other parties also cooperate.
- It is simple--easy to read and uncomplicated.
Some days, I wish those characteristics were more pervasive in the population.
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
An atheist giving a public lecture on his book, The God Delusion
Birds and Dinosaurs
Totally cool science in a recent issue of Nature, as we learn of new evidence that the pulmonary systems of dinosaurs likely resembled those of modern birds more than they did modern reptiles. From the summary in the Harvard Gazette:
"This paper shows that predatory dinosaurs had a pulmonary system with the potential to support elevated rates of metabolism, higher than what we typically associate with 'cold-blooded' reptiles," said co-author Leon P.A.M. Claessens, who received a Ph.D. from Harvard in organismic and evolutionary biology last month and will join the faculty at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., this fall. "The pulmonary system of meat-eating dinosaurs such as T. rex in fact shares many structural similarities with that of modern birds, which, from an engineering point of view, may possess the most efficient respiratory system of any living vertebrate inhabiting the land or sky."
As if avian flu didn't already have me suspicious of our winged friends.