Tag Archives: Science

Are you more scientifically literate than the average American?

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the-stupid-it-burnsThe state of science education in the United States is appalling and it’s only getting worse. Thanks to stupid policies such as the No Child Left Behind Act which places an exaggerated emphasis on testing to determine whether kids are learning anything resulting in schools “teaching to the test” and cuts to science education over the years, most people these days fall far short on basic scientific knowledge. It doesn’t help that there has been a systematic attempt by the Far Right in this country to undermine the teaching of well established scientific theories such as Evolution. Is it any wonder that the Discovery, History, and Science channels are resorting more and more to running shows like Ancient Aliens and The Supernaturalist?

It’s helpful to understand just how bad things have gotten so the folks at The Pew Research Center take the time every so often to poll Americans with a simple science quiz to see how they do. When I say simple, I mean ridiculously simple. There are 13 questions and only one of them made me pause for more than half a second to think about the answer.

You can take the quiz yourself here: Do you know more about science and technology than the average American? Go ahead and take it before proceeding with the rest of this entry. I’ll wait.

Done? OK, how’d you do? I got 13 out of 13 correct. There were several questions that I couldn’t believe they were seriously asking. Surely everyone got all of these questions correct, yes? According to the results I scored better than 93% of the Public and the same as only 7% of other quiz takers.

PewScienceQuizResults

Granted I’m probably more scientifically literate than the average person just because it’s a topic I’m interested in, but it’s not like I spend all my time studying science books nor are these questions in any way esoteric. The vast majority of them were laughably simplistic. If you’re paying attention at all you should get all 13 right.

When you get into the demographic breakdowns of the quiz it gets a little more interesting. Men did better than women on most of the questions except for those related to health. Generally speaking, the more education you have the better you’re likely to do — “collage graduate” scored better than “some college” which was better than “high school” — but it was surprising that only 20% of folks know which gas makes up the majority of the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s middle school science class for crying out loud. And the older you are the more likely you are to score low (probably because you’re beyond the point of giving a shit).

So what do we do to fix this problem? Hey, how about we get rid of that stupid No Child Left Behind program and allow teachers to, you know, teach and then properly fund education and science initiatives?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Like that has a chance in hell of happening.

And now the unstoppable force vs. immovable object argument solved. Kinda.

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Wow! It’s a good day for science videos tackling age-old brain stumpers. Earlier today we had one that took on the Chicken or the Egg question and now here’s one that deals with the old mind bender of what would happen when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object:

I just tickles me pink that we live in a day and age when we not only have almost all of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, but that there are folks out there who are applying science to silly questions and sharing the results with the rest of us.

Finally, an answer to the Chicken or the Egg question.

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This is one of the things I love about science. It can take a relatively silly question like the old one about whether a chicken or an egg was first to come into existence and apply a little thought to it along with our understanding of theories such as evolution and put forth an answer to a seemingly impossible question.

Check it:

What I like most about this video is how it points out how ambiguous the original question really is: The answer depends in part on how you define your terms. It also highlights one of the problems with dealing with reality when we have a tendency to think in absolute terms.

Thinking in absolute terms is one of the problems I think Evolution deniers have. “I’ll believe in evolution when I see a dog give birth to kittens” is one of the common arguments you’ll hear from them. Evolution doesn’t work that way. It’s the result of the accumulation of small changes over long periods of time.

In the evolution of, say, the wolf into what we know today as the domesticated dog there’s no one point along the line where you can point and say that’s definitively where it stopped being a wolf and started being a dog. It doesn’t help that there isn’t a “line” to point to because pups in a litter are not clones of each other. Each one has its own small mutations that make it slightly different from its parents and siblings. Each batch of pups starts a bunch of different potential branches which, depending on if they survive and manage to breed themselves, produces that many more potential branches with their own mutations. That’s why we call it “the tree of life” and not “the single file line of life”.

Given enough time you will eventually get different, but related animals. Given even more time you’ll get much more different animals that can be difficult to tell are related to something in the past (e.g. birds being the descendants of dinosaurs). That’s apparently hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around. Hence you get silly questions like: Which came first? The chicken or the egg?

I was going to post this sooner, but…

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I’m a major procrastinator. Have been for much of my life. It’s one of those things about myself that I keep meaning to improve on, right after this next turn of Civilization 5 is done.Or this episode of a TV show I’m watching (for the fifth time) finishes.

Thankfully I’m not alone in my failing and science has been working out why so many of us can’t seem to get a start on those New Year resolutions we made before the next new year rolls around:

I’ll probably try a couple of the suggestions in that video to see if they help me at all…

…just as soon as I hit level 90 in World of Warcraft.

The Universe is a stunningly big place.

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If you find yourself needing a little perspective today then take 2 minutes to watch the following YouTube video:

Now consider this: Those dots aren’t individual stars. They’re individual galaxies.

This animated flight through the universe was made by Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins University with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins. There are close to 400,000 galaxies in the animation, with images of the actual galaxies in these positions (or in some cases their near cousins in type) derived from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7. Vast as this slice of the universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0.1, corresponding to roughly 1.3 billion light years from Earth. SDSS Data Release 9 from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by Berkeley Lab scientists, includes spectroscopic data for well over half a million galaxies at redshifts up to 0.8 — roughly 7 billion light years distant — and over a hundred thousand quasars to redshift 3.0 and beyond.

I find this both awe inspiring and a little sad. That’s just a small slice of the universe we know about and it is mind bendingly huge on its own. When you stop to consider the distances between those galaxies it’s hard not to be awed by it.

And that’s also what makes me a little sad. Proxima Centauri is the next closest star to our solar system and it is roughly 4.24 light years away pretty much putting it out of our reach for visiting unless we find some way to bend the laws of physics. The closest known galaxy to ours is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy which is roughly 25,000 light years away from the Sun. That’s a difficult number to fathom on its own. When you realize that a light year is 5.87849981 × 1012 miles (roughly 6 trillion miles) it becomes even more so.

Now consider how close everything looked in that video. There’s just tons of places to go and see! Except that you’re looking at literally billions of light years of distance which means we’ll probably never see any of it up close. We’ll be lucky if we ever make it to Proxima Centauri given the distance involved, going to a neighboring galaxy is likely to forever remain a dream of science fiction writers. Not that NASA isn’t still considering the possibility, but the challenges of just getting to our neighbor star are overwhelming.

So much stuff out there and no real chance of seeing it. Guess I’ll have to settle for watching sci-fi movies for the time being.

Jesus fucking Christ, we’re on the Moon.

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Yesterday was the 43rd anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing back in 1969. I was only two at the time, but I seem to recall watching it on television in that weird way you remember things you were too young to recall because everyone you’ve ever known has told you about it so many times.

As I recall, it went something like this:

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s an accurate record of the first words ever said on the Moon.

New Mayan discovery shows they didn’t think world would end this year.

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I’ve said before that the only thing you can conclude about the Mayan calendar stopping on December 21st, 2012 is that it is time to get a new Mayan calendar. Yet there are still plenty of people out there who cling to the idea that it’s significant in establishing when the world will end.

Now archaeologists have found new evidence that the Mayans certainly didn’t think the world would end at that time after discovering a mural in the ancient city Xultún which included dates stretching well past the end of the calendar everyone is so worked up about:

Unprecedented Maya Mural Found, Contradicts 2012 “Doomsday” Myth

One is a lunar table, and the other is a “ring number”—something previously known only from much later Maya books, where it was used as part of a backward calculation in establishing a base date for planetary cycles. Nearby is a sequence of numbered intervals corresponding to key calendrical and planetary cycles.

The calculations include dates some 7,000 years in the future, adding to evidence against the idea that the Maya thought the world would end in 2012—a modern myth inspired by an ancient calendar that depicts time starting over this year.

“We keep looking for endings,” expedition leader Saturno said in a statement. “The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It’s an entirely different mindset.”

There you go. Clear evidence the Mayans thought the world would continue on past the end of the calendar they were using. Can we please put this stupidity behind us now?

Probably not, but it was worth a shot.

James the Preacher explains why atheists are atheists. We’re too stupid to know better.

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Click to embiggen.

All these years I thought I was an atheist because I just didn’t see any evidence in support of the concept of God(s). After much critical thought and application of reason it seemed pretty logical that God, at least as described by the major religions of the world, is the result of wishful thinking and lack of understanding of the natural world.

But according to James the Preacher, it’s not possible that I used reason and logic because I’m just too stupid to do so. Also, I love sin too much to let it go:

In case you don’t want to watch the video it all boils down to the Bible says we’re fools for not believing in God (Psalm 14) and an old edition of Webster’s Dictionary defines a fool as “one destitute of reason, or of the common powers of understanding; an idiot”. Put the two together and, voila, atheists are too stupid to understand the concept that a Creation requires a Creator.

The problem with that argument is that it assumes the Universe is a creation as opposed to the results of a natural process. Certainly the dictionary James the Preacher is using would suggest that is the case as it sites “specifically, the act of bringing the universe or this world into existence” as one of the definitions of Creation, but the dictionary is not a scientific authority on the issue. Nor, for that matter, is the Bible. Still, the argument commonly used is that you can’t get something from nothing so there has to be a creator to have brought the Universe into existence and that creator is God.

We don’t know the full story of how the Big Bang happened yet, but we’re getting closer to it all the time and there’s evidence that it was a natural outcome that may not even be unique. Additionally, physics has shown us that something can spring from nothing and happens all the time in what would otherwise be considered empty space. If you have an hour to spare you can learn a lot about how the Universe could come from nothing in this talk by Lawrence Krauss on that very topic:

He has since written a book with the same title that goes further in-depth on how this is possible: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. If you spend any amount of time watching Krauss’ talk or reading his book you’ll note that he doesn’t come across as being particularly stupid yet, according to James the Preacher’s simplistic argument, he’s just this side of a drooling moron because he doesn’t believe in God.

The point being, there’s been a lot of effort and thought put into the mystery of how the Universe could come to exist via totally natural processes. On one side we have all of this research and experimentation that provides evidence that you can get something from nothing and the Universe may be a naturally occurring thing with no supernatural causes behind it. On the other hand we have a book largely written by bronze-age goat herders that says an invisible, all-powerful, all-knowing being decided one day, for no particular reason, to create the “heavens and the earth” and then created light (prior to any light sources) and then the sky and then put all the water in one spot so there would be land and then he created plants, and then stars, the sun and moon, animals of the sea and land, and finally man and it all took about a week. There’s no evidence to support that account of how the Universe came to be. None. Zero. Nada. It makes logical sense to accept the explanation that has at least some evidence backing it up, but James the Preacher says no, that makes you a fool and an idiot.

OK, I guess I’m an idiot then. At least by the definition that James the Preacher is using. I’m not going to bother with the second half of his argument — that atheists love sin — because it’s even stupider than his first argument and I’ve wasted more time on him than he deserves already. I just wanted to point out his mistaken assumption that Creation is the only possible explanation for the Universe. Not is it not the only possibility, it’s not even as well supported by the evidence than many of the other possibilities.