November 9, 2006
September 30, 2006
Top Science Myths
Ok, so it isn’t actually a top 10, it’s a top 20, but I liked this list of the top myths (corrected by science.) Available via Live Science, vote for your favorites.
August 12, 2006
Second to last
Science blog pharyngula has yet another disturbing post regarding attitudes about evolution. The results of a new study, indicates that Americans are lagging far behind (second only to Turkey) the rest of the world in terms of sophistication about (i.e. acceptance of) the theory of evolution. The study suggests that in addition to being uneducated on basic genetics, that science has become increasingly politicized. PZ Myers, author of the pharyngula blog, thinks that God and the Republicans are to blame.
February 24, 2006
More on Benford’s Law
Essentially, Benford’s law predicts a certain distribution of numbers – violations of that distribution indicate fabricated data. Turns out Boing Boing had a post on this just a few weeks ago. The best treatment of it is on Wolfram’s Mathworld pages, which also has an extensive bibliography (always a plus.) I’m interested in studying applications of it. Fraud detection in accounting seem to be the a use, but I don’t know how commonly used it is. Another application described in the following article as a way to detect whether random numbers are truly random (or if they are merely faked.)
February 20, 2006
Dangerous Science Experiments
For your viewing pleasure, here are some links to ‘dangerous’ science experiments.