Science Outreach - You're Doing it Right

I'm sure most of my readers will have already seen this (considering I found it from my perusals of PZ Myer's blog Pharyngula), but I still couldn't resist posting it. As my girlfriend remarked, "I love a good boy band singing about science."

Monday Morning Quotations

"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men,
Gang aft a-gley."
-Robert Burns, Scottish poet, 1759-96

"In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling... In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling." - William S. Burroughs, American novelist, 1914-97

"One religion is as true as another." - Robert Burton, English clergyman and scholar, 1577-1640

Vater werden ist nicht schwer,
Vater sein dagegen sehr.
"Becoming a father is not difficult,
Being a father is."
-Wilhelm Busch, German satirical poet and illustrator, 1832-1908

An Absolutely Terrible Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode

I thought I had seen every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation over the course of my childhood. Apparently, that is not true. Over the past little while I have been slowly re-watching the series, and I am on the final stretch with the seventh season. Tonight I watched the episode entitled Sub Rosa. It was kind of like watching what I imagine would happen if television writers routinely trolled the internet looking for creepy fan-fiction rather than writing the episodes themselves. Not that I think anyone will mind, but spoilers are ahead.

Apparently, Dr. Crusher's grandmother lives on a weird colony that tries its best to emulate Scotland in the 1800s. While I figured that is what the holodeck is for, I guess it is the future when people can do all sorts of frivolously ridiculous things, including making an entire planet into a Scotland emulation, so perhaps we can forgive the setting. The episode doesn't really have much to do with any of the characters beyond Crusher, with Data, Riker, and Geordi providing minor plot bits. Picard and Troi have slightly larger roles, but their roles are unfortunately mainly served as foils for Crusher's weird and creepy trans-generational ghostly love affair. You see, Crusher's grandmother had a secret lover named Ronin who was actually an "aniphasic" alien who lived in a candle (a regular candle, but somehow it turns out to actually be a plasma candle). Now that Crusher's grandmother is dead, he seduces her. If the story of someone's grandmother's lover seducing them is not awkward enough, he repeatedly tells her how much he loves her within the context of loving her just like he loved her grandmother, and her great grandmother before that, all the way back through the generations.

I not only have no idea who pitched this storyline in the writing room, but I cannot imagine how anyone who heard it thought, "Grandmother's ghost lover seducing Dr. Crusher - how is that not television gold?" Apparently there is another episode that I also have not seen (or at least have no memory of seeing) coming up that is even worse than this one, but I have a hard time imagining that. Also, I realise that this post in no way holds any sort of worthwhile news or interesting bits about science, but I felt the need to share my pain.

Puzzle Number 9: Epic Word Scramble

In a QI episode from the second season (or, I should say second series, since I am talking about a British show), Jimmy Carr did one of the most impressive things I have seen on television. Given a jumble of the following letters: A A A A A B B C E E E E E E G H I I K K K L L L M M M N O O O P R R S S S S S T T T T T T U U W, he was able to use them all to create the message "PUT SMARTIES TUBES ON CATS LEGS, MAKE THEM WALK LIKE A ROBOT" (of course, he did not have a comma, but I think that is something that he can be forgiven for). In recognition of such an impressive feat, I have created two sets of letters to be unscrambled. In this case, I have started with an intelligible sentence, so you can be assured that it is possible to use all the letters. If you are unable to, however, I will also accept solutions that simply use as many letters as you can manage for partial credit, with bonus given to amusing and interesting creations. If you are not particularly skilled at anagrams (like me), I will be posting two sets of hints in the next week. The first hint set will give the number of words that my original sentence contains, and the second will give the number of letters in each word as well as the punctuation between them. The first hint set should come out on Wednesday, so if you want to be really impressive and solve this without hints, you will have to get your solutions in before then. Note: Since you can add punctuation, contractions are acceptable (for example, CANT could be used not only as the word cant, but also to denote can't).

1.) A A C G G H H H I I I L M N N N O O R S T T U W Y

2.) A A A E E E E E E E E E F G H H H H I I N O O P P R R R R S S S S S T T T T T V Y

Hints: Puzzle Number 9 Hint One, Puzzle Number 9 Hint Two

Note: Solutions to the puzzle can be found here.

Avoiding Neuronal Tangle

Every so often, I run across a study that elegantly elucidates a solution to a problem I failed to think of, but which in retrospect appears to be a very serious problem I really ought to have wondered about. When this happens, it is both exciting (I am learning something really neat, after all) and disheartening (why didn't I even wonder about that?) at the same time. A recent study pointed out and summarized by Neuroskeptic resulted in such an experience for me.

Since Neuroskeptic has already summarized the study quite nicely and readably, I will only briefly explain what was going on here to convince you it is worth following the link. Basically, the problem that I failed to wonder about was how branching neuronal processes managed to avoid entangling themselves and mainly forming self-connections. I had wondered about the problems of axonal guidance, particularly in relation to long distance connections, but I also should have wondered about the lack of tangling in the dendritic trees and local axonal processes as well. I also knew chemical markers would be involved, as previous evidence for chemical markers guiding axon growth has been found. However, somehow developing a unique chemical marker for each neuron to keep it from entangling itself seems like something that would be rather difficult to do. Fascinatingly, though, researchers from the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA have found evidence for a remarkably elegant solution. I highly recommend reading Neuroskeptic's summary and checking out the paper itself.

Ongoing Goodyear Problems

Over the summer, I mentioned that the Canadian Science Minister Gary Goodyear had stuck his ignorant nose into an academic conference because he was worried that there would be some speakers who were anti-Israeli at the conference. As I pointed out at the time, when you have a conference on something as contentious as Middle Eastern politics, most likely you are going to have a variety of viewpoints which include both anti-Israeli sentiments and anti-Palestinian. After my initial reporting of the incident, though, I did not hear anything more. Science recently had an update article on the matter. While the information was rather scant in the article, it is at least nice to see that the matter is still being pursued (and, as I guessed, Goodyear appears to be throwing his weight behind things for ideological reasons... shocking, I know, for someone who thinks belief in evolution is a religious question).

I also thought it was kind of funny that the author of the article originally thought York University was in the United Kingdom... I suppose it must be kind of confusing, given that the vast majority of our universities in southern Ontario ripped off at least a couple names from British schools.

Fascinating Art

I have only recently been made aware of the artist Liu Bolin, a modern Chinese artist who paints himself into pictures. This is apparently done without photo editing tricks, and is quite impressive. I wonder what would some of these shots would look like when physically at the scene, and I am also quite curious what he uses to paint himself.


You can read an article about Liu Bolin, and then view this more extensive gallery of his work.