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Professor Poliakoff Is Knighted! - Periodic Table of Videos

You're not a scientist!

bmacs27 says...

I'm sorry, but there are lots of bogus points in here. First of all, no one is arguing that the scope or impact of funded science should be anything less than great. The question is who should decide it. It seems the republicans want to take the awarding of scientific grants out of the hands of peer review, preferring that politicians micromanage the appropriation of research grants. Personally, I think that will lead to an end of basic science. Politicians are bound by their sponsors whom for the most part have an interest in public funding of applied rather than basic research.

This particular research is not about ecology or the environment, or some squishy bleeding heart first world problem. It's about the relative value of sexual and asexual reproduction. This particular snail can reproduce in either fashion, and it raises fundamental questions about when and why sexual reproduction would be preferred. It will likely lead to a deeper understanding of the genetic mechanisms that underlie sexual recombination, and how they relate to the success of progeny. Sounds like it's got some scope to me. The competition for grants is so stiff within science today that it's highly improbable that narrow research aims will be awarded. The fundamental question you need to ask yourself is "should basic science be funded, or should the only funding available be for applied science." My answer is an emphatic yes to basic science. It has proven its value beyond all doubt. Further, I personally feel that the applied work should be forced into the private sector as anything with a 5 year pay off will be funded naturally by the market anyway.

You also sing the praises of defense funding. I agree, many great discoveries have been funded by, say, DARPA. However, break it down by dollar spent. Because the money isn't allocated by peer review, but rather the whims of some brass, I personally don't feel it is efficiently allocated. Our impression when dealing with ONR (for example) is that they had absolutely no clue what they were interested in as a research aim, and had no clue what we were actually doing. They just thought we had some cool "high tech looking" stuff. Further, we as researchers didn't really care about their misguided scientific goals. It was sort of an unspoken understanding that we were doing cool stuff, and they had money to burn or else they wouldn't be getting anymore. All the while, the NIH is strapped with many of their institutes floating below a 10% award rate. Most of the reviewers would like to fund, say, 30-40% of the projects. Imagine if a quarter of that defense money was allocated by experts how much more efficiently it would be spent.

dirkdeagler7 said:

As someone who loves science and believe research is absolutely important, I think both sides do a horrible job of trying to address the issue. To say that seemingly insignificant research is obviously unnecessary is wrong, as much of science is built upon research never intended for the purpose at hand.

However the opposite is not always true either. Not all science and research brings enough value to the table to justify the spending to do it.

If you're trying to use "the greater good" as a measure for what solutions to use or what problems are most important, then you have to accept that even some things like ecological research or environmental issues may not cut the mustard if their scope or impact are not large enough.

I also find it interesting when people clamor to cut military spending as if they didn't understand that a lot of current technology and research is piggy backing off research done for military purposes (and some of which may be funded by military spending).

Richard Dawkins Answers Reddit Questions

Lawdeedaw says...

Science is on the right track--but people don't care. It is more about money than religion *As is everything.* Soooooo, if people do not apply science *Global warming for ex* then what does science matter?

Paper airplane demonstration of thrust and drag

Hand vs. Liquid Nitrogen and the Leidenfrost Effect

rychan says...

>> ^mentality:
>> ^rychan:
yes, per mile a commercial airliner is safer, but that's a stupid statistic. Per mile being an astronaut is extraordinarily safe, but in actuality it's outrageously dangerous.

Say you're traveling from NYC to LA. You can either drive there, or you can fly there in one trip. Which is safer? Flying would be safer, because you have to physically cover the distance from point A to point B, and you said flying is safer according to distance.
A space shuttle "travels" many miles with respect to earth as it stays in orbit. Comparing the distance a shuttle "travels" to distance covered intentionally between two terrestrial locations is a stupid point to make.
I can tell you that water has a very low electrical conductivity, but you wouldn't want to get into a bathtub with a toaster -- and rightly so, because it turns out that the dissolved minerals in tap water raise its conductivity several orders of magnitude.
Guess what also tells you that getting into a bathtub with a toaster is dangerous because water with ions in it conducts? Science.
I really don't get the point that you're trying to make. Are you trying to say that the implementation of science is scary because statistics can be manipulated to show that cars are safer than planes or vice versa; or that a toaster in bathwater is bad? Or are you saying that applied science is scary because it cannot eliminate risk, only greatly reduce it? For example, your risk of dying from not performing the procedure would be far greater than the risk of dying from the anesthetics.


People don't think about distances when they step on a plane. They think "am I going to step off this plane alive?". The fact that the planes are covering more distance is as inconsequential as the spacecraft covering more distance. The fact that it would be even more dangerous to spend two full days driving the distance is inconsequential. They're stepping into a situation an order of magnitude more dangerous than when they step into their average car trip, so they're right to be scared. Of course, that fear is more based on lack of control and discomfort than statistics, but I hate people who try and calm you with statistics, because they're not strongly on the side of airplanes.

I'm saying science is great and reproducible, our human interface with science is often unreliable, because the real world and the human body have thousands of variables that science can't account for. And for that reason I'd be hesitant to test something like the Leidenfrost effect by dipping my hand in liquid Nitrogen (if I hadn't seen someone else do it, or maybe even then). Who knows, maybe if you sweat a lot and your skin is salty, if you have on nail polish, if you have on rings, etc... then something goes terribly wrong.

Hand vs. Liquid Nitrogen and the Leidenfrost Effect

mentality says...

>> ^rychan:
yes, per mile a commercial airliner is safer, but that's a stupid statistic. Per mile being an astronaut is extraordinarily safe, but in actuality it's outrageously dangerous.


Say you're traveling from NYC to LA. You can either drive there, or you can fly there in one trip. Which is safer? Flying would be safer, because you have to physically cover the distance from point A to point B, and you said flying is safer according to distance.

A space shuttle "travels" many miles with respect to earth as it stays in orbit. Comparing the distance a shuttle "travels" to distance covered intentionally between two terrestrial locations is a stupid point to make.

I can tell you that water has a very low electrical conductivity, but you wouldn't want to get into a bathtub with a toaster -- and rightly so, because it turns out that the dissolved minerals in tap water raise its conductivity several orders of magnitude.

Guess what also tells you that getting into a bathtub with a toaster is dangerous because water with ions in it conducts? Science.

I really don't get the point that you're trying to make. Are you trying to say that the implementation of science is scary because statistics can be manipulated to show that cars are safer than planes or vice versa; or that a toaster in bathwater is bad? Or are you saying that applied science is scary because it cannot eliminate risk, only greatly reduce it? For example, your risk of dying from not performing the procedure would be far greater than the risk of dying from the anesthetics.

Op Plowshare: using nuclear explosions to build stuff

Memorare says...

Film gives a good glimpse of life before the cultural revolution of the 60's. This vision for applied science and technology is also what made kennedy's push for a man on the moon possible. 2:25 Guys with crewcuts, pocket protectors, slide rules and blackboards makin stuff happen!

The Atheist Delusion

Memorare says...

i like the self referential illustration "proof" God <-> Bible <-> God.

The only drawback to all these videos is that since the pro-God argument is so weak, juvenile, simplistic and easy to defeat, the sarcastic arguments made against it become repetitive and boring.

btw the guy needs to take his own advice and apply Science and Reason to his examples - the reference to unicorns is wrong, the centuries old mistranslation was due to lack of knowledge of ancient Hebrew. The correct translation reads:

8 He ranges the hills for his pasture
and searches for any green thing.

9 Will the wild ox consent to serve you?
Will he stay by your manger at night?

10 Can you hold him to the furrow with a harness?
Will he till the valleys behind you?


As for the giants reference, Genesis 6 IS very bizarre, but again "giants" is a mis-transliteration of ancient hebrew which has no english equivalent to convey what the original author meant. Yet, the correct word does still seem to refer to some non-human being...

4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days — and also afterward — when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

Or does it? In old hebrew grammatical structure who does "they" refer to? - 'the sons of god' or 'The Nephilim', and who or what exactly was meant by The Nephilim, or "the sons of god" for that matter. Is it literal, figurative, poetic, or a cultural euphamism now long since lost?

Girl spins on escalator

xxovercastxx says...

>> ^oxdottir:
[...] I created the engineering channel partly out of frustration that there was no appropriate venue for cool gadgets, cool use of technology, and discussions of same. [...] Which doesn't of course, keep you from being snippy, but that's the interwebs.


And I would enjoy a home for gadgets and interesting technology. This video is just someone being goofy on an escalator. Maybe it's what you had it mind when you created the channel; as you say, only you know that for sure; but it's not what I think of when I think "engineering". If there was some explanation of said "matched linear forces" and perhaps ways they are put to more practical use, then I'd think engineering. "Practical ends" is the key part of the definition of engineering. You may argue she's applying science and math principals here, but there's no practical application in sight.

There's no snipping here. I'm just saying categories are pointless if they're not well defined.

Enemies of Reason - Part Two

Memorare says...

From early in the video - the reason superstition is gaining ground is because:

A) It's easy to understand and therefore to believe in. Things like "I Know that I Know that I Know" and stuff about angels and supernatural realms are easy to grasp.

and

B) Science is becoming Damn Hard to grasp even for educated laymen who bother to make the effort.

I mean who the phuk actually understands carbon nanotubes, or electron/hole flow, or genetics, or quantum physics, or the rings of Uranus or damn near anything that crosses the Science News wire these days. Even Applied Science has advanced so far beyond the =capability= of the ordinary guy to understand that many people have simply given up trying.

edit: oh and i recall seeing a tv special on Hawking years ago where he was asked "do you believe in god", after a bit of cosmological hemming and hawing he finally said no.

HowTo Cook Crispy High Roast Chicken

winkler1 says...

Interesting perspective, djsunkid.

I like ATK's critical thinking - showing the results and conclusions of trying different things. Talking about what they tried, and debugging the cooking process - which exposes the underlying principles. The Equipment Corners/taste tests are fun too. Empirical and observational.. applied science, really.

What I love about this recipe is taking simple everyday ingredients and tools -- nothing exotic or expensive -- and making something insanely good in an hour. Do you know other recipes like that, which are within the reach of non-chefs?

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