LAS VEGAS, NV - JANUARY 12: Vice President of Global Content Partnerships at YouTube Robert Kyncl speaks in front of an image of make-up artist and YouTube personality Michelle Phan during the Entertainment Matters keynote address at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show at the Las Vegas Hotel & Casino January 12, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES, the world's largest annual consumer technology trade show, runs through January 13 and features more than 3,100 exhibitors showing off their latest products and services to about 140,000 attendees. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Copper mining and sulfuric acid plant, Copperhill], Tenn. (LOC) (Photo credit: The Library of Congress)

SETTLING POND OF THE RICO-ARGENTINE CO. SULPHURIC ACID MILL OFFICIALS CLAIM THE SETTLING PONDS, WHICH CONTAIN IRON... - NARA - 543816 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition, painting by Cristiano Banti (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Chemist Professor Martyn Poliakoff, from the University of Nottingham, is filmed in his office for The Periodic Table of Videos project. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"Science Friday" Recommendations (Photo credit: LollyKnit)

Titrations are AWESOME!!

Making Salts: Double Replacement Reactions and Ionic Compounds

Eppur si Muove

Sometimes You Just Love Feeling Small

I saw this first on a physics site that I monitor [ LINK ] and it is yet another of the amazing time lapse sequences taken at observatories or in the desert. One can argue that it makes one feel small but I had to watch this three times ... first in amazement ... then humbled and finally grateful. Take a look but just don't be satisfied with the little image here go to the actual video to see it in all its' glory.

Posted by Mel Schriver at 9:20 AM No comments:

Friday, March 04, 2011

Friday Science Gleanings

The Chemistry Department of the University of Nottingham has a YouTube video channel where they have a video for each element of the periodic table narracted by the stereotypical chemistry professor Martyn Poliakoff. The vidoes work however because of their verisimiltude ... these vidoes are works of love.

LINK to YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos

In any event their most recent is a mash-up of the famous Lehrer "Element Song" and their narrators saying the names of the elements. It made me smile:

Saturday, February 26, 2011

I Always Thought the Chemistry Was Wrong On this Issue

It turns out the Mafia informants have been overstating the use of barrels of sulphuric acid to dispose of human bodies. As someone who has put a lot of organic material in concentrated sulphuric acid over the years I just know that the fumes, heat and reaction residue would not be an easy clean-up. So it was good to hear that someone did the actual science on the whole "body in a barrel of Sulphuric Acid" myth. Now I have to come up with a different plans to dispose of the bodies ...

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/corpse-dissolving/

(I gotta ask though how this gets tagged as "biology" by the magazine)

Eppur Si Muove

It was whispered in defiance by a tired old man who had spent his life on the near thankless task of integrating his faith with his science. We inherit his legacy to continue in the face of discouragement and opposition. We also find ourselves wanting to find the easy way out. We are truly Galileo's grandchildren.

........................................................................

Your personal position on Science and Religion is crucial as you continue on in your careers even if they are not in science. Your community, both your civil community and your faith community (even if it is just your child asking you why the sky is blue) need you to not only know the content and concepts but also the meaning and value of both Science and Religion. If you fail in this you fail in the whole reason why we have a degree from a liberal arts and science university.

if there are places in society where you as an individual with a liberal arts and science degree and a faith position will need to address the content, concepts and integration related to this course it will likely be in the following areas:

1) Evolution and the Age of the Earth, while not really covered in this course were the elephants in the room. As I said, while we need to be careful of initial positions (in that in Science were are expected to change initial positions as more data becomes available while in Religion we are often expected to fight to the death to defend a received position) it is something to think about that in the all of the history of Western culture when Religion has fundamentally disagreed on an issue that Science had a well developed database on it was never Science that had to accommodate Religion.

) Environment: Polkinghorne, Peters and Sagan have all identified this one area as an arena where both Science and Religion speak truth to each other. I do not care to identify causes. In my opinion climate change is littered with both false causalities and incorrect predictions. I will say this though: twenty years of climate change evangelical preaching did not change the behaviour of people in any significant way. Only two things in the recent past has dramatically changed people's behaviour to match what the climate-change prophets have told us to do: the spike in gas prices a couple of years ago made us reduce consumption and the ongoing financial collapse. It is my prediction that we have an open window into the correctness of the climate change models concerning anthrogenic greenhouse gases and climate change. There can be no doubt that the financial crisis has forced us to create less CO2 and green house gases. If I am right, in about five years we will know the truth about our role in climate change.

But then again, who cares about causality? What is clear at this point is that climate change is happening. It is also clear, from the climate models that I have read, that Canada will be in a unique position to weather this change. We are blessed with water, space and natural resources. The best decision you ever made was to be born in Canada at the end of the 20th century.

In any event, the world will be coming to Canada hungry, naked and destitute. What will you do?

Ethics and Morality: In your lifetime we will have children born in artificial wombs, clones and drones (clones without consciousness created for spare parts). Our society is not ready for the ethical and moral decisions that it will have to make as Science and Technology race onward.

Science and Religion

The essay that we looked was written by Sagan and published by his wife after his death in the book "Billions and Billions". It marked an interesting stage in Sagan's career where he realized that despite a life spent building a trusted public persona he had not been able to touch the core identity and values of the people he was addressing. Thus he began to try to find common ground with the "religious tribe" (as he called them).

The latest in this series is the mash-up of Carl's words from Pale Blue Dot (another book where he discussed his successful attempt to get NASA to turn Voyager around and take one last photo of Earth while it was still visible).

It is worth listening to.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

This Will Rock Your Worldview

Of all the things that have happened recently in the interaction of Science and Religion this one has the potential for making a splash in the popular conscience. Most of us are familiar with the broad outlines of the Drake Equation. In short, the equation takes the stunning number of stars out there and uses a series of probability multipliers to determine the number of civilizations out there that are co-incident with our time. The cat fight is in setting the values for the multipliers.

So yesterday, a space telescope was launched that will spend a long, long time looking at one small patch of sky that is rich in stars. By monitoring the brightness of these stars and determining if the variations are periodic, the astronomers can determine the characteristic of the planets that circle the stars. This is not new but the sensitivity of the methods used have gotten finer and finer. We are now at the point where it might be possible to see Earth like planets pass between us and their primary stars.

LINK TO ARTICLE

So why will this rock our worldview? Well, I guess it depends on your thinking. This study should give us a reasonable number for one of the probabilities in the Drake Equation (the number of habitable planets capable of supporting life as we know it). This will edge us further into less speculative thinking about life in the Universe other than us. For some of us theists this thinking may be more of a problem than evolution. What would it mean for us theologically if there were life in other star systems and the meaning of the Fall and Salvation? We might have to start thinking about this.

It is interesting that they call the space telescope Kepler after the famous astronomer Kepler who said that in Science "we are thinking God's thoughts after Him". Kepler was a contemporary of Galileo and there are a number of myths surrounding the relationships between Brahe-Kepler-Galileo. But the reality was that Kepler nailed down the Copernican Universe with Brahe's exceptional data (based on ground based, naked eye observations) and math, with no help from Galileo (or his telescope). I dub this name ironic but also prophetic for this space telescope could in the same way nail down a controversy with simple Baconian observation.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Brooke Week 3: Mechanical Enlightenment

“The theme of Chapter IV is the mechanization of the natural world – that seventeenth century development which has often been seen as a decisive advance on organic models of the cosmos.”(p. 13)

“One of the many ironies in our story is that a model for the universe, which in the seventeenth century was used to affirm God’s sovereignty, was used by the deists of the eighteenth century in their attacks on established religion” (p. 13)

“Isaac Newton saw in the very laws he discovered a proof, not of an absentee clockmaker, but of God’s continued presence in the world” (p. 118)

“The basic postulate of the mechanical philosophies was that nature operates according to mechanical principles, the regularity of which can be expressed in the form of natural laws, ideally formulated in mathematical terms” (p. 119)

“This ability to create two worlds, to relate the real world to an idealized mathematical model, was one of the techniques that made modern science possible” (p. 121)

“For Bacon, as for Boyle and Newton after him, it was simply inconceivable that, from chance distribution and collision of atoms, a wolrd of such order could have been produced - and order that the progress of science was confirming rather than destroying” (p. 125)

“An event could be deemed a miracle if it was not explicable in terms of physical laws.” (p. 127)

“He was not bound by any kind of logical necessity, nor by the laws of nature, for they were simply expressions of the way He normally chose to act.” (p. 134)

“Newton’s conviction that “God was everywhere from eternity” had implications for how space and time were to be conceived. They, too, had become absolute rather than relative contructs. For DesCartes there had been no space without matter; for Newton there was no space without God.” (p. 137)

"It was often said that the test of a good Cartesian was whether he would kick his dog." (p. 141)

“Chapter V takes us into the eighteenth century and into that period of the “Enlightenment” when the sciences were hailed as instruments of progress and when institutionalized religion, especially in Catholic countries, was vilified for its superstition and priestcraft.” (p. 13)

“It was often not the natural philosophers themselves, but thinkers with a social or political ax to grind, who transformed the sciences into a secularizing force.” (p. 13)

“If scientific knowledge derived from reflection on ideas that arose ultimately from sense experience, it was tempting to generalize and say that no other mode of knowing was possible” (p. 154)

“An antipathy to voluntarist theologies is evident in Leibniz’s remark that a secure foundation for law is to be found not so much in the divine will as in His intellect, not so much in His power as in His wisdom.” (p. 161)

“Miracles, Leibniz insisted, were to supply the needs of grace not to remedy second rate clockwork.” (p. 162)

“Priestley makes a fascinating study because he personified a set of values that allowed the integration of scientific and industrial progress into a process theology, which promised the eventual triumph of rational Christianity. Progress in science was to be “the means under God of extirpating all error and prejudice, and of putting and end to all undue and usurped authority in the business of religion as well as science.”” (p. 180)

“That the Christian religion could be given a rational defense became one of Hume’s principal targets. He did not deny that the universe must have a cause. The question was whether anything could be known about it.” (p. 182)

“The gist of it was that no testimony was sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony was such that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact that it purported to establish. Defining a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature, Hume insisted that there must be a strong antecedent probability against its having occurred. Human testimony, however, was know to be capricious and corruptible” (p. 184)

"He (Wesley) stressed, as before, that his aim was not to account for things, only to describe them." (p. 191)

"The lesson that Wesley's many readers would have absorbed was that a science of nature, not bedeviled by arrogant theorizing, could offer rational support for Christian piety - revealing, as it appeared to do, a marvelous organization and adaptation within the created order." (p. 191)

Posted by Professor Honeydew

Natural Theology and The Science of History

....if our Sun behaves in any way like the stars in the Universe that are the same size then this is not only the history of our Sun but its future as well. What is amazing in this is that if this model is correct then to form a golf atom in a wedding band the atom would have to have been fused in the heart of one star. That star would have to explode and turn to dust then return to the heart of a second star which then uses it as fuel to form the gold atom and then that star explodes to dust that eventually got collected up into the ball of space debris that formed our Earth. At least two stars. Makes you wonder.

ur view of the Universe is based on what we can see. The fact is that stars closer to us block the view of stars that are farther away. So one year the Hubble Space Telescope was trained on a tiny spot of night sky that was apparently dark. What they discovered was that the tiny black spot was a window past the local stars to the farther stars and this famous photo was collected. It is important to note that the image did not see stars but galaxies of millions, billions, trillions of stars ... all in a window the size of a grain of sand in the night sky.

Tulips in My Stained Glass Window

In last weeks lecture we got to talking about tulips. I don't know how students that have taken religious studies courses from Calvinists would miss this. Many churches have tulips or stylized tulips in their stained glass windows

Why would they have tulip motifs in their stained glass windows? Well the people at The Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics offers us the following:

"This system of theology was reaffirmed by the Synod of Dordt in 1619 as the doctrine of salvation contained in the Holy Scriptures. The system was at that time formulated into "five points" in answer to the unscriptural five points submitted by the Arminians to the Church of Holland in 1610. "

The five points are:

Total Depravity
Unconditional Election
Limited Atonement
Irrisistible Grace
Perseverance of the Saints

So the tulips in your church's stained glass windows are there as a mnemonic to remind you that once upon a time your church was Calvinist (or it still is). 'Nough said.

A Pale Blue Gas

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Honeydew Shaken Not Stirred

OK, I pretty much gave up on the old research blog. I flirted with Facebook for a bit and there were only so many hours in the day so I let the blog slide. That and the fact that the research took several unfortunate turns. It turned out that one of the starting materials that I used most of the summer was so decomposed and contaminated that almost everything that I did in the lab over the summer could not be published and would/will need to be repeated. The work that I started at MtA has also gone very slowly but I have done several new reactions. The most exciting part of that work was cracking open an ampule of a very reactive compound that I sealed over ten years ago and discovering that the compound is still pure ... dangerous but pure. There was a time when that compound was sold for $ 1000 per gram and now it can be bought for "only" $ 165 per gram.

I have over 100 grams of the compound and I am now actively "making friends" in the chemical world. I will not sell it but will use it to participate in the research of several groups that can use the compound.

But now winter is reaching out to touch my research. I bought a "beater" car in May to drive from Moncton to Fredericton and Sackville. I was small and grossly underpowered but it got me around and after some initial problems it has been a faithful steed.

That all changed Sunday. The weather office completely missed the fact that we had a November winter storm coming and we woke up Sunday morning to 10 cm of snow on the ground. But it wasn't the ground that was the problem. It would turn out that the Moncton municiple services were also caught napping and by church time the streets were still not cleared. I wasn't so bad in the city where the speeds are low but I was heading out McLaughlin Road to speak at a church in Dundas (about 20 - 25 minutes out on a day with good driving).

To make a long story short (or at least shorter) there is a steep hill about a third of the way to Dundas. It was packed snow and slush both up and down that hill and I could hear the slush sliding by the low slung floor of my little Kia Rio. I was pleased when I got past the hill and started up the next long slow incline. About a kilometer along there was a thick line of slush and as I drove over it the back end of the car came loose and I could feel the car swing around. I turned into the slide and got the car moving forward but unfortunately that forward direction was towards the ditch. I swung the steering wheel over and it was weirdly like the iceberg collision scene in Titanic where everything is sluggish and inevitable. In my case, the car swung around but kept sliding slowly toward the ditch and it ALMOST stopped but it had just enough momentum to push the center of mass over the edge of the road and then the car pretty much toppled sideways into the ditch!

Now, it is an extremely odd feeling to be sitting in your car while it is lying on it's side. The car was running and everything seemed fine except for the odd orthogonality of the gravitational reference system. Me? I'm fine ... a little freaked out but undamaged. So, I turn off the car and face my first problem: How do I get my weight off the seatbelt so I can unbuckle it? Clever use of leverage and ligaments allowed me to a) release the seatbelt and b) discover the seatbelt was holding me up. Now I am standing on the passenger side window (ominous cracking noise from the door) contemplating how to get out of the car. I grab the knapsack with my phone, laptop, Bible and preaching notes, crack open the driver side door and crawl up and out of the car.

So, now I am standing on the side of the road (a deserted, desolate road) in a snow storm up to my ankles in slush wearing dress shoes. But, a blessing of the age, I have a cell phone. So who do I call first? Would you believe I called the church to let them know I would not be able to speak that morning? I actually needed them to look up the phone number for a towing company too so that worked out OK. Now, at this time suddenly the road was alive with Good Samaritans. I was on the phone and a guy in a pick-up truck asked me if I wanted to use his cell phone. The next Good Samaritan in a mini-van asked me if there was anyone in the car and would I like a bottle of water. And so on ...

Finally a pick-up rolled up and it was the son of one of the members at the church I was going to speak at that morning. I got in his truck (my cold, wet feet were very thankful) and finished my phonecalls. It would be a half hour for the tow truck to show up and I was feeling a bit self conscious about how long my new friend would have to wait. That, and that fact that a solid stream of people were now stopping at the car and "investigating". Now was a crucial moment. It was clear that I was fine, the tow truck driver knew what he had to do without me and Anthony was patiently waiting with me. Well, what do you do? I said "Why don't we just head on out to Dundas and I will deliver the message like originally planned?" I mean, really, what point was there to waiting? So 15 minutes later I walk into church at exactly the point in the service where I was needed. I hooked my computer up to the LCD projector and gave the message. Just like that. Surreal.

In a weird post-script to this story. When I picked up the car the only real damage to the car was done by the tow truck driver. They checked the car over and the frame, engine, steering and suspension were all fine. There were dents to the passenger side panels front to back but that was it. The tow truck had broken the plastic over the rear bumper but apparently when I had asked them to tow the car there was an understanding that they would not be liable for any damage caused by the tow. Who knew?

( Father was first posted to the combined mission charges of Richibucto/Rexton and Harcourt/Brown's Yard, New Brunswick back in 1957. His tales of a Christmas drive of 250 miles ( 400 km ) to complete the circuit or of taking 'the river road' ( it froze in winter enough for traffic to use as an alternate ) or of people bending under their power lines going out the front walk in winter - or depending on caprice of wind etc. sometimes walking over top of the lines ! - were family legend. He had pictures. And when I was first put behind the controls of the car - as distinct from his old practice of him having me steer while sitting on the seat in front of him - the river was conveniently a place without 'rules of the road.' And yes - cars did break through the ice from time to time.

The car ? A turquoise '57 Chevy' replete with fins like dual aircraft tailfins from a famous WW II fighter aircraft - which had not been that long ago and in which he had participated.

So although I left N.B. for the first time in 1968 and first moved to Red Deer in 1976....I remember snow...including looking down to the second floor of a house in downtown Rexton from atop a downtown roadside snowbank where plows and snowblowers had piled it high.

Less fun was recalling when neighbourhood kids build their snow fort so far out to the road that the blower blew red snow passing through. That was carted away before I saw it. )