10 Remarkable Female Mathematicians

I wrote a post much like this one, a while back.
The post is here.

Mathy comics

In Questionable Content, Hannelore reveals one of her hobbies: theoretical knitting. If you've ever wondered why bubble-form tests ask you to use a #2 pencil, XKCD reveals the awful truth. And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal pits A 17th Century Explorer vs. Calculus.

Science, meet Politics. Charmed, I'm sure

This was never meant to be a political blog, but what happens now will become history. And in this day and age, scientific research is intertwined with politics. So yeah. I can't think of anything witty to say.

A 29th twofer.

First, an interesting little article on a very strange research project that, strangely, seems to have produced some results. Strange ones. Basically, they are trying to map personality traits according to geography in the US.

Second, an article about the mistakes made by Einstein. This, in my opinion, is an important thing to write and read about, because it defuses the idea that science is ideology. If a physicist whose name and countenance are symbols of intelligence itself can be shown to have been wrong - well, that's only to be expected really.

All the other great scientists of the past were wrong about things, because advancing the state of the art in knowledge is like that - better theories, better data, better models - but never The Truth. Just a useful approximation. This is the power and glory of science: to recognize and correct its errors.

This is why I dislike terms such as "Darwinism" and "evolutionism" so intensely. They attempt to crystallize the ever changing ideas of how species originate into an ideology that, if somehow shown to be false, can then be defeated. It surely must be comforting for opponents of science and knowledge to think that this could possibly work. However, they are just as wrong about this as they are about so many other things.

Beauty's Truth

Find here an old but very interesting essay about what makes a scientific theory beautiful. Essentially, the author argues that the beauty of a theory comes from its truth, and not the other way around. That is, having preconceived notions of what a beautiful theory is can prevent scientists from accepting one that may describe reality better.

Especially interesting given the recent news about the Large Hadron Supercollider. Let's see what happens - maybe we will live to see new theories emerge. This is a historic time.

The Innumeracy of Intellectuals

Magnolia Sitter has linked to this very interesting article. The double standard of engineering students who don't like humanities versus humanities students who don't like math or science is especially interesting.

Also interesting to me is that in medieval education, the trivium and quadrivium consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, respectively. Of the seven courses in the original liberal arts curriculum, two were explicitly mathematical and three were closely related to mathematics.

To paraphrase Robert Anton Wilson, "Some people at the university specialized in manipulating mathematical symbols, others in verbal ones. Because the people who manipulated verbal symbols were better with language, they got to define themselves as the intellectuals."

The Most Important Image Ever Taken

According to this video, it is the Hubble Deep Field, and I'm inclined to agree. Whenever I look at it, I feel chills. This image, and the even higher resolution Ultra Deep Field, contain hundreds and hundreds of points, blobs, and smears of light. Each one is not a star, but an entire galaxy.

On the less inspired side of things, if you want to see something that manifests such intense stupidity and willful, possibly malevolent ignorance that it is capable of causing physical pain in those who watch it, go here.

The basic "idea", for those unwilling or unable to subject themselves to such gibbering imbecility, is staggeringly nonsensical, and incandescently moronic; a train wreck of epic cognitive ineptitude: Rainbows are a government conspiracy.

Or as the video says: "Everywhere we look, the visible spectrum, is rainbows. This cannot be natural." This is why we need math and science education with tough, rigorous, and reality-based curricula.