From the category archives:

Wrong!

“The China Study” Considered Harmful

July 11, 2010

An influential study of diet and health has been exploded here. The data and the conclusions don’t just disagree, they aren’t even on speaking terms.

Meanwhile, randomized intervention trials indicate that advice on the perils of saturated fat has been wrong. I suggest some reforms.

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Next up: Asteroids

July 4, 2010

Soon after Earth’s life first touched the Moon, NASA promised to make spaceflight routine and inexpensive, and I began studying the prospects for space as a genuine frontier.
Geologists had analyzed the new, hard-won lunar samples, and I read up on the results in the local college library. Not nice: almost no carbon, nitrogen, or hydrogen, [...]

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Needless Megadeaths:
A Suggestion for Science in the Public Interest

June 16, 2010

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Knowledge and causality in inquiry and design

June 3, 2010

The structure of science and engineering, a big mistake, and a book

See also: “The Antiparallel Structures of Science and Engineering”

An effect may have one possible cause, or many. The weight of a stone has a single cause, gravity, but the flight of a stone coming over a wall could have one of many [...]

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A programmable nanoscale assembly line

May 20, 2010

When I picked up my copy of this week’s Chemical & Engineering News this evening, I found that the lead article begins with this:
Futuristic visions of nanobots that travel the body to treat disease and construct compounds one atom at a time got a little closer to reality this week, thanks to two advances in [...]

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Flattening the Matterhorn

May 19, 2010

Text and graphics excerpted from Figure 4 of a recent paper on a new form of nanoscale lithography:
AFM scan of the replica of the Matterhorn written into the molecular glass (3D data source: geodata © swisstopo).
The maximum steepness of slopes is an important parameter in scanning probe lithography. It would be easy to misread the [...]

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Incentive engineering v. Econ 101
   (creativity, criminality, etc.)

April 7, 2010

About a book and a paper…
The economics I encountered (in what were considered to be humanities courses) at MIT presented theories of productive behavior illustrated with graphs of relationships between supply and demand, prices, utilities, consumer surpluses, deadweight losses, and so on. These are elementary parts of the apparatus of neoclassical economics, a soaring [...]

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Chemists deserve more credit:
Atoms, Einstein, and the Matthew Effect

February 17, 2010

Chemists understood the atomic structure of molecules in the 1800s, yet it is often said that Einstein established the existence of atoms in a paper on Brownian motion, “Die von der Molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme Gefordete Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten Suspendierten Teilchen”, published in 1905.
This is perverse, and has seemed strange to me [...]

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Why fusion won’t provide power
   (at a reasonable cost)

January 20, 2010

The greatest problem with fusion power is rarely mentioned and scarcely on the research agenda: capital cost. When I discussed the problem earlier, in “Fusion Power: A New Way to Boil Water”, I hadn’t seen this quietly damning report, which I think is worth quoting:

Issues and R&D needs
for commercial fusion energy
An interim report of the
ARIES [...]

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Evolution: The concept and how we talk about it

January 3, 2010

Note: I’m in the middle of writing a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology, prompted by the recent 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. The next will discuss what the U.S. National Research Council has said about advanced molecular manufacturing, including its recommendations.

I’ve been asked [...]

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For Darwin’s sake, reject “Darwin-ism”
 (and other pernicious terms)

December 31, 2009

On this last day of the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth, I’d like to suggest that we honor Darwin by rejecting the dubious term “Darwinism”.
To call something an “ism” suggests that it is a matter ideology or faith, like Trotskyism or creationism. In the evolution wars, the term “evolutionism” is used to insinuate that the modern [...]

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More about less opportunity for young scientists

December 22, 2009

I recently wrote about the trend away from funding young scientists as independent investigators, with a graph of age distributions at NIH and related observations here. There’s been a lively discussion at the Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog. I posted a link there to an NIH dataset [XLS spreadsheet], and a commenter [...]

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