Ever get hit with the realization that you should have asked for help three mistakes ago? One incident from when I was a science apprentice continues to haunt me. I was an undergrad working in a cell biology lab. Among my regular tasks were two that involved different kinds of cuvettes--small rectangular tubes. One was used to assess bacterial growth; you put a sample of bacteria in liquid culture in the cuvette and measured how much light was blocked by the bacteria. That one was clear; the other cuvette had metal … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Was Canceling The Acolyte a Mistake?
Science Corner: A Priest, a Poet and a Mathematician Walk into an Abbey
I recently had the great privilege to spend 9 days in London with my family on a sort of mini-sabbatical after 15 years of service at my day job. A subtle but recurring theme to the visit was how often religion and science came up together. For starters, we patronized several bookstores, and every time the science section and the religion section were in the same room. Now, in a suburban Barnes & Noble in the US, that would be unremarkable because the whole store is basically one room. But these were older buildings, … [Read more...] about Science Corner: A Priest, a Poet and a Mathematician Walk into an Abbey
Science Corner: Dreaming in the Academic Clouds
So far, the explanation for dreams which resonated most for me came from Anil Seth's book Being You. The overall thesis of the book is that our conscious experiences are really predictions about the world around us which are updated based on input from our senses. Dreams, then, are what happens when the predictive aspect is decoupled from sensory corrections. Thus our dreams contain elements from our actual experiences but unconstrained by the need to correspond to anything, even themselves moment-to-moment. That … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Dreaming in the Academic Clouds
Science Corner: “What Hath Darwin to Do with Scripture?”
It's Stanley Cup Finals time, and so I expect we are all asking ourselves the same question: How would you explain ice hockey to Bronze Age nomads from Canaan? Of course there will be a matter of translation. Words like "stick" and "net" presumably would map pretty directly. There'd probably be a word that shares meaning with "team" although maybe it would refer primarily to animals. "Offsides" is tricky to explain even to modern English speakers, but that's because there are a lot of details; the constituent concepts … [Read more...] about Science Corner: “What Hath Darwin to Do with Scripture?”
Science Corner: I Wan’na Be Like You
I know the world faces a lot of weighty issues right now. Some of you may be on college campuses with recent or ongoing police activity, cancelled or disrupted commencement events and other types of disturbances to what is usually a celebratory season. And all of that stems from events in Israel and Palestine, where staggering numbers of lives have been lost and many more irreversibly altered. I might wish science could offer answers to the uncertainty, but clashes of values are not readily adjudicated by its methods. … [Read more...] about Science Corner: I Wan’na Be Like You