There was an earthquake-generated tsunami in between Samoa and Tonga on the Tonga trench this afternoon. No local damage has been reported to date, and the low amplitude (0.08m) should prevent any distal destruction.
Information on the earthquake can be found here:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/eqinthenews/2006/usteaj/#summary
The tsunami bulletin can be found here:
http://www.prh.noaa.gov/ptwc/wmsg
I should add an explanatory note to the argument presented as “option 1” in “A zircon that predates the universe”. I mentioned that in order to be taken seriously by the scientific community, it is necessary to explain previously existing data, as well as one’s own.
The alternative, which I will designate 1a, is to ignore the judgment of the scientific community by joining the lunatic fringe.
The issues and challenges surrounding a career in quackology are no different than those of any other profession. I do not intend to discuss them all, so for this post I will focus on a relatively basic problem: gender representation.
Why are there so few women pseudoscientists?
There are numerous blogs devoted to the issues of women representation in mainstream science. Whether you are looking for a witty, reasoned, or angry approach, this topic is extensively discussed online. Not so with women in the fringe. Despite career prospects that in some cases may rival that of academic scientists, this remains a male dominated profession. So at the very least, a quick review of some possible explanations is in order.
1. Pipeline problem. This hypothesis suggests that there are few women shysters because they never take the basic high school training that is required. Women who take college preparatory courses and do independent research are in danger of missing the opportunities created by spending one’s afternoons selling used cars, real estate, and standards-approved laboratory equipment.
2. Hostile work environment. There is no doubt that extreme nut jobs can create a difficult work environment. The social acclimation of people who belive the face on Mars is watching them can be marginal, at best. The cultivation of cults, harems, cloned teenage heartthrobs, and blockheaded arguments can also dissuade women from a career in quackery.
3. Systemic bias. In my travels as a wild youth, I met several women who had a basic misunderstanding of the Earth sciences. However, they do not seem to have ever made the career jump from uninformed housewife to corporate shill. A widespread, subconscious reluctance to give female applicants the same benefit of the doubt (even where the doubt is a fiction designed to distract and deceive) as males could potentially be an explanation.
4. Biological differences. Some people, including Harvard administrators, may suggest that there is an innate biological difference that makes fakery easier for men than for women. The unspoken corollary to this law is that there is no point trying to recruit women into the pseudoscientific disciplines, because they have neither the inclination nor the ability to succeed there. I suspect that the proponents of this particular hypothesis have all led sheltered, ivory tower lives that have never involved being wrapped around the finger of one of these professional manipulators. That, or they’re too up themselves to admit it.
Anyway, there are a few important take-home points here. First of all, this is a completely theoretical exercise. There is no possible relationship between the factors that govern bias in science and pseudoscience. The reason for this is obvious. Selection committees in the sciences are immune to charisma, charm, the hard sell, the flashy diversion, or any other pseudoscientific techniques. They only consider quantitative, verifiable factors when filling appointments. Always.
I have on my desk a rather curious geochronology result. It is a SHRIMP analysis that I ran a month or two ago on a zircon- a very routine analysis. However, the result is somewhat surprising.
According to this summary sheet, the 206Pb/238U age of the zircon is 160 million years. Jurassic. No big deal.
The 207Pb/206Pb age, however, is a bit older- 3362 million years, or early Archean. That is a bit odd, but not completely implausible. A severe Pb-loss event caused by metamictization could, in theory, create such extreme discordance. The real problem is the thorium age.
The 208Pb/232Th age for this sample came out at 15,223 million years. 15.2 billion. That’s really old. It is more than three times the accepted age of the Earth and solar system (4.56 Ga), and considerably older than the best estimate that astronomers give us for the age of the universe: 13.7 Ga. Such an age is a bit counter-intuitive for a zircon from a Phanerozoic orogeny.
When trying to interpret such a result, the extreme value gives us only two possibilities:
1. The arcane disciplines of cosmochemistry, geochronology, isotopic analysis, and astronomy are all conspiratorial hoaxes perpetrated by godless, soul-destroying, ivory tower elitists, whose evil scheme is to avenge their social ostracism by polluting our precious bodily fluids.
2. I fucked up the analysis.
Obviously, choice one is more appealing to my sense of self-worth. It allows me to stroke my ego to sleep at night with the belief that I have single-handedly exposed the academic fraudsters. It fills me with the warm glow of knowing that humanity owes me for bringing justice, light, and honesty into the realm of physical science. It excites me that this selfless discovery will undoubtedly arouse the thousands of nubile young damsels who found zirconology fan clubs and fantasize about thorium decay.
Unfortunately, there is one small problem. There is a conceit among scientists- an unspoken rule of the laboratory code. It says that science should have predictive value. In order for my ground-breaking pre-universal zircon to overturn science, destroy the paradigm, and score me some hot chicks, I need to put it in a meaningful context. I can do this by either developing a new theorem, that will explain my data while reinterpreting the last 40 years of research in a new light, or I need to show that all the previous studies were flawed. Before I can do either, I need to understand the body of knowledge which I wish to overturn. This will require attending a library.
Thing is, I’m not real fond of libraries. The stacks smell musty, the babes give me dirty looks, and there is nothing to do other than sit and read. So instead of reviewing all the crusty old theories that my new data will disprove, I will procrastinate by testing hypothesis two, the outlandish possibility that the analysis is not completely perfect.
To be continued...
p.s. Note to the ANU students who read blogs instead of working on their mid-terms: Please don’t give the punch line away.
On Friday, the last day of winter, we had a total fire ban. This does not bode well for summer.
I hope to write up a cool talk I went to see on the dating of Ethiopian hominid fossils, but this blog explains why they are interesting way more eloquently than anything I could write.
The Atlantic Hurricane season may be winding down, but you can still find updates here.
From the Bad Astronomer, a great update on Brown dwarfs, and a link to the homepage of Thierry Legault, who takes amazing astronomical pictures.
And finally, a search engine roundup:
Recently, I’ve been getting a statistically meaningful number (around 20-25%) of search requests for “Pluto conspiracy”.
Geologic mnemonics and various Bunsen burner queries are also represented more than once. As for the singletons, here are some highlights:
Donate a testicle to science
Australian nuclear weapons
Plausible deniability standard
Salt dough cockatoo
Duck egg cookies
Nitrogen trifecta system
what does it mean by when “only boys accepting feminism get kissed meaningfully”
steve irwin jfk diana
How intelligent are oysters?
steve irwin jfk diana
give me a catchy title for a science si unit lab
A Lab Lemming is a creature which mindlessly follows its protocols over the precipice of understanding, to drown in the frigid sea of uncertainty. Everyone who has ever fallen into research over their head, and gulped down the icy brine of confusion is welcome here. Grab a couch by the fire, dry off, warm up, and tell the tale of how your scientific hubris led you astray.
To proclaim a purpose or theme for The Lounge would be to deny its empirical nature. This blog is basically a collection of thoughts about working in a scientific lab, with a focus on the nitty gritty details of collecting data that is scientifically useful.
In my opinion, mainstream scientific education and commentary often fall into a number of pitfalls that reduce their effectiveness. These include, but are not limited to: solemnity, condescension, formalism, frigidity, politeness, hero-worship, and generalization. Thus, I will try to make this blog as silly, challenging, relaxed, visceral, rude, irreverent, and specific as possible.
It may be that my jokes are so esoteric that only ten people on the planet understand them (and only two find them amusing). It may be that semi-erotic descriptions of the large ion lithophiles are not the most appropriate way to teach analytical techniques. But the heart of the scientific endeavour is experimentation. And if I don’t worship oysters and Bunsen burners, ponder mutant rats, defend Pluto, or collect rude mnemonics, who will?
It has been a year since Mrs. Lemming and I bought our house. Our rate of renovating appears to resemble exponential decay, as the longer the work goes on, the slower the rate of progress. So I really need to put in some extra time to finish it off.
In addition, I recently had a look around the blogosphere, and found it fairly depressing. According to The Truth Laid Bear, most of the huge blog sites are partisan political propaganda. I kinda don’t really see the point of making esoteric jokes and explaining how stuff works to ten people a day, when a million times that number wolf down deliberate misinformation.
Finally, spring has sprung, and the number of pleasant outdoor hours has increased from three to 12.
So I’m taking a working holiday. I’m going to put my living room back together, paint it, and then put in a garden so that el Nino can desiccate it. This is not the end; I still have posts about paying for open access, zircons that predate the universe, and the terminology of lab culture in the works. I just don’t have the time or the interest in finishing them off right now.
Later, dudes.
According to RealClimate, The American Association of Petroleum Geologists and the American Quaternary Association have gotten their knickers in a twist about the recent decision by the AAPG to grant a journalism award to the novelist Michael Crichton.
Some random thoughts:
If writing novels about cloned dinosaurs and global warming hoaxery is an example of what the AAPG considers to be good science journalism, is it any surprise that oil costs $70 a barrel? How can anyone expect to keep exploration costs down when tarot cards and divining sticks cost so much these days?
By accusing the AAPG of self-interest, the AQA is totally and completely hypocritical. After all, the only possible reason to study the Quaternary is self-interest, since that is the period in which we happen to live.
So much love lost so quickly. It was only last century that Pleistocene paleontologists (and I don’t mean Neanderthals with doctorates in trilobitology; I mean mammoth-lovers) and petroleum geologists alike were swooning, hand-in-hand, at the richness of the California tar pits for both of their respective professions.
Given that this debate is between rival factions of soft rockers, I’m surprised that it has been so civilized. After all, they are actually using words. Correctly. Given the usual level of debate between environmental and ore geologists, I would have expected them to bare teeth, hurl feces, and howl at each other from opposing tree-tops.
This is an addendum to last night’s post.
I should let everyone know that I was using an unusual definition of “my”. Usually, my is the first person possessive pronoun. But occasionally, it has other meanings. In the case on yesterday’s title, for example, I used the little known definitions of “my”, such as: my=a; my=an uncontrollable; or my = a scheming foxy, willing-to-let-me-think-I-actually-figured-her-out.
For the better part of a week, everything was perfect, blissful, the Cs barely twice the instrumental background and Rb only a few times larger. I’m still not sure exactly what happened. Perhaps I got complacent, and started taking my cps for granted. Or maybe the alkali wild spirit can never really be tamed by a lab coated man, and resumed its contaminated machine on its own schedule, without regard to the wants and desires of the laboratory staff.
Whatever the reason, in the cold light of dawn, it became evident that the Friday morning backgrounds were an order of magnitude higher than the rest of the week. I was back to square one, with no consolation or explanation to ease my loss.
Fortunately, by that time the moon people had finished their analyses. In fact, I eventually tracked down the source of the contamination. A couple of Germans from Edinburgh* had been using the machine to looks at refactory glass and carbonates. That was fine, but what ended it for me and my alkali backgrounds was their decision, late in the day, to run just a couple of volcanic sanidines (is there any other kind?). The ablation of trace element-enriched K-spar must be what brought on the contamination.
I’m not really sure what to do now. Staring at the wiggly signal lines, it feels like I’ve lost something special, something irreplaceable. The calculating pert of my mind tells me that I’ll solve the problem of getting the low backgrounds soon enough, and I think I know how to keep them, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying.
A more interesting question, however, is why the Germans are in Edinburgh. I suspect it is a result of natural selection. Researchers from Mexico, China, or Italy would not be able to survive in Edinburgh. They would starve to death. So only it is reasonable to suspect that any scientists who can thrive there must come from countries with a cuisine sufficiently bland that Scottish food is not too painful an adaptation.
