@cowboycatranch Huh. Okay, I think I know what’s going on. He presented the notes to the Academy in 1880. But it wasn’t published until 1881. But he clearly lists it in his book as 1880.
There are three notes, according to his 1881 reference in that book.
It depends on what you are writing, whether you need to establish when he announced it to the scientific community (1880) or when it was formally published (1881). He puts emphasis on 1880 as the first formal revelation.
I look forward to the day when we have to explain the oil industry to the next generation in the same way that our history teachers explain that yes, it used to be common to use lead in makeup, to smoke on planes, and to teach workers using radioactive paint to lick their brushes.
@craiggrannell@helenczerski I remember long-haul flights with Alitalia where the smokers were on the right side of the aircraft and non-smokers on the left. I wrote to complain and got a reply explaining that it was to ensure equal seating preference to all passengers…
Reviewing scientific papers would be much more fun if the actual science wasn't so often obscured by so many basic errors of grammar, communication and logic. It's often like marking 1st year UG projects.
No-one should be talking about scientists learning the skills to communicate with the public, policymakers etc until those scientists can actually communicate to start with.
And sloppy writing betrays sloppy thinking, so it matters.
I do have one small quibble with the NYT piece. The headline calls Meitner the “Mother of the Atomic Bomb.”
No. Meitner helped discover nuclear fission & foresaw its dangerous potential. BUT she refused to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, famously declaring, “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!”
Her gravestone reads, “Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity.” /2
Remember that abysmal attempt at creating a fake paper detector that #Science magazine trumpeted? The one that just looked to see if you used your institutional email address, had international collaborators, and were affiliated with a hospital?
The one that instantiated the authors biases and then they turned around and used as evidence for those biases?
Science has just published the letter that Brandon Ogbunugafor and I wrote in response.
But their "editor's note" published alongside our letter is, not to put too fine a point on it, complete bullshit.
"Far from heralding or sensationalizing the tool, we presented it as a rough indicator of a real problem."
It’s not a rough indicator; their own data show that it entirely fails. More importantly, a rough indicator with racist consequences is far worse than no indicator at all, and the article neither notes these racist consequences nor this basic fact.
@ct_bergstrom the institutional email bit is scary. It also hits articles based on thesis work of recent graduates.
Finding a research position after graduation takes time, and if you publish something in the mean time a personal email is all that's left. Same applies if you decide to work in industry.
My first paper would have been impacted by this thing :kaboom:.
In Canada, about 50% of PhD students do not finish their degree in the Humanities.
For those that stick it out, it takes on average 7 years to complete. Of those that do finish, ~20-30% find jobs at colleges/universities.
"The evidence tells us that there is a systemic impossibility of achieving anything close to reasonable rates of permanent academic employment for humanities PhDs."
My suspicion is that most non-science people don’t realize that just coming up with a definition “this is a kilogram” and then being able to make a measurement in a lab where you can say with confidence “this is a kilogram” has involved an unimaginably huge amount of work and gazillions of dollars
The UK bungled covid response just like the US did, and the NHS is under attack by people trying to wreck it so it can be privatized-- so you're not far behind us. There will always be people nervous about vaccines, but the problem gets magnified when healthcare institutions aren't trustworthy.
@violetmadder@cmsdengl@iamcanehdian our problems with antivaxxers started long before covid. We have struggled with MMR uptake since at least Andrew Wakefield.
About 250M years ago, 90% of species on Earth died during the Permian extinction. All of that loss created a lot of vacant niches to fill. And not long after, the first mammals, our ancestors, appeared.
Life on this pale blue dot will continue to be resilient - whether or not we’re part of it. #Thanksgiving#science#history
@Sheril this is setting a pretty low bar for optimism isn't it? It's like putting a skipping rope on the ground and calling it the high jump. First the fossil fuel industry encouraged us to think there was no problem and now it's encouraging us to believe there's nothing we can do about it anyway. I'm firmly in between. There is plenty to be done, and no reason to roll over and accept mass extinction as a done deal. How do I know? Where I live there used to be almost no humpback whales. Now more than 40,000 migrate past here each year, and growing - thanks entirely to activists who wouldn't give up. And just this Friday there was a mass demonstration run by school kids, a new generation putting adults to shame for their complacent fatalism. Yes, in the long run we're all dead, and nature will continue without us. But until then: action, not acquiescence.
Here is a somewhat comical but also highly indignant commentary about the folly of “Net Zero by 2050”…
We insiders — by which I mean anyone paying attention — know that the plan to mitigate the climate catastrophe with Net Zero by 2050 is complete bullshit. But maybe you’ve absorbed that knowledge without really understanding why. So let’s talk about it.
What does Net Zero actually mean? Net Zero is the point at which the CO2 burden in the atmosphere is no longer increasing. We’re still putting some up, but we’re also taking just as much out.
This definition immediately tips off two major problems.
The “still putting some up” part is a major issue because the fossil fuels industrial/political complex hears that and stops listening. The “still putting some up” part is their job, and somebody else can do the “take just as much out” part.
In other words, it's Business As Usual for fossil fuels, including continuing growth. Someone else can do the preserving-life-and-the-climate part.
The second obvious problem with Net Zero is the very idea of “taking just as much CO2 out of the atmosphere each year as the fossil fuel industry is adding to it each year.” We know of only two ways to reduce the CO2 load of the atmosphere. One is time. But CO2 stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years, so time is not on our side.
The other way to reduce CO2 is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Carbon is “captured” from the atmosphere using a chemical solvent that absorbs CO2, after which it can be buried in the ground where the CO2 will stay safely out of the atmosphere virtually forever.
CCS technology both does and does not exist.
CCS does exist in that there are many ingenious systems for doing it, including several pilot programs demonstrating direct air capture, the holy grail of CCS. Many fossil fuelled electricity generation plants have been removing CO2 from their smokestack emissions for decades. Unfortunately, much of the currently captured CO2 is being injected into played-out oil wells, forcing more of the remaining oil to be recoverable, to burn as fuel. Totally self-defeating, as far as reducing the CO2 load in the atmosphere.
But CCS also does NOT exist in terms of a significant contributor to Net Zero. They remove so little CO2 from the atmosphere, and at such a cost, as to make them completely impractical. To make a dent in carbon emissions, hundreds of thousands of CCS plants are needed, if not millions. The cost is prohibitive. Not to mention the carbon costs of manufacturing all those plants.
But surely CCS technology will improve over the next decade or two. Maybe someone will even find a miraculous breakthrough that will make it truly practical?
Sorry, but no. It’s not that there hasn’t been enough research into CCS. It has been heavily researched and the science is known. It’s actually some pretty simple chemistry. We can tweak around the efficiency edges, but there are no breakthroughs waiting in the wings to be discovered.
@breadandcircuses Net Zero is just a buzzword. It means that we’re not going to get any worse than we are now…which is what put us in this situation.
Corporations always thrive on growth. That’s really bad for climate. Net zero is status quo, not improvement. We need negative growth in emissions.
That requires a complete overhaul of what we’re doing, a lifestyle change, not a small tweak.
It’s also incomprehensible for most people.
Born in 1910, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin perfected X-ray crystallography, a type of imaging using X-rays to determine a molecule’s three-dimensional structure.
She determined the structures of insulin, penicillin & vitamin B12, leading to tremendous advances in medicine.