Understanding science stuff [Archive]

#FF0000

10th March 2012, 02:55

yeah absolutely -- there's a lot of folks who are really good as "popularizers" of science. One that comes to mind is Bill Nye, who had a show that was aimed more for children, but then there are folks like Neil Tyson who goes around on all sorts of shows talking about science stuff. He also hosts PBS' Nova scienceNOW which, honestly, I'm not very familiar with.

But yeah there's a lot of good sources to learn science from. Nova makes good documentaries besides their scienceNOW show, magazines like Popular Science, Scientific American, Discover (not familiar with this one but folks I know rave about it), etc. etc. etc.

And from time to time, there are very good, very accessible books you could look into -- in particular Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time

CommunityBeliever

10th March 2012, 02:57

If you are going to do practical academic scientific work you are going to need to understand analysis, combinatorics, topology, graph theory, and many other mathematical subjects.

However, if you just want to want to learn facts then you can forgo this. There are plenty of free documentaries and videos which explain scientific concepts in a simple and easy absorb manner.

Drosophila

10th March 2012, 03:15

I had almost no interest in science until I watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos documentary.

You can watch the entire series on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL474A7F1BA0FCEF8C&feature=plcp

NewLeft

10th March 2012, 03:20

I had almost no interest in science until I watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos documentary.

You can watch the entire series on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL474A7F1BA0FCEF8C&feature=plcp
Excellent documentaries! I love this series and they're coming out with new ones soon..

Zealot

10th March 2012, 03:50

Anything in specific? Natural Selection/Evolution maybe?

I would watch this series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q76jw0ZB9hA

Then some Donexodus2 videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL0tmb3Evhc

If you want to see something that isn't so rushed but a bit longer you can watch this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcjgWov7mTM

That's just to explain natural selection. Then you'll want to learn about other things such as genetic drift and mutations, which I think is in the series anyway, but if you want "evidences" you can see this link (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/) at talkorigins.

Science in and of itself is always fun. The sheer size, mysterious and often bizarre nature of our universe makes it much more magnificent than any holy book would have us believe. As long as you have the will to learn you shouldn't worry too much.

I know you were (are?) religious and its nice to see you're keeping an open mind.

Os Cangaceiros

10th March 2012, 03:59

I second the recommendation of NOVA, I like that show. I watched an hour long program they showed last night about economics and the 2008 Wall Street crash, it was really interesting. Which is a great feat, seeing as how the subject of economics makes most people want to blow their head off with a shotgun.

Drosophila

10th March 2012, 04:11

Excellent documentaries! I love this series and they're coming out with new ones soon..

Yes, they are. It's being produced by Seth MacFarlane and a couple others, Neil Degrasse Tyson is hosting it. Only problem I see with it is that it's going to air on FOX.

MarxSchmarx

10th March 2012, 05:00

dodger

10th March 2012, 06:54

http://www.google.com.ph/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cts=1331359441621&sqi=2&ved=0CC8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FKonrad_ Lorenz&ei=wO5aT-LpBISPiAecwoHEBQ&usg=AFQjCNGc1pzS9ag99yhRK16UpX4au8sSDA

Elysan if you have space why not breed some poultry or wildfowl. Observe their behaviour, that's how Konrad Lorenz started before becoming a leading world figure in his field. Put food on the plate, fresh eggs for breakfast.

2UIU9XH-mUI&feature=related

I'll echo MarxShmarx a second hand telescope has made Wifey the family expert on the heavens. We are blessed here with nil light pollution, eclipses, meteor showers are all observed and shared with neighbours who join our little band of star gazers. One night we even turned the scope earthwards and observed local cops taking a bribe from illegal loggers, in their massive truck.

Ose

10th March 2012, 07:24

Stephen Hawking has already had a mention, but I'd recommend The Universe in a Nutshell over A Brief History of Time as an introduction to modern physics and cosmology. Even if you don't read all of it, you can learn a lot just from looking at the pictures.

Lobotomy

10th March 2012, 08:19

Yes, they are. It's being produced by Seth MacFarlane and a couple others, Neil Degrasse Tyson is hosting it. Only problem I see with it is that it's going to air on FOX.

I think it's cool that it's going to be on Fox, it means it will reach a wider audience.

Drosophila

10th March 2012, 12:58

I think it's cool that it's going to be on Fox, it means it will reach a wider audience.

We'll have to put up with commercials every ten minutes though.

Deicide

10th March 2012, 13:31

If you want to learn about astronomy, search (and subscribe to) this channel > http://www.youtube.com/user/tdarnell?feature=g-user-u

Aurora

10th March 2012, 23:12

If your looking for astronomy/ physics stuff i'd highly recommend Prof Brian Cox's programs Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe, he's remarkably good at explaining things in real terms and without any graphs etc They're visually very beautiful as well, combining amazing locations all around the world with real images of other planets and galaxies.

RGacky3

12th March 2012, 11:49

Why the hell are you asking about learning science on a revolutionary leftist forum?

Deicide

12th March 2012, 11:55

Why the hell are you asking about learning science on a revolutionary leftist forum?

I think most of us here like science anyway.

''Science is interesting, if you don't agree you can fuck off'' :lol:

Rooster

12th March 2012, 12:34

There are a great deal of many popular science books. You could try to look up that genre on Amazon. Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything goes through the history of science and stuff, giving insight into personalities and scientific concepts, etc.

There are also several magazines that present scientific topics in an easy to read manner such as Science and Focus. Also, there's the National Geographic.

LOLseph Stalin

12th March 2012, 20:36

You can't know everything about every field of science; that'd be impossible so I would recommend just sticking with one or two scientific fields that interest you. Even if it's just specific topics within those fields it's fine. I have a particular interest in genetics and diseases and such so I just stick to those while usually ignoring everything else.

Anyway, I hope I was of some help. :bored:

Franz Fanonipants

12th March 2012, 21:22

science without context leads you into becoming a scientism practitioner like communitybeliever

check out changes in the land (http://books.google.com/books?id=tcy8xSz5AxIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=changes+in+the+land&hl=en&sa=X&ei=l1peT9fOHc_diAL89-WzBA&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=changes%20in%20the%20land&f=false) as it gives you science within a useful context. then check out bill mckibben's the end of nature (http://books.google.com/books?id=nOZQgZErFIwC&dq=the+end+of+nature&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wlpeT6jSL6qpiQL1kqjABA&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA).

both of which are good without being just science facts in a vacuum, both of which taught me more about science than any of my schooling.

ColonelCossack

14th March 2012, 00:40

Bill Nye

Please no!!!

They show us one of his shows every other physics/chemistry/biology lesson I have. It just makes me want to die.

I do agree with you, though, that there are many good popularisers off science, which is quite a good thing to do. Science is very interesting.

Decommissioner

14th March 2012, 01:25

Also you might want to consider doing, and not just learning, about science. For example, you can purchase a telescope and see what constellations you can identify - even cooler is looking at Saturn and Jupiter. Watching how Jupiter's moons orbit around and predicting where they'll be a month from now is pretty neat.

This is a good recommendation. Even with a low powered telescope, you'll be amazed when you gaze at jupiter and see with your own eyes the four galilean moons surrounding it.

If you have a yearning for knowledge your knowledge will grow with time. No need to feel rushed about understanding some of the more complex stuff, it will come naturally to you so long as you stay interested. Like others say, if you really want to get your hands dirty and participate with whatever field interests you, you'll have to be more studious and vigilant to understand and further the science yourself.

#FF0000

14th March 2012, 02:14

Please no!!!

They show us one of his shows every other physics/chemistry/biology lesson I have. It just makes me want to die.

I do agree with you, though, that there are many good popularisers off science, which is quite a good thing to do. Science is very interesting.

If anyone thinks they're too cool for Bill Fucking Nye they are wrong.

NGNM85

14th March 2012, 22:59

You're problem probably has less to do with the 'science stuff' and more to do with the presentation. People with poor communication skills can make even the most fascinating subjects tedious. Also; not all scientists are great communicators, these are two different skill sets. (However; almost invariably, the most revered scientists are those who are both great scientists, and great comunicators. Check out Michio Kaku, Carl Sagan, or Stephen Hawking.

Elysian

16th March 2012, 03:57

Franz Fanonipants

16th March 2012, 04:25

pls don't check out sagan he is total wasteoid ass and a science popularizer.

Drosophila

16th March 2012, 04:26

Ignore this idiocy.

pls don't check out sagan he is total wasteoid ass and a science popularizer.

Thanks, everyone. Helped me a lot.

Can someone give me links to videos/free online books to understand evolution? Or some author who can make Darwin understandable/readable to the average guy....

What is it you want to know about evolution? Just the general idea/concept behind it? If that's the case, I think I can tell you:

Evolution is basically the process by which one species changes into another. This happens because of natural selection, or "nature's" way of picking what is most likely to survive. If you put a group of rodents on an island covered in trees, there would be a chance for them to adapt to that environment over millions of years. This happens because of mutations in DNA. There's good videos that explain it better than I can. I'll link you to them if I can find them.

Revolution starts with U

16th March 2012, 04:43

pls don't check out sagan he is total wasteoid ass and a science popularizer.

And Mr Rogers too!

No, but dinosaurs totally would've built rocket ships if that pesky Chixilub hadn't come along.

eric922

16th March 2012, 04:50

Just a few recommendations. Stephen Hawking used to be host a show called 'Into the Universe" that was pretty good and Morgan Freeman hosts a show on the Science Channel called "Through the Wormhole." I enjoyed both of those, I don't know if they are still on though.

Revolution starts with U

16th March 2012, 04:52

Ignore this idiocy.

What is it you want to know about evolution? Just the general idea/concept behind it? If that's the case, I think I can tell you:

Evolution is basically the process by which one species changes into another. This happens because of natural selection, or "nature's" way of picking what is most likely to survive. If you put a group of rodents on an island covered in trees, there would be a chance for them to adapt to that environment over millions of years. This happens because of mutations in DNA. There's good videos that explain it better than I can. I'll link you to them if I can find them.

To elucidate your example; it's not that nature chooses. It's that those that live to have offspring... live to have offspring. The ones who have the most offspring eventually come to be the premier iteration of the species. If you put a bunch of rodents in a jungle island environment they will continue to search the floor for nuts and discarded foods, as they do. Now if one gets a mutation that allows it to glide a little out of the trees, and this helps it survive and have children, given a long period of time the population of gliding rodents will grow. If something now happens to jungle floor making it not evolutionarily convenient for "regular" rodents, newcomers to this island will just see an island full of gliding rodents.

There is also sexual selection and social selection, but these are more subsets of natural selection, than actual means of selection themselves. Big feathers on a peacock gets him more mates, being a dominant male tends to get more mates in monkey troops (tho there is a lot of "adultery" going on, and the alpha isn't quite the progenator I'm sure he imagines himself to be).

Recently a lady came up with the idea of symbiotic biogenesis to explain many mutations. It says that microbes and bacteria inside species cause many of the complex evolutions in the world. It is the bacteria that needs these mutations, and will recode the dna for it, as opposed to the species itself. I really like this theory... of course even it is still subject to natural selection.

Zealot

16th March 2012, 09:26

Darwin starts his book by basically giving an overview of how artificial selection works. Artificial selection is not up for debate, dog breeders, horse breeders etc. are always breeding animals in a directed manner to produce some quality they desire e.g. faster horses or shorter dogs. In fact, French Bulldogs have been domesticated so much that they physically cannot breed naturally anymore and most require artificial insemination.

From here he lays out his idea of natural selection which is basically artificial selection done naturally. We are always producing variation and mutations, sometimes beneficial, sometimes neutral and sometimes straight out bad. The bad ones would, of course, have died out because they would be less competitive and thus have less of a chance of surviving whereas beneficial mutations increase the individual's chances of survival, enabling him to spread his genes. A good example of today is that in Africa a mutation has emerged in some people that has effectively made them resistant to AIDs. Neutral mutations can sometimes become bad or good, an example would be the peppered moths mentioned in one of the videos I linked. The moths with a darker coat had a better chance of survival during the industrial revolution because it effectively became a type of "camouflage" for them amongst the soot whereas before it might not have mattered all that much.

There is a lot more than this involved and I don't want you to go thinking that I've covered evolution by natural selection in a couple of paragraphs. I haven't even scratched the surface and no doubt I probably made a mistake somewhere. It's a very basic and eloquent mechanism that is actually quite easy to understand and which has been observed many times both in the lab and in the wild. This mass accumulation of small changes eventually creates what would seem huge changes. But if the whole history of evolutionary forms were to be drawn on paper we wouldn't notice much difference from one form to the next. However, comparing forms that are thousands of years apart we would definitely see it. Richard Dawkins once called it "The Blind Watchmaker."

#FF0000

16th March 2012, 13:48

Thanks, everyone. Helped me a lot.:thumbup1:

Can someone give me links to videos/free online books to understand evolution? Or some author who can make Darwin understandable/readable to the average guy....

I know there's this 8 HOUR epic of a documentary (split up into 7 parts -- so you can watch whatever parts might interest you separately from the whole thing) from PBS called "Evolution: A Journey Into Where We’re From and Where We’re Going" that might be something like what you're looking for, if you can find it now.

Franz Fanonipants

16th March 2012, 14:58

Ignore this idiocy.

you morons do know that actual scientist contemporaries of Sagan hated him right?

not because of his fame, but because they were rightly worried that his popularization work actually gave people the wrong ideas about cosmology etc.

Revolution starts with U

16th March 2012, 19:09

1 or 2 crotchety old scrooges didn't like Sagan. For the most part he was a well respected member of the field of biology.

ColonelCossack

16th March 2012, 22:49

If anyone thinks they're too cool for Bill Fucking Nye they are wrong.

I'm not too cool* for Bill Nye; I just find him incredible annoying.

It's not his fault; it's that my school used to show me his stuff too much, so I went off it. Too much of a good thing, you know?

*In fact I'm probably the least cool person ever. I'm a super nerd. Just look at my tendency!

Genghis

18th March 2012, 19:03

I just finished a book on medieval science - The Genesis of Science by James Hannam. Good read.

NGNM85

18th March 2012, 19:55

Ã‘Ã³ẊÃ®Ã¶ŉ

22nd March 2012, 18:21

you morons do know that actual scientist contemporaries of Sagan hated him right?

not because of his fame, but because they were rightly worried that his popularization work actually gave people the wrong ideas about cosmology etc.

Perhaps you could furnish us with some examples so we can avoid those pitfalls when later encountering Sagan's work? Because this is the first I've heard of it and it seems dubious that successive popularisers would miss such a teaching opportunity...

The Jay

22nd March 2012, 18:32

Perhaps you could furnish us with some examples so we can avoid those pitfalls when later encountering Sagan's work? Because this is the first I've heard of it and it seems dubious that successive popularisers would miss such a teaching opportunity...

I completely agree, Sagan did a good job and was a pioneer in scientific popularizing. That is not a bad thing, scientific literacy is necessary for a voting public in any socioeconomic system, both now and after capitalism.

Revolution starts with U

22nd March 2012, 19:00

Ã‘Ã³ẊÃ®Ã¶ŉ

22nd March 2012, 19:25

Sagan once suggested that without chixilub, its entirely possible that certain dinosaurs could have developed higher cognitive abilities, even humanlike. Then a whole school of crotchety scrooges got their undies in a bunch.

Oh, is that it?

I can't help but think that even if there was a species of intelligent dinosaur around the time of the impact, it's entirely possible that we could have missed them somehow, especially if they didn't industrialise.

Fossilisation is a pretty damn rare process, and the only reason we have so many fossils today is because there have been hundreds of millions of years for them to accumulate.

Deep time hides an awful lot of the past from us.

I also suspect that any intelligent dinosaurs, if they did exist, would be more velociraptor-like than humanoid. There's more than one way of being a biped.

The Jay

22nd March 2012, 19:34

Oh, is that it?

I can't help but think that even if there was a species of intelligent dinosaur around the time of the impact, it's entirely possible that we could have missed them somehow, especially if they didn't industrialise.

Fossilisation is a pretty damn rare process, and the only reason we have so many fossils today is because there have been hundreds of millions of years for them to accumulate.

Deep time hides an awful lot of the past from us.

I also suspect that any intelligent dinosaurs, if they did exist, would be more velociraptor-like than humanoid. There's more than one way of being a biped.

I think that the point is that this would just be pointless speculation as such a thing has no real evidence like you said.

Ã‘Ã³ẊÃ®Ã¶ŉ

22nd March 2012, 20:41

I think that the point is that this would just be pointless speculation as such a thing has no real evidence like you said.

I disagree that speculation is pointless. It's useful to scientists and interesting to laymen.

To use the possibility of intelligent dinosaurs as an example, informed speculation can be used by scientists to formulate questions regarding the topic. If intelligent dinosaurs existed, what sort of thing would we have to look out for in terms of evidence? If we find such evidence, for example some really ancient pieces of stone that appear as if they have been worked into tools, then is there anything else that can explain what we see? If so, can we rule out those explanations?

I know of no evidence for any previously evolved intelligent species on this planet, but I don't think that means asking the question is a waste of time. It'd be nice to get the input of a geologist or paleontologist on this matter.