Regular readers (especially those from the Genre-fictional League of Critical Motherfuckers) will be aware that I loves me a good taxonomy.

And what do you know, here’s one now: a chap called Eric Van (who I’m not sure I know) has categorised the flavours of science in science fiction [via Niall Longshanks Harrison]. The list was originally developed to comment on sf cinema, but Van suggests it’s easily adapted to use with the written form; I am very much inclined to agree.

Of special note for its concise definition of a very slippery concept:

Bad Science. An attempt is made at one of the above categories, and although the science isn’t demonstrably Wrong, it still doesn’t work for you; it takes you out of the story and makes you wince at its stupidity. That’s Bad Science. Whether Speculative Science strikes you as Bad usually depends on your scientific knowledge. With the other varieties, Bad Science seems ultimately a matter of taste. That the alien mothership in Independence Day apparently runs the Mac OS is Fake Science, but for many it’s Bad Fake Science. Botching the hand-waving explanation is a classic form of Bad Science; The Force in the original Star Wars trilogy was (like almost all psi powers in sf) simply Magic Science, but the introduction of midichlorians in the prequel trilogy struck many as a turn to the Bad Side, in that the explanation added nothing. In fact, a good criterion for identifying Bad Science is that fixing it would improve the story—if Jeff Goldblum’s character had to struggle to interface with the alien OS, that could have been exciting and funny and needn’t have taken more than twenty seconds of screen time.

This, incidentally, is the one you always see from writers who thought they’d take a crack at writing sf without knowing anything of the genre beyond the mainstream cinema and televisual canon. As a result, it’s almost impossible to explain to them why it doesn’t work.

Science & Islam, a History – Ehsan Masood

Icon Books, HBK £14.99 RRP; 8th January 2009

ISBN-13: 9781848310407

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Accompanying a BBC television series that I’ve not seen, Ehsan Masood‘s Science & Islam, a History is a readable pop-sci-history book and a great introduction to what lies behind the veil of the mythical Dark Ages, which I remember being taught were a period of scientific and philosophical vacuum. Behind the curtain of Western Europe’s descent into superstition and ignorance lies a largely untold story – that of the scientific achievements of the Islamic peoples. Continue reading “Book review: Ehsan Masood – Science & Islam, a History”

Hi there, gentle reader! There’s been toss-all of note here this last week except link-dumps, and for that I should apologise – frightfully busy at the moment, you know how it goes.

By way of apology, I offer unto you a piece at Teh Grauniad where Chris Morris reports on his visit to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider:

Then someone hits you with the seething vacuum. You think a vacuum is empty space. Quantum theory says yes – but it is also full of spontaneous eruptions of energy. This virtual energy comes from nowhere. It does and doesn’t exist. You can use the bit that does, so long as you pay it back. This beats sub-prime. A physicist called Polkinghorne says the quantum vacuum is the nearest analogy to God in the physical world. Then again, the physicist who is brainwashing me in the CMS says quantum theory is “probably bollocks”.

I can’t tell whether he thinks it’s awesome or silly or both. I think this is probably the effect he was aiming for. [LOL-collider courtesy willc2]

So – how’s the weather in your part of the world, hmm?

No, not the rapper. Happy Darwin Day, creationists everywhere!

(Yeah, looks like I forgot again; lucky the science blog crowd are there to remind us mortals about the important annual festivals, eh?)

Martin McGrath keeps claiming he doesn’t really want people to read his blog. If that’s the case he should really stop writing interesting pieces on it that I find the need to tell people about.

It’s a kind-of-essay about the close-mindedness that the scientific method can produce in its most fanatical adherents, about how change is rarely comprehendable before it happens, and how the science fictional impulse (as both reader and writer) is based on the thrill of seeing new worlds of understanding open up:

I doubt that “cold fusion” is really fusion – though I’d be interested to know what is causing some of the phenomena observed by some groups like the US Navy findings on radioactive traces – but what the argument really demonstrates is despite the pedestal some people put the practice of science on, it really is just a profession like any other, with fads and power structures and turf-battles all ringed around with bureaucracy and propped up with career ladders.

None of this is to deny the benefits of science. I’m a geek. I love science and I’m having none of that back to nature malarkey either – I like living in a world with Wiis and the Internet and missions to Pluto and a vast array of antibiotics – this is undeniably the most extraordinary era to be alive in throughout human history.

But, believing that, one can still point out that the mechanisms and institutions of science are the product of mortal man, and mortal man is incapable of perfection.

Go and read the whole thing, it’s worth it. Clever guy, and lucid too. Even when drunk.

A forthcoming psychology paper is bound to provoke some lively debate on matters political.

In researching the way people reach moral judgements (and finding in the process that an awful lot of it boils down to subsequent justification of instinctive decisions), the psychologists have concluded that people with conservative political attitudes have more subsystems in their moral processing brain centres than their liberal equivalents. Ample opportunity for spin from both sides with those results, I’d say. Watch closely for the first salvoes!

[Cross-posted from Futurismic]

Offered without comment, from New Scientist:

“Fruit flies have free will. Even when deprived of any sensory input to react to, the zigs and zags of their flight reveal an intrinsic, non-random – yet still unpredictable – decision-making capacity.

If evolution has furnished humans with a similar capacity, this could help resolve one of the long-standing puzzles of philosophy.

Science assumes that effects have causes, and that if we understand the causes well enough we can predict the effects. But if so, our experience of being free to make choices is an illusion, since we are in effect just sophisticated robots responding to stimuli. If our behaviour is unpredictable, this is only because random events prevent us from responding perfectly to our environment.”

A number of science fiction writers (David Brin being probably the best known of them) have written about the idea of ‘uplift‘ – sub-sentient animals raised to human (or even higher) levels of cognition by scientific means; the transhumanist movement is quite fond of it as a conceptual meme too.

Which means science fiction and transhumanism can have a day of feeling vindicated; via Peter Watts, a science fiction author whose science qualifications are more than impeccable, comes the news that a team of Chinese scientists have not only discovered the gene that triggers production of a chemical intrinsic to human cognition, but managed to splice it into chimpanzees and observe the protein in question being produced.

Or, in layman’s terms: we may have found a way to create chimps with human intelligence, which may throw an interesting light on Hiasl’s human rights case.

Yet another sf trope that now passes the Mundane benchmark?

[Cross-posted from Futurismic, because it's just too damn good a story not to share.]

Keeping your mind fit is as important as looking after your body – although I tend to default on the latter rather too often. But what is the most effective thing to do if you want to keep your thinking sharp and flexible? After all, most cognitive exercises are pretty dull, and dull exercise doesn’t get done unless you’re a real disciplinarian. But now new research suggests that studying theatre produces significant and lasting increases in cognitive performance – which is good news for drama teachers and playwrights everywhere.

I imagine that most of VCTB’s regular readers will have heard of the Ig Nobel Prizes. The Annals of Improbable Research is the magazine that sponsors them, a humerous science journal focussing on ‘science that makes you laugh, and then makes you think’. Continue reading “The Improbable Research Lecture Tour 2007″