Today I decided to play with some chemicals I ordered to try to spherify V-8. It’s the molecular gastronomy thing where you mix a liquid with sodium alginate, then drip it into an aqueous solution of calcium chloride to get the juice-alginate mixture to gel, forming a skin around a liquid center.
My first attempt did not produce the results I was shooting for.
It’s a proud day for any parent when offspring start getting interested in formal proofs. So I felt a little thrill when the elder Free-Ride offspring sat down with Dr. Free-Ride’s better half to consider whether it was possible for there to be a largest prime number:
This Friday marks the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. Accordingly, in SprogCast #5, the elder Free-Ride offspring marks the change of season by describing a local release of trout-fry.
You can download the sound file and pretend that the bathtub sounds are the gentle tides of the lake. The discussion is transcribed below.
Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic.
by Frederick Grinnell
Oxford University Press
2009
Scientists are not usually shy when it comes to voicing their frustration about the public’s understanding of how science works, or about the deficits in that understanding. Some lay this at the feet of an educational system that makes it too easy for students to opt out of science coursework, while others blame the dearth of science coverage in our mass media.
Rather than casting about for a villain, cell biologist Frederick Grinnell has written a book that aims to help the non-scientist understand what scientific practice looks — and feels — like to the scientists. This description of scientific activity connects the dry textbook accounts of scientific method to the vibrant, messy, frustrating yet invigorating terrain scientists inhabit as they try to build new knowledge. Grinnell’s book also connects the scientists’ world to the vibrant, messy, frustrating yet invigorating world they share with non-scientists as he considers ethical and societal dimensions of scientific practice.
The younger Free-Ride offspring’s admiration for and appreciation of the work of Jonathan Coulton continues unabated.
In fact, JoCo songs have become the subject of painstaking drawings that the younger Free-Ride hopes Mr. Coulton might encounter while Googling himself (as one does).
The latest offering is the younger Free-Ride offspring’s conception of Skullcrusher Mountain (lyrics here):
Over at Neurotopia, SciCurious has a fabulous post on the question of who is a scientist. Her discussion really teases out a lot of important nuances, and I think her analysis is spot on.
I’m going to add my two cents simply to connect Sci’s discussion with an issue I’ve pondered before: the boundaries (or lack thereof) between who we are and what we do.
Orac takes issue with a pair of posts I wrote yesterday about the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). I gather he thinks I’ve been far too trusting as far as the information provided on the NCCAM website, and that I’m misrepresenting the issues the critics of NCCAM have with the center. If my posts communicated that they were giving the straight dope on NCCAM and the objections to it, then I blew it; that wasn’t at all what was intended. Rather, I wanted to have a look at the ethical issues that arise from such an official effort to examine medical treatments that are not part of the mainstream, and to start to tease out how these might be connected to broader issues around the interactions between scientifically grounded health care providers and patients who are not adherents to scientific ways of thinking.
Here, let me reiterate that I am not an expert on NCCAM or the movement to get broad acceptance for alternative medical treatments. Rather, I’m trying to understand the political battles in terms of the divergent ways of understanding the world driving the participants in these battles.
With that in mind, some specific responses to Orac’s post:
In my last post, I started wading into the question of what kinds of ethical questions arise from clinical trials on “alternative” medical treatments, especially clinical trials supported by the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). The ethical questions include whether alternative treatments expose human subjects to direct harm, or to indirect harm (by precluding a more effective treatment), not to mention whether the money spent to research alternative modalities would be better spent on other lines of research. I think it’s worthwhile to dip into the NCCAM website to look at some of the clinical trials this federal agency has supported.
From the NCCAM website’s discussion of clinical trials being conducted on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM):
A little while ago, PalMD put up a post at Whitecoat Underground about the current state of the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), especially at a moment in history when the federal government is spending loads of money (and thus maybe should be on the lookout for expenditures that might not be necessary) and when health care reform might actually happen. Pal wrote:
I’m couching the question in terms of the academic milieu, but I suspect people in other types of organizations face a similar kind of choice.
Behind door #1: