Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Laboratory >

Barbelith Science Reading Group

15:19 / 09.05.06

This is going to be a bit of an experiment.

The typical Lab thread seems to fall into one of two categories. The first is the question-answering category, in which a poster poses a question and a flurry of usually not-terribly-informed responses follow. The second category is that of the science news soundbyte, in which a science-related news story is posted as an item for casual discussion. The problem with both these types of discussion is that there's little impetus for the reader to go out and actually do any in-depth research or learning.

To try and improve the standard of discussion in the lab, I'm going to propose that we found a science-oriented reading group. The idea is that this thread be used to discuss topics for group readings or research and plan followup discussions.

To get things rolling, I'll throw out a few ideas of things I'd like to learn more about. If anyone else is interested in one or more of these topics, we can plan a set of readings and establish a thread to follow discussion as we go along.

Possible initial topics:
The current state of the art in artificial intelligence. Readings would include journal articles freely available online and research might include playing around with freely available toolkits for machine learning.

Physics 101 Readings could include sections from the Feynman Lectures on Physics (which are also available online as MP3), class notes from freely available online courses provided by CalTech, and other introductory physics material. Research could include a collaborative effort to understand some of the mathematics underlying general relativity.

Readings on Climate Change An analysis of peer-reviewed articles related to climate change and the models used to make predictions about the future of climate.

15:33 / 09.05.06

and I'd like to sugggest:

Medical Science, specifically increasing complexity and sophistication (or lack thereof). As we learn more about how our bodies work, and/or modify them to work better and longer, what does this mean to our species as a whole? Readings would include medical journal papers on a variety of topics, obv., but mostly longeveity, through both preventative measures (i.e. disease prevention, lifestyle changes) and active biological modification (i.e. telomere research, etc).

*

17:42 / 09.05.06

Scientific and medical ethics topics would seem to be pretty important right now, and these seem to be ending up in Swichboard or Headshop. Can/should they be discussed in a different constructive way in Lab?

18:03 / 09.05.06

I am keen on ASTRONOMY 101 or perhaps Cosmology, the shape of the universe and it's eventual destruction, the life cycles of stars and planets. Too many people are confused by why the sun rises and the seasons change, and it takes about ten minutes to set straight, and it stimulates discussion of the space programme etc. etc.
Outer space is cool.

On a slight tangent, I'd like to see a tradition emerge in the Lab of noting in responses if you have relevant education or experience in a field, or perhaps some recognition that the poster explaining it's spaliens* might not have as valid a view as the poster explaining it's entropy. If someone is answering my stupid ass questions on mitochondria and they're a professor of biochemistry I want to know, rather than somebody throwing out a random answer because they assume I'm an idiot.

*space aliens= spaliens

09:09 / 10.05.06

It's a little out-of-date now, but The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is a cracking read and a good introduction into modern thought on evolution. I've just started reading The Extended Phenotype.

09:21 / 10.05.06

If we really want to get things going, we should discuss evolutionary psychology, because that includes lots of claims about sex and relationships that people can get excited, and argumentative, about.

I know nothing about it beyond what I've read in a few books, but I'm guessing that there are probably some good online resources to get our teeth into.

Also, I'm happy to lend what mathematical expertise I have to any math heavy reading projects.

11:33 / 10.05.06

I've been wanting to read The Selfish Gene for a while now myself, but haven't gotten around to it. That seems like a good place to start to me.