Category Archives: TOK & Pseudoscience
Bill Nye takes on Pseudoscience
Thanks to mad.scientist from the TES Boards for digging this up.
Click here for PART 2 and PART 3.
Or you could spend the better part of a weekend watching a whole collection on this YouTube playlist.
Graphjam and Graphical Silliness
Here’s a response to silly graphs on TV news shows (is it Brasseye?)
The Graphjam blog has loads of funny (and not so funny) pop-culture referencing graphs…
… as does the Facebook group “You’re having a graph”
Idea: have a stupid graph-making challenge – middle school link with Maths?
Here is Brasseye with Heavy Electricity:
150 years since ‘On the Origin of Species’
Darwin’s theory of natural selection was finally published (and sold-out) in November 1859. The idea had been in his head, and a talking point of others, for years before. We’re still talking about it today.
Here’s a clip from a BBC documentary called Legacy about the impact of Darwin’s ideas:
The Guardian newspaper has a great page devoted to Darwin, including key excerpts from ‘On the Origin of Species…‘ and an article by Richard Dawkins.
You can download the full text of the first edition in pdf format from the University of New South Wales, or read it online at Talk Origins.
Cell Theory – Hooke and van Leeuwenhoek
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek invents the microscope:
Rediscovering Robert Hooke (from the Royal Society): Click for video
Powers of Ten – an oldie, but still interesting.
This might be worth a look when thinking about measurements and the significance of getting the decimal point in the wrong place. This is pretty old – going back to the 80’s by the look of things – so be aware that the units they’re using might not match the ones you need (they use microns and angstroms where DP Bio is on micrometers and nanonmeters). This in itself may be a good introduction to TOK and changing ways we view Science over time.
A new year, a new beginning (of all life on Earth)
Two short clips of Miller-Urey’s experiments demonstrating the formation of amino acids from water, ammonia and hydrogen (with a little help from lightning). The evidence produced by this experiment supported the hypothesis of chemical evolution – the formation of organic compounds from inorganic molecules.
Thanks to Hilary Rimbi from the IB’s OCC for posting this link. 
A quick Google search turned up this short clip of Stanley Miller describing the experimental set-up.
If you click here, you can also try a simulation of the experiment (can be saved with Flashcatcher). This little Flash was produced by the University of California at San Diego’s TV channel. I haven’t had time to search through their site, but there may be more useful nuggets of Science gold there.
Evolution resources from pbs.org
Thanks to bogstandardcomp from the TES Boards for this link. A collection of short films about evolution, breaking it down into discussion-point chunks. Quicktime or RealPlayer videos, but content is protected and can’t be saved – if you decide you like it though, you can buy the set on DVD.
Royal Society Predictions for 2007: What are we really talking about?
At the end of 2006, at a Royal Society shindig, the Telegraph asked a range of RS members to predict what we’d be talking about in 2007. Dark matter, cancer, engaging young people, the brain, bioinformatics, water flowing down craters on Mars… Interesting viewing – a nice short clip.
Dawkins vs Homeopathy: The Memory of Water
This is a useful clip form the ‘Enemies of Reason’ series by Richard Dawkins. I know I’ve posted the whole episodes before, but some useful scientist has edited out the section explaining how homeopathy works. Very useful for the TOK statement regarding pseudoscience in the new DP Bio guide (Chemical Elements and Water).
i-Biology 