Papers: Rejection and publication

Never has there been a better time!

Rejecta Mathematica is a new, open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences. We are currently seeking submissions for our inaugural issue.

About Rejecta Mathematica

At Rejecta Mathematica, we believe that many previously rejected papers can nonetheless have a very real value to the academic community. This value may take many forms:

• "mapping the blind alleys of science": papers containing negative results can warn others against futile directions;
• "reinventing the wheel": papers accidentally rederiving a known result may contain new insight or ideas;
• "squaring the circle": papers discovered to contain a serious technical flaw may nevertheless contain information or ideas of interest;
• "applications of cold fusion": papers based on a controversial premise may contain ideas applicable in more traditional settings;
  
• "misunderstood genius": other papers may simply have no natural home among existing journals.

Edge: An interesting site

Here's an interesting site to peruse at one's leisure. I've bookmarked on my toolbar so I'll see it most days.

Enjoy.
(hat tip: Ilachina)

Brian Hayes on Complexity

Brian Hayes, a columnist for American Scientist magazine, gives a wonderful blog entry about the complexity and its confusing use of strange, often weird, terminology.

My concern here is not with the difficulty of the concepts—there’s not much we can do about that—but with the notation and terminology. Do locutions like P^#P and NISZK and (NP ∩ coNP)/poly roll trillingly off your tongue? How about EXP, EEXP, NEXP, PEXP and SUBEXP? And while we’re on the subject of EXP and friends, I’ve been wondering how to pronounce NEXPTIME. (I’m kind of hoping the “P” is silent, as in Pterodactyl.)

And it gets even better:

The sad truth is, the naming conventions for furniture at Ikea make for a more consistent language than those of complexity theory.

Read it all, just for fun.

Invisible tank

In secret trials last week, the Army said it had made a vehicle completely disappear and predicted that an invisible tank would be ready for service by 2012.

The new technology uses cameras and projectors to beam images of the surrounding landscape onto a tank.

A soldier, who was at the trials, said: "This technology is incredible. If I hadn't been present I wouldn't have believed it. I looked across the fields and just saw grass and trees - but in reality I was staring down the barrel of a tank gun."

I have believed for years that this was possible. Years ago I hypothesized such an invention with fiber optic cables where images from one side of an object would be "transmitted around" the object. That was fanciful and people I told about it where less than impressed. Still the idea nagged at me. But using cameras with projectors, if that's how this is actually, done, makes sense. The technological hurdles must be substantial.

Videos for Science: Journal of Visualized Experiments

Here are two links, here and here, that talk about scientists using video---cheap, easy, do-it-yourself videos---to describe their work and tell others how to do what they do or have done.

This is absolutely wonderful and a great way to communicate one's work.

To begin, a video let's the viewer see and hear what a scientist is thinking and wants to show you. You don't have to be limited to paper and text which are quite good but are static. What's more, videos can be archived and indexed so that you can search through them if you make a library for yourself, or go to a library on-line.

I think this idea is right up there with publishing on-line so that everyone can have access to each other's work. I was reading just a few months ago about how expensive journals are so that many researchers cannot afford them. What's worse, libraries (even university libraries) are starting to limit their subscriptions because of the tremendous cost.

If you go to ArXiv, you'll find a collection of pre-prints that researchers have written and posted there for others to read and for editors to check for publication. In fact, Grigory Perlman, who recently proved The Poincare Conjecture posted his work to that site. Anyone could get it; many did; and each could enjoy his wonderful research. (I looked at his papers and didn't have clue where to even begin. But that's not the point.)

Having these sites, like JOVE (see the link at the top) is a truly wonderful beginning to getting research out to others for review, comments, and general dissemination.

(Hat tip: Ilachina)

P.S. There is always the chance for people to abuse these sites and post junk. It happens but I think that generally others recognize the junk and filter it away.

Mapping the Internet by Function, Not just connnectivitiy

It's the first study to look at how the Internet is organized in terms of function, as well as how it's connected, says Shai Carmi, a physicist who took part in the research at the Bar Ilan University, in Israel. "This gives the most complete picture of the Internet available today," he says.

While efforts have been made previously to plot the topological structure in terms of the connections between Internet nodes--computer networks or Internet Service Providers that act as relay stations for carrying information about the Net--none have taken into account the role that these connections play. "Some nodes may not be as important as other nodes," says Carmi.

The researchers' results depict the Internet as consisting of a dense core of 80 or so critical nodes surrounded by an outer shell of 5,000 sparsely connected, isolated nodes that are very much dependent upon this core. Separating the core from the outer shell are approximately 15,000 peer-connected and self-sufficient nodes.

(Hat tip: Ilachina)

Art of sizes

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. My underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007

When you view these beautifully expressive images note the zooms and how the zoomed out views relate to the zoomed in pieces or pixels, if you will. These are a wonderful example of how you can build images with other images.

Various measures: obscure to unknown

Some examples, from the site:

Attoparsec
Parsecs are used in astronomy to measure enormous interstellar distances. A parsec is approximately 3.26 light-years or about 3.085×10¹⁶ m. Combining it with the "atto-" prefix yields attoparsec, a conveniently human-scaled unit of about 3.085 centimeters (about 1-7/32 inches) that has no obvious practical use but does have a proper SI symbol, apc. Interestingly, 1 attoparsec/microfortnight is nearly 1 inch/second (the actual figure is about 1.0043 inches per second, or approximately 2.55 cm/s).

Siriometer
The siriometer is a rarely used astronomical measure equal to one million astronomical units, i.e., one million times the average distance between the Sun and Earth. This distance is equal to about 15.8 light-years, about twice the distance from Earth to the star Sirius.

Light-nanosecond
The light-nanosecond was popularized as a unit of distance by Grace Hopper as the distance which a photon could travel in one billionth of a second (roughly 30 cm or one foot): "The speed of light is one foot per nanosecond."

Computer agents: Testing theories of social interaction

The complex behaviour of primates can be understood using artificially-intelligent computer 'agents' that mimic their actions, shows new research published in a special edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B and presented at the BA Festival of Science in York.

Scientists using agents programmed with simple instructions to work out why some primate groups are 'despotic' whilst others are 'egalitarian' - overturning previous theories developed by primatologists.

They have also found support for an existing theory of how dominant macaques make it to the safer positions at the middle of their troop without seeming to be pre-occupied with getting there.

Using agents programmed with two rules -- stay in a group for safety and pester subordinates until they move away -- scientists found that their more dominant agents would make their way to the centre of the group.

This is one of the few times I've seen agents being used to test theories. Oftentimes, agents are criticized for not being predictive. That is, you can run agent models, see interesting and thought-provoking patterns, but then ask: How does that help me to set a course of action?

While that question is unanswered, for now, the idea of mimicking social behavior and comparing the agent model to actual creatures, is quite fascinating and a marvelous application of this science.

Quote of the Year

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

Freeman Dyson, Physicist

Making fun of physics

This site pokes fun at theoretical physics and physicists. Frankly, there's a place for physics and place for fun but I think that mocking the serious endeavors of physicists is a childish and shows a degree of disrespect for what is a noble profession.

The Book Site

The link above takes you a lovely site where you can download parts of classic books. I just downloaded Edwin Shrodinger's chapter "What is Life?" and Henri Poincare's "The Future of Mathematics."

Take a look, you'll find something you like. Try this link of authors to see authors and titles easily.

A council has put up a sign warning lorry drivers to ignore their satellite navigation systems after faulty sat-nav directions caused traffic chaos in Wales.
Vale of Glamorgan Council in South Wales is the first in the UK to use visual signs warning drivers not to believe sat-nav advice after once peaceful villages were reduced to bedlam when heavy-goods lorries got stuck in tiny country lanes.

Now a sign aimed largely at foreign drivers has been put up on the outskirts of the village of St Hilary.

"The proliferation of satellite navigation aids used in heavy goods vehicles, and their over-reliance, especially by overseas drivers, has presented itself as a problem within the Vale of Glamorgan," a spokesman for the council's highways department said.

GPS navigation is a wonderful invention and usually, it's quite useful. However, one has to be careful to use it intelligently. Just because the GPS aid says to turn, one should check that there is a road there on which to turn.

GPS: Think when in use.

Math and girls

I had forgotten about this picture and then found it today. Tara C. Smith's blog is about women and science. In this post she talks to actress Danica McKellar about her book Math Doesn't Suck.

The book, as I read about it on Amazon.com, is pretty insignificant and so I won't link to it. What's interesting here is that Ms. Smith promotes women in science yet, if you look at this screen capture and the ad at the top, her advertisers see women as something less than scientific.

If one wants to support women in science, and that's a worthy goal as is supporting men in science, at least have the decency not to objectify them with sexually-based ads. C'mon.

Reading: Just do it

If you read more you exercise your brain and will be less likely to suffer mental impairment.

Workers at lead-smelting plants can suffer substantial neural damage from exposure to the toxic heavy metal. Workers who read well, however, experience comparatively less mental impairment, a new study finds.

It's not that the better readers were smarter, but that they have more "cognitive reserve," explains study leader Margit L. Bleecker, a neurologist at the Center for Occupational and Environmental Neurology in Baltimore. She says that people typically gain cognitive reserve-better or more resilient neural connections in the brain-through reading, puzzle solving, and other mentally challenging activities.

Her team recruited 112 men at a lead smelter to participate in a battery of neural assessments. After measuring the men's reading abilities-a rough gauge of cognitive reserve-the researchers split the volunteers into two groups of equal size, consisting of high or low scorers. In other respects-age, number of years worked, educational background-the two groups were similar. Most important, participants in each group exhibited the same range of blood-lead concentrations.

In the July 31 Neurology, the researchers report that in each group, men with higher blood-lead values scored more poorly on tests of hand-eye coordination. That's typical of lead poisoning. However, men in the better-reading group performed 2.5 times as well on tests of memory, attention, and concentration-tasks not necessarily related to reading.

The brain is like a muscle, Bleecker concludes: Exercising it strengthens it and makes it better able to counter the ravages of disease and poisoning.

To turn a phrase: Reading, just do it!

Out of your body experiences

The study participant sits in a chair wearing a pair of head-mounted video displays. These have two small screens over each eye, which show a live film recorded by two video cameras placed beside each other two metres behind the participant's head. The image from the left video camera is presented on the left-eye display and the image from the right camera on the right-eye display. The participant sees these as one 'stereoscopic' (3D) image, so they see their own back displayed from the perspective of someone sitting behind them. (Credit: Image courtesy of University College London) (Reference: Here.)

The above link is a fascinating article on inducing out of body experiences. The part that caught my attention is this:

A separate set of experiments was carried out by Henrik Ehrsson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was “a bored medical student at University College London,” he wondered, he said, “what would happen if you ‘took’ your eyes and moved them to a different part of a room.”

“Would you see yourself where your eyes were placed?” he said. “Or from where your body was placed?”

To find out, he asked people to sit in a chair and wear goggles connected to two video cameras placed six feet behind them. The left camera projected to the left eye, the right camera to the right eye. As a result, people saw their own backs from the perspective of a virtual person sitting behind them.

Using two sticks, Dr. Ehrsson stroked each person’s chest for two minutes with one stick while moving the second stick just under the camera lenses, as if it were touching the virtual body.

Again, when the stroking was synchronous, people reported the sense of being outside their own bodies, in this case looking at themselves from a distance where their “eyes” were situated.

Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated, and their pulses raced. They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt.

Years ago, my friend Andy mentioned just such a experiment. He put as: What would you see if you could take your eyeballs out of your head and the point them at yourself? I think we have an answer here.

Also, here's a thought: If people feel that these experiments are actually happening to them, that is, the threat of a hammer induces feeling of being hit by hammer, then we have a very effective means for torture. If a captive can be led to think wrongly, then torture would be physically harmless (or somewhat, given that one responds physically the effect is not truly harmless) yet highly effective.

Hat tip: Ilachina

Plagiarism in physics

From Ars Mathematica I learned about an article at Ars Technica describing a scandal involving plagiarism of theoretical physics papers by about 20 different people, some of them students at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Many of the papers were refereed and published in well-known journals, and one made it into what is now perhaps the most well-known particle theory journal, the Journal of High Energy Physics.

The rest of the post gives more detail and quotes.

Frankly, I think this just shows the greed in people.

According to Dr. Sarioglu, [faculty member at METU] two of the authors of this paper were graduate students with a prodigious track record of publication: over 40 papers in a 22-month span.

Think about those numbers. That's almost two papers a month. Incredible. To do that kind of work as graduate students, who generally work for themselves without students under them, is too good to be true; and it was, obviously.

My question is: Where was the faculty advisor?

If you go to the link above, check out the comments for more insights.

Teenageres in love, Madly in love

Adolescents who claim they are "madly in love" might not be too far off the mark: a new study suggests that they show almost manic behaviours.

Serge Brand of the Psychiatric University Clinics in Basel, Switzerland, and his colleagues surveyed 113 teenagers at around 17 years of age, asking them to complete questionnaires about their conduct and mood and to keep a log of their sleep patterns. Of those, 65 indicated they had recently fallen in love and experienced intense romantic emotions.

Thelovestruck teenagers showed many behaviours resembling "hypomania" – a less intense form of mania. For example, they required about an hour less sleep each night than teens who didn't have a sweetheart. They were also more likely to report acting compulsively, with 60% saying they spent too much money compared with fewer than 30% of teenagers who were not in love.

Moreover, the lovestruck teens were more than twice as likely to say they had lots of ideas and creative energy. Worryingly, they were also more likely to say they drove fast and took risks on the road.

Yep, that about explains it Speaking from experience, once as a teenager, now father to three teenagers, one who has a boyfriend, I can testify that teenagers do some wacky things. It's nice to see that scientists have confirmed what most parents already know. The article doesn't say how long this behavior will last but, as most parents also know, there's always an end.

Is this real?

My last post was about image editing. So, I went to the Astronomy Picture of the Day for a real image. Alas, it's not, from their caption:

Colors in the gorgeous image were picked to emphasize light emitted by specific elements in the nebula excited by the energetic starlight.

So, what picture does capture reality?

Pictures: From Graphics to outright lies

Here's an image that we start with.

I have a dear friend whose hobby is photography. He doesn't just take photos though because he's an artist. So, he takes pictures, digital pictures, and then he processes them to make beautiful prints. You can see some here. What's interesting is that the pictures you see are not what the scene showed but rather the pictures are what he wants you to see. They are art, and as art, they are gorgeous and well worth having. I proudly display many of these works in my office.

But they are not a capture of reality. (It is interesting to ask just what is a capture of reality and how do you know it. That's a post for another time.)

Now two scientists have devised an automated algorithm that allows you to easily remove, edit, and change your digital pictures to take out what you don't like and replace with something that will fill-in the picture realistically. This is letting a computer effectively edit out reality from your pictures.

Digital photographers could soon be able to erase unwanted elements in photos by using tools that scan for similar images in online libraries.

Research teams have developed an algorithm that uses sites like Flickr to help discover light sources, camera position and composition in a photo.

Using this data the tools then search for objects, such as landscapes or cars, that match the original.

The teams aim to create image libraries that anyone can use to edit snaps.

In the past you could edit pictures, use Photoshop and change what you liked and didn't like. Now, it is automated (well, almost) so that soon you won't have to work at making phony images. Phony images are fine, of course, we are free to change them as we like. But to have the process automated, well, that just seems like making it all the more easy to distort reality.

This is the same image with the roof removed and phony boats inserted. A beautiful graphic but not a photo of the actual scene.

From dust to dust..

The Bible tells us that man goes from dust to dust. How fitting then that we should find the following:

Life on earth is organic. It is composed of organic molecules, which are simply the compounds of carbon, excluding carbonates and carbon dioxide. The idea that particles of inorganic dust may take on a life of their own is nothing short of alien, going beyond the silicon-based life forms favoured by some science fiction stories.

Now, an international team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organised into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.

So, while we think of life as special, we are no more special than dust, or helically-shaped molecules.

Until now, physicists assumed that there could be little organisation in such a cloud of particles. However, Tsytovich and his colleagues demonstrated, using a computer model of molecular dynamics, that particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into corkscrew shapes, or helical structures. These helical strands are themselves electronically charged and are attracted to each other.

Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.

So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? "These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter," says Tsytovich, "they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve".

Call it in, but the Bible had it first. (Hattip: ilachina)

Google Earth Image: A Plane in Flight

While working this morning with Google Earth, I came across this image. It's just outside of Chicago's O'Hare airport, by the way.

At first glance I thought I was looking an airport, then I realized there weren't any runways nearby. So I asked myself, how did the airplane get there? I then realized that the images are from satellites, of course!, so the plane you see is actually in flight.

Pretty cool, eh?

(The white line is for work; it's not part of the image itself.)

NSF: U.S.A. shows slow growth in technical articles published

The United States is not increasing the number of research articles (science and engineering) it publishes. We still produce more than any other country but our rate of growth is level while other countries are producing papers at an accelerated rate.

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) report finds the number of U.S. science and engineering (S&E) articles in major peer-reviewed journals flattened in the 1990s, after more than two decades of growth, but U.S. influence in world science and technology remains strong.

The report, Changing U.S. Output of Scientific Articles: 1988 - 2003, finds changes occurred despite continued increases in funding and personnel for research and development. Flattening occurred in nearly all U.S. research disciplines and types of institutions.

In contrast, emerging Asian nations had large increases in publication numbers, reflecting their growing expertise in science and technology. European Union totals also went up.

This is not a surprise to anyone who even glances at the literature today. Check out arXiv.org and you'll see more and more preprints from outside the Unites States. True, many of these are from the states but more and more are not.

Still, the NSF finds some positive news:

"In addition to numbers published, one should look at another very important indicator -- article quality," said Derek Hill, senior analyst and a coauthor of the report. "The more often an article is cited by other publications, the higher quality it's believed to have. While citation is not a perfect indicator, U.S. publications are more highly cited than those from other countries."

In raw numbers, the United States continues to publish far more articles than any other country and remains a major force in world S&E. However its overall share of published articles has declined while other nations produce more.

And how are other nations doing in publishing?

Four Asian societies--China, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan--out-distanced all others in the world between 1992 and 2003 with an average annual growth rate of 15.9 percent in publications.

According to the report, Japan's article output rose at an average annual rate of 3.1 percent, five times faster than the United States.

The European Union, which passed the U.S. several years ago in total numbers of articles published, posted an average annual growth rate of 2.8 percent during the same period, more than four times faster than the United States.

It's no secret that the U.S. is ahead now in total numbers but we will not stay there for long. Witness, for example, who is doing basic research in physics ---the Europeans at CERN while our basic research stalls.

The truth is that it's very difficult to get funding for research in industry today. It's tough to get funding at universities, too. And do you know what else? When you get funding there is little support to publish. In fact, the trend is not to publish so as not to tell others (competitors) what you are doing.

I am now writing a paper on some of my work and the one thing that comes out is: tell enough to get the idea across but not so much that others can reproduce what I've done. For a company, that makes sense because, after all, the company is in business to make money. If the company tells others how to do what we now do, well, it won't be long before our market share dwindles to little. However, this trend is now true at universities where professors and administrators seek to patent and sell research. It didn't used to be that way: professors sought to publish whatever they did, sometimes even publishing junk. Today, schools want to profit so publishing is not as important as it used to be.

I fear that in the near future our lack of scholarly discourse, of which publications are central, will mark a steady decline in our scientific progress. (While I'm on this topic, let me state one more indicator. The U.S. is losing promising scientists because we do not seek to employ them when they graduate. So they return to their native countries and contribute there instead of here. In essence we give them an education that they take back and then compete with us. Is that bad? I don't know.)

Interesting physics experiments in the offing

University of Washington physicist (and science-fiction author) John Cramer is moving forward with his experiment in backward causality, thanks in part to tens of thousands of dollars in contributions sent in by his fans. Although Cramer emphasizes that his lab is looking at “nonlocal quantum communication” rather than backward time travel per se, the gadgetry he’s assembling could settle a controversy surrounding a seemingly faster-than-light effect that Albert Einstein thought was downright spooky.

Boiled down to its basics, the experiment involves splitting laser light into two beams, so that characteristics of one beam are reflected in the other beam as well. That's an example of what physicists call quantum entanglement. Specifically, Cramer has been planning to fiddle with one of the entangled laser beams such that it takes on the property of waves or particles. If one beam behaves like particles, the entangled photons of light in the other beam should behave like particles, too.

I can't do better than the author of this link, so go here to read it all.

Sex in your sleep

I stumbled upon this while looking at space.com for when the planet Mars will be visible in August. It's somewhat interesting, though.

If you think it’s impossible to have sex while you sleep, think again, according to a new study.

There are at least 11 different sex-related sleep disorders, collectively referred to as “sexsomnia” or “sleepsex,” that affect people who are otherwise psychologically healthy—causing them to unknowingly engage in various sexual activities during the night.

Carlos Schenck, a psychiatrist at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, and his colleagues have studied a number of behavioral disorders associated with sleep.

“Any basic instinct can come out in the context of sleep,” Schenck told LiveScience. “All sorts of things can happen.”

So, be careful when you're sleeping, as if that's possible. But, if your roommate tells you something weird about yourself, it just may be true.

A WOW video

I got this link from a good friend in an email today. I didn't think much about it, but I started to watch, and I have to say, it's simply fantastic. You'll see a scale model of the B-29 bomber with an X-1 rocket. The B-29 takes off with the X-1 on its belly. The B-29 then flies up and releases the X-1. The rocket flies on its own, and even goes to an accelerated flight. Then the rocket safely lands and you see the B-29 flying. Watch for the flat spin, it's about half-way through, and then you'll see the rest of the flight.

It is truly fun to watch and when you think of the work it took to make these remote control airplanes, and that they work together, well, that's just fantastic. Here's what my friend said:

This aircraft runs on four chainsaw motors. You can just imagine how much time, effort, skill and money these guys have put into this thing.

Here's the link:

http://users.skynet.be/fa926657/files/B29.wmv

Simple yet inexplicable illusions and unknowns

The Astronomy Picture of the Day today is not about astronomy, per se, but rather about illusions. The image above is fairly common. You see the checkerboard pattern but are squares A and B the same color? They look different to me. Then you see the picture below.

The squares are connected so that instead of looking like different colors, they look close to identical. (I still see square A as darker than square B but maybe that's my age showing.)

No one knows why people see the squares as different colors, but we do.

The site also has a link that, with a few clicks, takes you to this picture.


Ever notice that when the moon is near the horizon it looks much bigger than it does high in the sky? I've seen it may times, low to the horizon, and my wife calls that a "harvest moon," although that's not really right. In any case, the moon does seem much larger when it is near the horizon than when it's high. In truth, the moon always has an angular diameter of about 0.5-degree, so it's not any bigger when it is low than when it's high.

No one knows why we see the moon this way, some say we interpret distance objects as wider (so on the horizon we "see" this distance but in high in the sky we don't interpret it as such) or one's eyes focus differently for the different positions of the moon.

So, here are two simple phenomena which no one understands. These pictures reminded me of another phenomena that I thought was a legend. The phenomena is that if you place equal measures of cold water and hot water in a freezer the hot water will freeze first. Sounds crazy, I mean, the hot water has to cool to the temperature of the cold water before it can freeze so we would expect the cold water to freeze first. The cold water has a head-start as each cools to 32-degree Fahrenheit.

Not so. In fact, yesterday I was browsing the (now purchased and its way to me) book The Science of Cooking by Peter Barham and in there I found the following.

In this short excerpt, we see that hot water does freeze faster than cold water and yet the experts, physicists no less, are stumped. They have no idea why.

I think we should revel in these puzzles and see that with all we know, we know very little. Our eyes mislead us in viewing a simple picture, they mislead us in viewing the heavenly skies, and science can't explain (yet!) the nature of water freezing. Simple yet inexplicable.

It makes me wonder: just what can we know and of what can we be certain?

Beautiful graphics: Singles in the U.S. and Viagra emails

On Carl Bialik's Blog (The Numbers Guy for the Wall Street Journal) he has interesting post on single women in New York City. You can find his post at the link above.

What I found interesting was not just the post (if you're married, as I am, finding single women isn't much of a concern) but the graphic he linked to, shown above and a link here. The graphic presents a quick way to see where most single people live, color coded by gender; men are blue, women are orange. At a glance you can see density of singles and make quick comparisons of sizes based on the circle size. Each circle not only tells the number of singles, and the gender, but also location given the placement of the circle on the underlying map of the United States.

Graphics such as these are simply wonderful. They show data in a clear, easy to use manner, that allows the reader to quickly see trends or numbers that a table would obscure.

Here's another beautiful graphic:

This graphic comes from the current issue of American Scientist and it is in Brian Hayes's column How Many Ways Can You Spell V1@gra? His column is very good; I recommend you click the link and read it.

The graphic though, is truly wonderful. He shows you various spellings of Viagra (the article is about the proliferation of spam and Viagra is a common spam email) along the left column. The color bars help organize the different spellings (red for ordinary alphabetic characters; yellow for accented characters; olive for spellings with numbers and other non-alphabetic characters; brown for spellings with spaces or hyphens; and blue for correct spellings. Time is along the bottom, left to right and the number of emails (he uses his received spam for data) is shown by the area of the disks. From this it's easy to see that:

Vertical correlations within the table suggest that many of the mailings were coordinated and may have been conducted by the same individuals or groups.

With a glance you can see patterns in the data, relate pieces of data to each other, and quickly see what the author is trying to show you.

Astronomy Picture of the Day: Can't resist

Explanation: When is the Sun most distant from Earth? It happened again just this past weekend. A common misconception is that the Sun is most distant during the winter, when it's the coldest. In truth, however, the seasonal temperatures are more greatly influenced by the number of daylight hours and how high the Sun rises. For example, during northern winter, the tilt of the Earth causes the Sun to be above the horizon for a shorter time and remain lower in the sky than in northern summer. The picture compares the relative size of the Sun during Earth's closest approach in January (northern winter) on the left, and in July (northern summer) on the right. The angular size of the Sun is noticeably smaller during July, when it is farther away. If the Earth's orbit was perfectly circular, the Sun would always appear to be the same size. These two solar images were taken from Spain during 2006, but the same effect can be seen in any year from any Earth-bound location.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Explanation: Spiral galaxy NGC 2903 is only some 20 million light-years distant in the constellation Leo. One of the brighter galaxies visible from the northern hemisphere, it is surprisingly missing from Charles Messier's famous catalog of celestial sights. This impressively sharp color image shows off the galaxy's beautiful blue spiral arms. Included in the ground-based telescopic view are intriguing details of NGC 2903's central regions -- a remarkable mix of old and young star clusters with immense dust and gas clouds. In fact, NGC 2903 exhibits an exceptional rate of star formation activity near its center, also bright in radio, infrared, ultraviolet, and x-ray bands. Just a little smaller than our own Milky Way, NGC 2903 is about 80,000 light-years across.

I can't get enough of these.

No Way Physics: Thought provoking

Many principles of physics are of the form "If you do this, what will happen is that." Newton's second law, for example, says that the acceleration of a particular mass will be proportional to the force applied to it. Such principles imply that certain effects are practically impossible. A small number of principles, however, belong to a different category. These say, in effect, "That cannot happen." Such principles imply that certain effects are physically impossible.

Notorious examples of the latter include the first two laws of thermodynamics. The first law says that energy cannot be created or destroyed ("You can't win"), while the second can be stated in several forms, such as that heat cannot be transferred from a colder to a warmer body or that the entropy of a closed system always increases ("You can't break even, either"). Other examples include Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the relativity principles regarding the impossibility of recognizing absolute velocity and the prohibition of faster-than-light travel.

Such principles often represent not "new physics" but deductions from other principles. What is different about them is their form. And to say that something is physically impossible tends to make scientists want to rebel.

The article goes on to explain that such laws force scientists to re-think their theories, to try to find ways to make something work that is actually impossible. Such provocations lead us to new theories and new technologies.

While some things are truly impossible, sometimes being told something is impossible is the first step to getting it done.

Mathematics Plus: A truly wonderful zine

A friend of mine sent me an innocent email just a few minutes ago. It read:

Dave,

I like Cambridge U.'s Plus Math-zine.
They came out with their new quarterly
issue this month:
http://plus.maths.org/issue43/

Greg C.

So, I ambled over to this site not knowing what to expect. Was I in for a most pleasant surprise!

Here's a beautiful zine that gives the most beautifully illustrated articles on so many topics. I think anyone who goes through these zines, the current issue or past issues (hit the archives button) will be in for a treat.

I've spent some time just now downloading and printing articles on Euler, special relativity, game theory, Godel, among others.

The articles have links to other sites, animations, videos, code listings, and each article is available as a pdf file so you can easily print them. Some you'll want to read on-line, see the animations, play the videos, and enjoy. Others you can print for later.

Enjoy, I know I will.

Science toys at home

I ran across this site while waiting for a program to run. It's pretty neat.

I love the theme of science-oriented toys you can make at home with everyday things around your house.

Peet to peer Patents

Peer-to-Patent opens the patent examination process to public participation for the first time.

Become part of this historic pilot program. Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications.

Become a community reviewer and improve the quality of patents.

This is an idea whose time has come. There will be kinks to work out, processes to improve, but it's almost impossible to believe that the patent office cannot benefit from this. Kudos to everyone who made this possible.

Here's a good interview on this.

Portraits of Scientists

The Wisconsin Historical Society presents portraits of scientists. It's worth some time to thumb through them.

Computer interface for the future, NOW

Click on the link to see the whole video. You'll see how images and text can move on the screen in front of the person, be manipulated and shared in real-time.

It's worth viewing, maybe even twice.

Google with a Street View

This is utterly fantastic!

At maps.google.com there is now, for San Francisco, a street view of the city. With Adobe Flashplayer you can see video captures of the streets of the city.

Try this and be amazed.

Molten core on the planet Mercury, possibl

"NASA scientists working with high-precision planetary radars in California have discovered strong evidence that the planet Mercury might have a molten core.

"Scientists had not expected to find a magnetic field at Mercury," said Professor Jean-Luc Margot of Cornell University, leader of the research team. "Planetary magnetic fields are associated with molten cores, and the prevailing theory was the planet was too small to have a molten core."

Since then, multiple radar observations have ruled out a solid core, leading to the finding that Mercury's core is molten -- or at least the outer core is molten and not forced to rotate along with its shell."

I'm not sure what this means in the grand scheme of things, but it goes to explaining more of our universe. And that's a good thing.

Fighting rape with co-evolution

The mallard Anas platyrhynchos: a species with high levels of forced copulations. Females have very elaborate vaginas (left) to counter males' phalluses (right). (Image: Patricia Brennan et al.)

"Some female ducks and geese have evolved complex genitalia to thwart unwelcome mating attempts, according to a new study.

Males of some species, such as mallard, have a notorious habit of "raping" females. They and other wildfowl are among the 3% of bird species whose males have phalluses big enough to insert into the vaginas of females, whether or not the female consents.

Now, in the most detailed analysis yet of duck and goose vaginas, researchers have established that females of these species have evolved vaginal features to thwart unwelcome males.

Some vaginas had spiral channels that would impede sex by twisting in the opposite direction to that of the male phallus. Others had as many as eight cul-de-sac pouches en route, that could prevent fertilisation by capturing unwelcome sperm. Moreover, these features were only found in species renowned for forced sex. All other species had simple male and female genitalia.

“These structures are wonderfully devious, sending sperm down the wrong road or impeding penetration,” says Birkhead.

He says that the features demonstrate an evolutionary "arms race" in which control over reproduction alternates between the sexes. If the male develops a longer, more elaborate phallus to force copulation, females wrest back control by developing features to thwart males who rape.

“It shows that females are not passive in averting exploitation by males with large phalluses,” says Birkhead. "

This is a terrific example of co-evolution. The aggressive males evolve to perpertuate their genes, hence the force coupling. The females evolve, almost simultaneously it seems, to counter the evolution of the males.

Fascinating.

Research on Erectile Dysfunction

Here's something truly amazing. Not for it's work, although I have to believe it's good, but for the nature of the research.

"Like a column collapsing under the burden of a heavy roof, erectile dysfunction is a classical mechanical engineering problem, says a US urologist. Using mathematical models of penis geometry and hydrostatic pressure, doctors can predict when penises will fail – and in which vagina – he says.

The most widely investigated parameter of penile rigidity is intracavernosal pressure (ICP) – the fluid pressure achieved by blood build up in the two expandable "caverns" of the penis. For a healthy man, the erect ICP is between 60 and 90 millimetres of mercury (mmHg), but can drop to just 30 mmHg, in men with erectile dysfunction (ED)."

Here's the abstract from the Journal:

"Two major branches of engineering mechanics are fluid mechanics and structural mechanics, with many practical problems involving the effect of the first on the second. An example is the design of an aircraft's wings to bend within reasonable limits without breaking under the action of lift forces exerted by the air flowing over them; another is the maintenance of the structural integrity of a dam designed to hold back a water reservoir which would exert very large forces on it. Similarly, fluid and structural mechanics are involved in the engineering analysis of erectile function: it is the hydraulic action of increased blood flow into the corpora cavernosa that creates the structural rigidity necessary to prevent collapse of the penile column."

If you have a copy of the paper, please email it to me. Thanks.

First it was animals, then people...

OOPS, that's wrong. It's first people then animals, so says the article. Used to be we tried experimental drugs on animals and then prescribed the drugs on people. That's in reverse:

Vets have rejected claims by a British animal welfare charity that giving dogs drugs to treat behavioural problems will create a population of "pill-popping pets".

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals expressed alarm at the news that an antidepressant called Reconcile - containing the same serotonin-reuptake inhibitor used in the human drug Prozac - has been licensed for use in dogs by the US Food and Drug Administration.

"Pet owners have a duty of care towards their animals," says charity scientist Penny Hawkins. "Pharmaceuticals should not be used to help sustain an unsustainable lifestyle by addressing problems that should be dealt with by other means, such as more exercise."

“Pet owners have a duty of care towards their animals. Drugs should not be used to sustain an unsustainable lifestyle”

But vets specialising in treating behavioural problems say medication can be extremely useful in treating anxiety symptoms such as howling and destructiveness.

Dogs with behavioural problems account for about a quarter those that are euthanised by veterinary practices, so by increasing the chances of successfully managing a problem drugs can improve welfare.

It used to be that if you had a dog, and it was a problem, you either gave the dog away, or had it killed. Simple. Dogs are dogs, after all, not people. Now, we're seeing a slide to drugs for dogs (and I'm sure other animals) that will only take us further along to more drugs, more medical treatment, more costs, and, if owners opt not to do these things, there will be societal (read: animal rights activits) pressure to force owners to do them.

Web browsers: Still unsafe

YOU are surfing the net, and stop at a sports site you regularly visit to read the latest headlines. You are always careful to avoid sites that appear suspect, so you feel safe online. Unbeknownst to you, though, and to the innocent owner of the website, a piece of malicious code has been added to the page you are viewing. This uploads software onto your computer via your browser, turning it into a "zombie" PC under the remote control of a malicious user.

While installing firewalls and antivirus software on your computer may keep it safe from conventional threats such as worms and viruses, these security tools do not inspect data downloaded through browsers - a loophole that attackers can exploit. "The firewall is dead," says Google security specialist Niels Provos.

The threat is real, not just a theoretical possibility:

Provos warned that many web users are becoming the victims of "drive-by" downloads of bots from innocent websites corrupted to exploit browser vulnerabilities. As firewalls allow free passage to code or programs downloaded through the browser, the bot is able to install itself on the PC. Anti-virus software kicks in at this point, but some bots avoid detection by immediately disabling it. Once a computer has become infected with the malicious software, the zombie periodically connects to a web server controlled by the botmaster to receive instructions and download more software.

To determine the scale of the problem, Provos's group at Google analysed several billion web pages and selected 4.5 million suspicious pages for more detailed study. To test for malicious software, or malware, they loaded a program designed to simulate a computer with a vulnerable version of Internet Explorer and monitored what happened. They found around 450,000 web pages that launched drive-by downloads of malicious programs. Another 700,000 pages launched downloads of suspicious software. More than two-thirds of the malicious programs identified were those that infected computers with bot software or programs that collected data on banking transactions and emailed it to a temporary email account.

You don't even know it's there. The result: be very careful with the sites you go to. If possible, don't use Internet Explorer; IE is a disaster for security.

Happy Birthday, Leonhard Euler

Sunday, April 15, is the 300th birthday of Leonhard Euler (pronounced "oiler"), one of the most important mathematicians ever to have lived.

Click the above link to read a wonderful description of his famous equation: e^iπ = –1

If you want to read some wonderful books, check out Paul Nahin's books: An Imaginary Tale and
Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula: Cures Many Mathematical Ills.

These books are worth reading and you'll learn about the mathematics of Euler.

The Mathematical Association of America has a wonderful column by Ed Sandifer entitled "How Euler Did It." Dr. Sandifer translates (I guess) some of Euler's original papers, tells you what Euler did, how he did it, and why that result is important.

Rotating polygons in space and in the lab

It was recently reported that there's a hexagonal rotating structure (see the image at left) at the North pole of Saturn.

We may not have found other life in our Solar System, but we have, it appears, found a polygon. An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with NASA's Cassini mission.

NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft produced images of the hexagon over two decades ago. The fact that it has appeared in the recent Cassini images indicates that it is a long-lived feature. A second hexagon, significantly darker than the brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures. The spacecraft's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.

Now others have seen the same phenomenon in the lab.


The unusual phenomenon in question involves rotating a bottom plate under a liquid in a circular (cylindrical) container. Bohr and his team of students at the Technical University and at the Niels Bohr Institute set up an experiment to find out whether or not such conditions would lead to stable deformations of a water surface into polygon shapes. The findings from their experiment were published May 3^rd in Physical Review Letters.

Bohr tells PhysOrg.com that a somewhat similar experiment took place eight years ago with a different team (including Clive Ellegaard and others). “We had fluid falling on a plane, like water from a faucet. We found that even if the rim of the plate is completely circular, the fluid surface can be shaped like a polygon.”

While the first polygon experiment Bohr did involved stationary polygons, the most recent effort shows rotating polygons. “Not only are these shapes rotating,” says Bohr, “but they are rotating at a different speed than the plate beneath them.”

This is a fascinating phenomena that is, apparently, unexplained as yet. Here's another site for a video and more links.


(Hat tip: Ilachina)

Are cellular phones killing bees?

Interesting article on how our cellular phones could be disrupting the navigation of bees.

Putnam Mathematical Competition Problems

Click on the link for the pdf file of the Putnam Mathematical Competition problems.

Good luck with them!

Planet of the Apes: Apes as People

In a ground-breaking case at the Mödling district court, just southwest of Vienna, Austria, a judge is to rule over "the humanness of a chimp"– specifically, over whether it deserves a legal guardian.

The chimpanzee in question is called Hiasl. He was born in the Sierra Leone jungle in 1981, captured by animal traders and illegally shipped to Austria, destined for a vivisection lab. Customs officials intercepted the crate and Hiasl was handed to an animal sanctuary. Now, years later, the sanctuary has gone bankrupt and Hiasl is to be sent to a zoo.

This is the most ridiculous legal item I've seen a long time. Of course the chimp is NOT a human. To say otherwise is to say that we, (you, me, your friends, etc.) are chimps. Clearly not the case.

Nonetheless, as an animal lover (dogs, in particular) I should think the court could see it's way to appointing a caregiver for the chimp without equating the chimp to a human. The caregiver would have certain rights as an owner and thereby take care of the animal. Anything more is an insult to humans.

Air traffic control, automatically

Fighter pilots will one day be able to control entire squadrons of uncrewed combat aircraft as well as their own plane, following successful flight demonstrations of a multi-aircraft remote control system in UK airspace.

In addition to cutting the number of pilots risked in military operations, the remote control system could one day also be used to auto-land hijacked planes. Or they might allow lone pilots to orchestrate complex search and rescue operations.

This is not as new as it would seem. Just today I was in a meeting discussing how we might see unmanned aerial vehicles flying in U.S. airspace and how cargo planes could become pilotless. This demonstration is one step to seeing those ideas become a reality.

Wheat at risk

"This thing has immense potential for social and human destruction." Startling words - but spoken by the father of the Green Revolution, Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, they are not easily dismissed.

An infection is coming, and almost no one has heard about it. This infection isn't going to give you flu, or TB. In fact, it isn't interested in you at all. It is after the wheat plants that feed more people than any other single food source on the planet. And because of cutbacks in international research, we aren't prepared. The famines that were banished by the advent of disease-resistant crops in the Green Revolution of the 1960s could return, Borlaug told New Scientist.

The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties, and almost no wheat crops anywhere are resistant to it.

Not only is Ug99 a threat in itself, but even if we have resistant wheat, we have still another problem:

However, Ug99 has another ace up its sleeve. The spores blowing in the wind now are from the asexual stage that grows on wheat. If any blow onto the leaves of its other host, the barberry bush (Berberis vulgaris), they will change into the sexual form and swap genes with whatever other stem rusts they find. Barberry is native to west Asia. "As if it wasn't challenging enough breeding varieties that resist this thing," laments Ward. "All I know is that what blows into Iran will not be the same as what blows out."

One solution is to apply fungicide to the crops which for many countries will work until new wheat can be developed that's resistant. But for poor countries fungicide is too expensive.

If you like to gamble, maybe it's a good time to go long on wheat futures?

The food cycle in the ocean

A shortage of big sharks along the U.S. East Coast is letting their prey flourish, and that prey is going hog wild, demolishing bay scallop populations.

That's the conclusion of researchers led by the late Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who died this week. Combining census surveys from the past 35 years, Myers' team found shrinking populations of big sharks and shellfish and increasing numbers of smaller sharks and rays.

"Affecting something at the top [of the food web] is going to have huge consequences as effects ramify through the system," says study collaborator Charles H. Peterson of the University of North Carolina's Institute of Marine Sciences at Morehead City. As part of the new study, he and his colleagues explored some of those effects by protecting bay scallops from the cownose ray (Rhinoptera bonasus), one of the flourishing midlevel predators.

So, the cownose rays have multiplied and are eating more of the delicacies of scallops. What to do? Should we hunt down the rays now or, as the article later suggests make the rays a delicacy themselves?

Cownose rays have grown so abundant along the U.S. East Coast that fisheries managers are trying to promote them as a seafood delicacy. TV cooking-show host Emeril Lagasse has even developed some recipes. (Picture caption)

I have never eaten a ray and have no desire to ever do so. But if people like them, why not hunt them and eat them? They are part of the food chain, as are we, and we should look at them as food just like we do for a cucumber.

Bon apetit!

Sunspots erupt out high!

From the Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Why are there dark spots on the sun? Although noted for thousands of years, sunspots have been known for decades to be regions of the Sun that are slightly depressed and cooled by the Sun's complex and changing magnetic field. High resolution pictures like the above image from Japan's new Sun-watching Hinode satellite, however, are helping to increase modern understanding. In the center of the above image is a sunspot, but not seen in the usual orientation --this sunspot is seen sideways. Of particular interest is erupting glowing gas that shows how the Sun's magnetic field comes right out of the spot center, but curves markedly around the spot edges. Better understanding of how the Sun ejects particles into space may result in more accurate predictions of solar storms that affect satellites, astronauts, and even power grids on Earth.

Fauxtography spotting

Nice post on discovering forgeries in digital photographs.

Jurassic Crocodile In Eastern Oregon

Artists conception of the ancient creature.

An ancient sea-going crocodile has surfaced from the rocks of Crook County in eastern Oregon.

It's discovery by the North American Research Group (NARG), whose members were digging for Jurassic-age mollusks known as ammonites, is another confirmation that the Blue Mountains consist of rocks that traveled from somewhere in the Far East, says retired University of Oregon geologist William Orr, who was called in to examine the find for the state.

The remains - about 50 percent of a 6- to 8-foot reptile, including long, needlepoint teeth - were found imbedded in Jurassic rock on private property in the Snowshoe Formation of the Izee Terrane south of Dayville, Ore. Rocks containing the fossils were slowly cut out of the rock, after NARG members realized that the linear appearance of the fossils in the region's hard rocks suggested that a whole creature had been found, Orr said.

"This taxon was a crocodile-like creature but had a fish tail," said Orr, a NARG adviser and director of the Thomas Condon State Museum of Fossils at the University of Oregon. "This creature lived in Jurassic times, so it's 150 to 180 million years old. It probably lived in an area from Japan to East Timor, somewhere in the western Pacific in a tropical estuarine environment."

The fossils are generally found in Japan or China so that the finding in Oregon indicates that possible:

[T]he remains in Oregon migrated eastward in rock by continental drift, a theory of land movement in geological time now encompassed under plate tectonics. Terrane formations, such as those where these fossils were found, are believed to be portions of the earth's crust riding apart of a plate that is pushed upward at contact with another plate.

An incredible find.

Verification of Pollack's art with fractals

Richard Taylor from the University of Oregon reported 8-years ago that he found Jackson Pollack's artwork to have fractal qualities. Not that they are a fractal, because fractals have detail at all scales of magnification. So, some people wanted to use Taylor's approach to verify found paintings as original Pollack artwork.

Well, a graduate student at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Katherine Jones-Smith

made some doodles on a page—"pretty ugly" ones, she says—she found that they shared the qualities of a Pollock, according to an analysis that follows Taylor's approach. "Either Taylor is wrong, or Kate's drawings are worth $40 million," says Jones-Smith's collaborator Harsh Mathur. "We'd be happy either way."

This started a discussion as to whether Taylor's approach can actually verify artwork.

Frankly, fractals are a mess when you try to define them because so many objects that you would like to be fractals don't fit in a single definition.

I think Michael Barnsley says it best:

For authentication, it doesn't matter whether it's legitimate to call Pollock paintings fractal, says Michael Barnsley of Australian National University in Canberra. Taylor has a reproducible technique that produces numbers from a painting, and he can correlate those numbers with different artists. "That doesn't allow you to authenticate or not authenticate a painting, but you could certainly add it into the collection of information that you have to say that it's more likely," he says.

Fractals are ill-defined now but the methods we use to measure fractal dimension have a place in our mathematical toolbox. A place, among many other tools, but not the only tool.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

I LOVE these pictures from NASA and the Hubble telescope. They never cease to amaze me and I marvel at their beauty. Just gorgeous.

What a picture from Hubble

It's like something out of photoshop with the imagination of an artist. EXCEPT, it's real. This is a picture from the Hubble Telescope, on the Astronomy Picture of the Day. Here's their explanation:

This stunning group of galaxies is far, far away - about 450 million light-years from planet Earth - cataloged as galaxy cluster Abell S0740. Dominated by the cluster's large central elliptical galaxy (ESO 325-G004), this sharp Hubble view takes in a remarkable assortment of galaxy shapes and sizes with only a few spiky foreground stars scattered through the field. The giant elliptical galaxy spans over 100,000 light years and contains about 100 billion stars, comparable in size to our own spiral Milky Way. The Hubble data reveal a wealth of detail in even these distant galaxies, including magnificent arms and dust lanes, star clusters, ring structures, and gravitational lensing arcs.

Wow, that one part (just a part) of the image is 100,000 light years across and contains approximately 100-billion starts. Read that again. The galaxy is enormous and it's only a small part of the image.

Staggering. Just staggering.

Juggling light: It can be done

A pulse of light can be stopped, transported, and restarted again using a cloud of super-cold atoms, US researchers have shown. The technique could ultimately be used for advanced computing devices or gravity detectors.

The experiments demonstrate physicists' increasing ability to manipulate light. Being able to control it in this way could be useful for optical or quantum computers, the team suggests.

I didn't understand the details of the article, but if you do, please leave a comment about it.

NASA reviews policy after astronaut goes beserk

NASA is reviewing its psychological screening process for astronauts, following astronaut Lisa Nowak's arrest for allegedly attempting to murder a romantic rival.

Police in Orlando, Florida, US, say that Nowak drove 1500 kilometres to try to kidnap and possibly kill Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman (see Astronaut accused of attempted murder released on bail). Both women may have been vying for the affections of NASA astronaut Bill Oefelein.

In response to the shocking event, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has requested an internal review of the psychological screening procedures used to admit new astronauts. He also asked for a review of any follow-up psychological evaluations of working astronauts, including who conducts the screening.

I've busy with work and unable to post for a while. But the news on Nowak is unbelievable. This woman is a disgrace to NASA and a disgrace to the United States Navy. What's worse is that NASA, and I bet the Navy, never bothered to see the signs of her deranged behavior.

Let's hope NASA changes their policies to screen out such people, and not just at the start of a career, but throughout an astronaut's career and the same goes for the Navy.

Getting close to mid-night: Bulletin of Atomic Nuclear Scientists

So, the famous Bulletin of Atomic Scientists believes we are two minutes closer to destruction than we have been in the past. Here's how they put it:

This deteriorating state of global affairs leads the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists--in consultation with a Board of Sponsors that includes 18 Nobel laureates--to move the minute hand of the “Doomsday Clock” from seven to five minutes to midnight.

This is another example of people with a certain expertise in one area, thinking they have expertise in another area. Scientists are generally smart people, perhaps some of the smartest on the planet we call home. But being smart as a scientist does not mean one is competent in other areas.

For example, while Richard Feynman was a genius in physics, he was no politician. That is, Feynman's expertise in physics did not mean that he had any deep insight in politics. He may have insight of his own, of course, but if you want political opinion it's best to go with a politician.

What's this have to do with the time creeping closer to mid-night?

Just this: the catastrophe that the Bulletin is "predicting" is more of a political catastrophe and not a scientific one. It is a political question as to whether nuclear bombs will be detonated not a scientific one. If the world ends due to nuclear bombs that responsibility rests with our political leaders; scientists have done their part already in building the bombs.

This year, The Bulletin also cites "Global Warming" as part of the coming (five minutes away!) catastrophe. Once again, the scientists have no say in Global Warming (if it even exists and I don't believe it). The question of climate is beyond the control of any scientist. Sure, scientists study climate and have opinions but whether the world will "end" due to some climate change is beyond them.

To try to predict "the end" is to scare people into believing others who, while smart in one area, have no business in other areas.

Invisibility: Mathematically possible

November 30, 2006: The invisibility cloak recently built by scientists at Duke University and Imperial College in London has received enormous attention all over the world. This breakthrough cloaking device makes a copper disk invisible at specific microwave frequencies. As it turns out, Mathematics Professor Allan Greenleaf of the University of Rochester along with Matti Lassas, who is now at the Helsinki University of Technology, and Gunther Uhlmann of the University of Washington, started the mathematics behind invisibility several years ago in the context of medical imaging and quantum mechanics. Joined by fourth member Yaroslav Kurylev of Loughborough University, the team has announced the mathematics of full-wave invisibility at all frequencies (http://www.arxiv.org/abs/math.AP/0611185). In their latest work, they examine the problem of cloaking not just passive objects, but also active devices that are emitting electromagnetic waves, and show that this requires modifying the original constructions.

(hat tip: Ilachina)

Goldbach conjecture: Proved?

Here's a paper that the authors say proved Goldbach's conjecture. From Wikipedia:

Goldbach's conjecture is one of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory and in all of mathematics. It states:

Every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes.

For example,

4 = 2 + 2
6 = 3 + 3
8 = 3 + 5
10 = 3 + 7 = 5 + 5
12 = 5 + 7
14 = 3 + 11 = 7 + 7
etc.

It's a very old problem and one that if solved, would be welcomed news in mathematics.

Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications

The University of Maryland is having a two-day seminar on Fourier Series in February. As part of the program you can get a trial copy of the Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications free, just follow link above.

The journal is math-oriented but worth perusing. Enjoy.

Junk science

Ian Gilmartin, 60, has invented a mini water wheel capable of supplying enough electricity to power a house - for free. The contraption is designed to be used in small rivers or streams - ideal for potentially thousands of homes across Britain.

It is the first off-the-shelf water-wheel system that can generate a good supply of electricity from as little as an eight-inch water fall.

Have a laugh and read the article.