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.