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)