Bytes of Science

From Best of the Web on the Wall Street Journal Opinion web page

2011-06-03T15:06:00.002-05:00

You know how scientists are always doing medical experiments on rodents? It turns out those studies have real-world applications, as this Associated Press story suggests:

A flight crew checking the cabin of a Qantas plane before takeoff found rats in a compartment holding medical equipment, grounding the plane for more than a day, a spokeswoman said Thursday.

Crews did a visual check of the plane Tuesday afternoon and found no more rats or any damage. The rodents had been in a cabinet holding a defibrillator.

It was really cute when, just before applying the electric shock, one of the little fellas squeaked "Clear!"

Found: Missing Mass

2011-05-27T15:43:00.000-05:00

A 22-year-old Australian university student has solved a problem which has puzzled astrophysicists for decades, discovering part of the so-called "missing mass" of the universe during her summer break.
Undergraduate Amelia Fraser-McKelvie made the breakthrough during a holiday internship with a team at Monash University's School of Physics, locating the mystery material within vast structures called "filaments of galaxies".
Monash astrophysicist Dr Kevin Pimbblet explained that scientists had previously detected matter that was present in the early history of the universe but that could not now be located.
"There is missing mass, ordinary mass not dark mass ... It's missing to the present day," Pimbblet told AFP.
"We don't know where it went. Now we do know where it went because that's what Amelia found.

Bedbugs: They're Baaack

2011-05-18T14:09:00.000-05:00

After a half-century of relative inactivity in the U.S., bedbugs returned in the late 1990s. Nationwide, 95 percent of pest-control companies have treated an infestation in the past year. A decade ago, it was just 22 percent.
In the 1940s and ’50s, liberal use of DDT and other insecticides all but wiped out the pests. Scientists hypothesize that the few that survived proliferated—females can lay up to five eggs a day, and 500 during a lifetime—and passed along pesticide-resistant traits. Millions of bedbug generations later, scientists are finally zeroing in on how, exactly, bedbugs made their comeback.

Do your best not to get 'em.

By the way, I call this little fellow "Andy."

The Touch of the Master's Hand

2011-05-17T11:05:00.000-05:00

I found this poem mentioned the other day and thought it worth posting. Enjoy.

It was battered and scarred,
And the auctioneer thought it
Hardly worth his while
To waste his time on the old violin,
But he held it up with a smile.
"What am I bid, good people", he cried,
"Who starts the bidding for me?"
"One dollar, one dollar, Do I hear two?"
"Two dollars, who makes it three?"
"Three dollars once, three dollars twice, going for three", But, No,
From the room far back a grey haired man
Came forward and picked up the bow,
Then wiping the dust from the old violin
And tightening up the strings,
He played a melody, pure and sweet,
As sweet as the angel sings.
The music ceased and the auctioneer
With a voice that was quiet and low,
Said "What now am I bid for this old violin?"
As he held it aloft with its' bow.
"One thousand, one thousand, Do I hear two?"
"Two thousand, Who makes it three?"
"Three thousand once, three thousand twice,
Going and gone", said he.
The audience cheered,
But some of them cried,
"We just don't understand."
"What changed its' worth?"
Swift came the reply.
"The Touch of the Masters Hand."
And many a man with life out of tune,
All battered with bourbon and gin,
Is auctioned cheap to a thoughtless crowd
Much like that old violin.
A mess of pottage, a glass of wine,
A game and he travels on.
He is going once, he is going twice,
He is going and almost gone.
But the Master comes,
And the foolish crowd never can quite understand,
The worth of a soul and the change that is wrought
By the Touch of the Master's Hand.

"The Master's Hand" was written by Myra Brooks Welch.

Physics: Not all it seems to be

2011-05-05T16:04:00.000-05:00

The range of phenomena physics has explained is more than impressive; it underlies the whole of modern civilization. Nevertheless, as a physicist travels along his (in this case) career, the hairline cracks in the edifice become more apparent, as does the dirt swept under the rug, the fudges and the wholesale swindles, with the disconcerting result that the totality occasionally appears more like Bruegel’s Tower of Babel as dreamt by a modern slumlord, a ramshackle structure of compartmentalized models soldered together into a skewed heap of explanations as the whole jury-rigged monstrosity tumbles skyward.

A physicist notes the inconsistencies and holes that exist in this study of nature.

Worth reading the whole thing.

Great slide show: How to tear down a nuclear power plant

2011-04-29T14:44:00.000-05:00

Click on the link above to see a great slides show of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant destruction and work to stop the reaction.

The finger of God

2011-04-28T16:55:00.001-05:00

Tuition costs: Dependent on your major

2011-04-28T16:22:00.002-05:00

The University of Nebraska--Lincoln is considering charging engineering majors more than, say, English majors.

[T]he proposal is expected to allow UNL, for the first time, to charge more tuition for some undergraduate programs than for others.
It would be a watershed departure from the concept that all Nebraska resident undergraduates should pay the same tuition for their degrees — currently $198.25 per credit hour — no matter what they study.
UNL previously dipped its toe into this water, however, by enacting a $40 per credit hour fee for engineering classes in 2007. Unlike traditional laboratory fees often charged for certain classes, the fee was not directly linked to a specific classroom expense.

At first glance, this almost makes sense. If students major in a field that costs more to teach, then perhaps it makes sense to charge more for the education. Engineering requires more lab work, more equipment, and maybe better teachers. So, perhaps students should pay for that. English, on the other hand, does not require particular facilities, at least not like those of engineering.

But, if you read the article, university costs are not the issue, at least not by major. The thinking is that an engineering student would make more money upon graduation and could therefore be charged more for his education. The proposed scheme is not based on university costs by major, but rather university costs in total and then those costs are skewed based on expected salaries.

Seems to me that an engineer could argue for a lower price if he promised to take a low paying job. Silly, isn't it?

PHD comics: The grand unified theory

2011-04-28T10:24:00.002-05:00

While the video from PHD comics doesn't say it explicitly, what we're starting to see is the connection between cosmology and particle physics.

Physics who study the heavens are now interacting with physicists who study the nature of matter. For years, these were separate endeavors with little in common. Now, the scientists are finding common ground.

You heard it here: These collaborations will yield the Grand Unified Theory!

Watch the video, it's worth a few minutes.

Bing versus Google

2011-04-01T09:58:00.007-05:00

Earlier today I needed to convert 6-inches to that distance in the units of meters. Search engines are known to perform computations. Here's what Bing provided:

which is terribly wrong. A meter is about 3-feet, so 6-inches, at 1/2-feet is about 1/6-meter or 0.17-meters.

I tried Google:

and got the right answer.

So, what's up with Bing?

Update: If I type in Bing: "6 inches to meters" I do get the right answer. So, what's the difference between "6-inches to meters" and "6 inches to meters" other than the dash after the 6? And, this is cute, for Google, the dash in the search terms, doesn't even return a wrong answer; rather I get no conversion.

Seems weird to me, but maybe I'm missing something.

2011-02-14T16:37:00.004-05:00

Here are two graphics from the Wall Street Journal for Saturday, February 12, 2011. They each show top countries for either exports (right) or imports (left) for the United States. Note how nicely the data show current rankings of each country and their historical position in 1990 and 2000.

What is more, the relative volume of each country is porportional to the colored (gray, really) bars.

The graphs are easy to understand and allow the viewer to make comparisons quickly and accurately.

I think this is a marvelous example of how data can be displayed for meaningful interpretations.

Sonar cloak

2011-01-18T16:42:00.002-05:00

Illinois professor Nick Fang developed a two-dimensional acoustic cloak that makes objects in the center invisible to sonar and other ultrasound waves.

Cloaking is no longer scientific fiction.

Solar cells on toilet paper

2011-01-18T16:40:00.002-05:00

Researchers have developed a working solar cell that can be put on toilet paper.

In the figure here, the solar cell is flexible enough to be folded into an airplane. A video at the link shows a video of the folding and that the cell does produce a current when illuminated.

Atomic weights: Your results may vary

2011-01-17T17:41:00.002-05:00

Seems that elements can have a range of atomic weights. Why, well because:

Some elements have more than one stable (nonradioactive) isotope—variants of the same substance, but with different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei that alter the mass. (The element's identity is determined by the number of protons.) In those cases the atomic mass listed on the periodic table has traditionally been defined as an average depending on how common each isotope is in nature. But that average is not the same every place on Earth, or in every situation. Just as radiocarbon dating can place a substance in time, isotopic analysis can also pinpoint its location.
So, now instead of carbon listed as being 12.0107 atomic mass units with a measurement uncertainty of about 0.0008, it has an official atomic weight of [12.0096; 12.0116], where the brackets and semicolon indicate an interval of atomic weights. The interval doesn't reflect an uncertainty in measurement precision but rather a real variation of atomic weight from substance to substance. Only 10 elements will have these new intervals, because the others have at most only one stable isotope or because upper and lower bounds have not been quantified.

Speaking of atomic weights, let me recommend the book The Joy of Chemistry: The Amazing Science of Familiar Things . I should say more later, but for now this is a great book to give a layperson a good overview of chemistry. And it includes experiments you can do at home with common household items.

Invisibility: Now available

2011-01-17T17:37:00.002-05:00

The idea of invisibility has always intrigued people from the Invisible Man to stealth airplanes. Now, there's a new cloaking material that can actually hide objects.

Two independent groups have now achieved this feat [of invisibility], by building transparent 'carpet cloaks', made from calcite crystals, that lie over the object to be hidden.
Carpet cloaks render covered objects invisible by bending light rays as they enter the cloak and then when they exit it -- after they have bounced off the hidden object. The light is deviated in such a way that the rays seem to have been reflected directly from the ground underneath the object -- as though the object was not there.

Seems that special crystals can bend the light rays to hide the object.

That's pretty neat.

Cross breeding: Good or Bad or Both?

2010-12-16T15:58:00.003-05:00

The headline reads:

"Arctic ice melt may promote cross-breeding, further imperiling endangered animals"

Sound ominous. Danger lurks ahead. Or does it? Within the news article we find this:

[I]nterspecies sex brought on by the melting Arctic ice could lead to the extinction of many endangered Arctic animals, the scientists said in an article published in the journal Nature.

Bad news, indeed.

Although Arctic species rarely interbreed, many are capable of doing so. In 2006, a bear with a patchy white-and-brown coat was shot in the Canadian Arctic. Scientists suspected — and DNA-typing later confirmed — that the animal was a polar-grizzly hybrid, a creature known variously as a "pizzly" or "grolar bear."

And last year, what appeared to be a hybrid of two whales — a bowhead whale and a right whale — was spotted in the Bering Sea.

Well, it's bad news if the cross breeding actually happens, which is rare. But is there a glimmer of good news? Let's see...

Even though hybrids can often be healthier than either of their parents (a phenomenon termed "hybrid vigor" by scientists), this is often a temporary advantage, said coauthor Andrew Whiteley, a conservation geneticist at the University of Massachusetts. The offspring, should the hybrids be fertile, are generally more sickly.

Nope. Hybrids are bad news (save for hybrid cars, I guess).

Wait, not so fast because:

Cross-breeding could also bring positive results, Allendorf said. However, he seconded Kelly's call-to-arms. "The most important point is … collecting the samples now so we can see if this happens in the future. If we don't, in the future we'll have no way of knowing if this is something new or has been there the whole time."

The conclusion: We just don't know if cross-breeding is good or bad. It so rarely happens that scientists have to make a study just to recognize it if it does happen. Forget about studying the effects when cross-breeding does occur. To see the effects, there would have to be lots of it, not just a single example, by the way.

What's most interesting is that cross-breeding, if you believe science, is another term for evolution. Evolution, the story of the genesis of man, and every living organism on our planet, is all about cross-breeding, mutation, survival, and adaptation to the creature's environment. Here's a possible deduction: If cross-breeding is bad, then so must be evolution.

I've always wondered why scientists, who support evolution in theory, why they don't like evolution when they see it. If cross breeding happens it would be golden opportunity to study evolutionary effects. The article hints at that, and only at the end. In reality, if science gets a chance to see this happen, it's a distinct step forward for evolutionary theory.

Poop: It's not all the same

2010-12-16T15:23:00.002-05:00

Think your poop (or pooh, as my daughter says) is not worth a thing? Think again.

Go to the link and see that doctors are now transplanting poop with good bacteria into bowels that lack those bacteria. The transplanted poop helps the recipient digest food and cures a possibly deadly form of diarrhea.

So, if you have good poop, you are lucky.

By the way, if you are taking antibiotics, the drugs may not only kill the bacteria that caused your infection, but they can also kill the good bacteria in your colon. The good news is that once you stop taking the antibiotics, the good bacteria show grow again and your colon returns to normal. The bad news is that without those good colon bacteria you could suffer diarrhea. Be sure to ask your doctor about it.

Bouncing water

2010-12-16T15:19:00.002-05:00

This video is remarkable. You'll see that the water, which has a high degree of intermolecular bonding (the oxygen and hydrogen have strong bonds) also has an extremely high degree of intramolecular bonding. The water molecules themselves are strong attracted to each other and that's why the drops bounce (well, that's what I think anyway).

Take a look; fascinating.

Fabulous cartoon, for fun

2010-11-24T10:29:00.000-05:00

Waste isn't waste...it's fuel

2010-08-06T14:15:00.002-05:00

The Bio-Bug has been converted by a team of British engineers to be powered by biogas, which is produced from human waste at sewage works across the country. They believe the car is a viable alternative to electric vehicles.
Excrement flushed down the lavatories of just 70 homes is enough to power the car for 10,000 miles - the equivalent of one average motoring year. This conversion technology has been used in the past but the Bio-Bug is Britain's first car to run on methane gas without its performance being reduced.

It can power a conventional two litre VW Beetle convertible to 114mph. Mohammed Saddiq, of sustainable energy firm GENeco, which developed the prototype, claimed that drivers "won't know the difference".

He said: "Previously the gas hasn't been clean enough to fuel motor vehicles without it affecting performance.

Scientists have always known that human waste was a good fuel, as is cow waste and other products. Now, though, we can see an alternative use for the waste: power for a car. It's a great concept, let's hope it catches on.

For your funny bone

2010-07-22T13:59:00.003-05:00

This post comes from my daughter who never stops reminding me that as an engineer there are certain social skills I lack.

Thank you, sweetheart, for thinking of me!

Check out the Bar Codes

2010-04-02T15:23:00.004-05:00

Researchers from Sunchon National University in Suncheon, South Korea, and Rice University in Houston have built a radio frequency identification tag that can be printed directly onto cereal boxes and potato chip bags. The tag uses ink laced with carbon nanotubes to print electronics on paper or plastic that could instantly transmit information about a cart full of groceries.

And if you're worried that others will know what you have (once the groceries are yours), there's a way to maintain your privacy:

And for those who would rather not have their food broadcast radio waves after getting it home, fear not. Tour says the signals can be blocked by wrapping groceries in aluminum foil.

It's easy to envision shopping with a grocery cart and then check out with a swipe of your credit card (or via your personal digital assistant like an iPad) and then just exist the store. In fact, it's possible that you simply swipe in to the store and when you leave, you just leave. The costs are automatically tallied, and charged or transferred from your account, as you depart.

This would lessen shoplifting, to an extent, too. To shoplift one would have to cover the product in tin foil. Not an impossible task, but it would take more effort than hiding an item in your purse. Of course, if your purse is coated with metal, well, I guess shop lifting would still continue.

Dogs: Ethics with a tail!

2010-03-19T15:48:00.001-05:00

Fair play, then, can be understood as an evolved adaptation that allows individuals to form and maintain social bonds. Canids, like humans, form intricate networks of social relationships and live by rules of conduct that maintain a stable society, which is necessary to ensure the survival of each individual. Basic rules of fairness guide social play, and similar rules are the foundation for fairness among adults. This moral intelligence, so evident in both wild canines and in domesticated dogs, probably closely resembles that of our early human ancestors. And it may have been just this sense of right and wrong that allowed human societies to flourish and spread across the world.

We can learn a lot from our four legged friends!

Laptops out of some classroom

2010-03-10T16:29:00.002-05:00

On a windy morning in downtown Washington, a hundred Georgetown Law students gathered in a hall for David Cole's lecture on democracy and coercion. The desks were cluttered with books, Thermoses and half-eaten muffins.

Another item was noticeable in its absence: laptop computers. They were packed away under chairs, tucked into backpacks, powered down and forgotten.

Cole has banned laptops from his classes, compelling students to take notes the way their parents did: on paper.

Computers are a tool that should help students with research, papers, and analysis. Class time is meant for learning and that's best done with attention to the teacher and without distractions.

Salt: Good for you or not?

2010-02-23T16:51:00.002-05:00

Suppose, as some experts advise, that the new national dietary guidelines due this spring will lower the recommended level of salt. Suppose further that public health officials in New York and Washington succeed in forcing food companies to use less salt. What would be the effect?
A) More than 44,000 deaths would be prevented annually (as estimated recently in The New England Journal of Medicine).
B) About 150,000 deaths per year would be prevented annually (as estimated by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene).
C) Hundreds of millions of people would be subjected to an experiment with unpredictable and possibly adverse effects (as argued recently in The Journal of the American Medical Association).
D) Not much one way or the other.
E) Americans would get even fatter than they are today.
Don’t worry, there’s no wrong answer, at least not yet. That’s the beauty of the salt debate: there’s so little reliable evidence that you can imagine just about any outcome. For all the talk about the growing menace of sodium in packaged foods, experts aren’t even sure that Americans today are eating more salt than they used to.
When you don’t know past trends, predicting the future is a wide-open game.

The truth is, salt is not bad for you. I can't say that too much is good or bad, but we use minerals, like salt, in our brains to help with synapses, those little electrical charges that are responsible for thought.

If we didn't ingest salt, well, we'd have trouble thinking. In fact, this issue is a big one for marathoners. Because the race is so long (26.2 miles!) many runners sweat out their minerals. Thinking becomes difficult and they become disoriented. That's why some drinks have minerals in them; to replace what was sweated out from the body.

Salt isn't going away anytime soon. Seems like if we all exercised more (maybe not all of us in marathons though) we could eat our salt and not worry so much.

For now, I'm off to the gym. :-)

Fractal Video, to 10^214 in scale

2010-02-23T16:43:00.003-05:00

This is a fractal zoom [of the Mandelbrot Set] to e.214 [that is, 10^214]

e.12 would increase the size of a particle to the same as the earth’s orbit.
e.21 would make a particle look the same size as the milky way.
e.42 would be equal to the universe.

This took a month to render.
Watch full screen in HD. The last 2 minutes are the best.

The last two minutes are the best, and I watched the whole thing.

Here's the Mandelbrot Set, often called the most complicated set in mathematics:

USA Science and Engineering Festival

2010-02-23T16:41:00.001-05:00

USA Science & Engineering Festival

Festival Dates: 10/10/10 - 10/24/10
Expo on the National Mall: October 23 & 24, 2010

The Inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival will be the country’s first national science festival and will descend on the Washington, D.C. area in the Fall of 2010. The Festival promises to be the ultimate multi-cultural, multi-generational and multi-disciplinary celebration of science in the United States. The culmination of the Festival will be a two-day Expo in the nation’s capital that will give over 500 science & engineering organizations from all over the United States the opportunity to present themselves with a hands-on, fun science activity to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

I hope to see you there!

Extraordinary Video

2010-01-20T17:24:00.002-05:00

Fish comes back

2010-01-18T20:24:00.004-05:00

Last night I changed the water in my fish tank. The tank has a capacity of 10-gallons and holds a single goldfish. Once I had cleaned the tank, I put the fish in it. This sort of goldfish does not require a heater and the fresh water was quite cold. So the little fellow was fine at first (say, for three seconds!) and then sunk to the bottom where he pooped just a bit from stress I guess (see the photo) and where he stayed all night.

He wasn't dead, his gills were working, but he sure looked bad. Then, tonight he is miraculously transformed anew and is swimming about happily! It just goes to show, the fish is cold-blooded and once the water warmed, the fish came back to life. No miraculous really, but kind of cool.

A quote on string theorists

2010-01-17T13:59:00.003-05:00

It's rare for a scientist---even a string theorist, beholden neither to instruments nor to data--to submit 7 articles in an entire year, let alone one month.

David Kaiser's review of Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich in American Scientist, Nov.--Dec. 2009,

On the book: I haven't read the book (only this review) but this quote summarizes a large part of physics today.

They knew more than we think

2010-01-13T10:03:00.004-05:00

X-rays and advanced photography have uncovered the true complexity of the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, a device so astonishing that its discovery is like finding a functional Buick in medieval Europe.

In 1900, some divers found the wreck of a Roman vessel off the Greek island of Antikythera. Among the other treasures remanded to the Greek government was an unassuming corroded lump. Some time later, the lump fell apart, revealing a damaged machine of unknown purpose, with some large gears and many smaller cogs, plus a few engraved words in Greek. Early studies suggested it was some type of astronomical time-keeping device – researcher Derek J. de Solla Price laid the groundwork by establishing initial tooth counts and suggesting that the device followed the Metonic cycle, a 235-month pattern commonly used to predict eclipses in the ancient world.

It took X-ray imaging and specialized processing techniques to uncover what was inside a barnacle encrusted and corroded container. Yet, what was left inside lent deep insight into advancements long ago.

The findings, published in Nature, are probably best described as "mind blowing." Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, and the Antikythera mechanism's compactness actually bests the later designs. Probably built around 150 B.C., the Antikythera mechanism can perform a number of functions just by turning a crank on the side.

Here's a device that "could be used to predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, and even accounted for leap years. It could also predict the positions of the sun and moon against the zodiac, and has a gear train that turns a black and white stone to show the moon's phase on a given date. It is possible that it could also show the astronomical positions of the planets known to the ancients: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn."

You can see a video here.

The ancients were neither primative nor ignorant. I am reminded of Doron Zeilberger's quote (somewhere on his site) to the effect that our ancestors were much wiser than we know. This is more evidence of that.

(hat tip: andy i.)

Snowflakes or fakes?

2009-12-24T11:23:00.003-05:00

During the holiday season we see images of lots of stuff not found in nature: flying reindeer, sugarplum fairies, and geometrically incorrect snowflakes. Now, Thomas Koop, a chemist, is trying to fix the snowflake problem.

Koop thinks ice crystals are masterpieces of natural beauty. Unfortunately, he says, "This beauty is sometimes corrupted."

The quest for accuracy in advertising. An exercise in futility if ever there were one!

Santa Physics: His existence is a miracle!

2009-12-24T11:08:00.001-05:00

Santa has 31 hours to visit 378 million Christian children; at the rate of 3.5 children per household, and assuming at least one good child per home, this comes to 108 million homes; if each child receives no more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh would be carrying more than 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself; Santa would thus need at least 360,000 Reindeer to pull the sleigh; since Santa must visit 108 homes in 31 hours, he will have to travel at 650 miles per second -- 3,000 times the speed of sound; at that speed, the lead pair of Reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each and vaporize – indeed, the entire Reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second; Santa himself would be subjected to forces of 17,500 G's; a 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, and be crushed.

This just shows that there's a miracle for Santa to exist!

A reason NOT to go into law

2009-10-08T10:41:00.003-05:00

From Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia (and I don't think he's talking about engineers):

I mean there’d be a, you know, a defense or public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know. Why isn’t she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?

I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.

And they appear here in the Court, I mean, even the ones who will only argue here once and will never come again. I’m usually impressed with how good they are. Sometimes you get one who’s not so good. But, no, by and large I don’t have any complaint about the quality of counsel, except maybe we’re wasting some of our best minds.

The Family Guy does physics

2009-09-30T21:51:00.003-05:00

From Hulu.com, we have the Family Guy (Fox TV) and the multiverse.

The show is fun to watch, a bit raunchy, but the physics aspect is horrible. Still, one wouldn't watch the show to learn physics.

Humans: Some of what we don't know

2009-08-14T15:12:00.002-05:00

Blushing, laughter, pubic hair, teenagers, dreams, altruism, art, superstition, kissing, and, (my favorite!) nose picking.

Do you have more?

Cheerleader for Science

2009-08-14T15:05:00.002-05:00

This comes via Fox News where a cheerleader has blog for science. It's pretty good and motivating.

It used to be people liked science for its intrinsic knowledge and for the love of discovery. Today, we don't really seem to find value in knowledge for the sake of knowing. That's too bad.

So, if a cheerleader can promote science, well, maybe people will move from seeing science as a cheer to seeing science as worthwhile in itself.

Laptops and real viruses: A winning combination

2009-04-07T16:46:00.002-05:00

[T]he same team used viruses to construct the negative electrode, or anode, of the battery. In the new work, the researchers engineered viruses for the positive electrode, or cathode. When the two are put together, the virus batteries should perform better than traditional lithium ion batteries and also be environmentally friendly, the team reports.
“Because the viruses are living organisms, we had to use only water-based solvents, no high pressures and no high temperatures,” says Angela Belcher, a materials scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a study coauthor.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

2009-04-07T16:41:00.003-05:00

From the site:

Explanation: Two galaxies are squaring off in Virgo and here are the latest pictures. When two galaxies collide, the stars that compose them usually do not. This is because galaxies are mostly empty space and, however bright, stars only take up only a small fraction of that space. But during the collision, one galaxy can rip the other apart gravitationally, and dust and gas common to both galaxies does collide. If the two galaxies merge, black holes that likely resided in each galaxy center may eventually merge. Because the distances are so large, the whole thing takes place in slow motion -- over hundreds of millions of years. Besides the two large spiral galaxies, a smaller third galaxy is visible on the far left of the above image of Arp 274, also known as NGC 5679. Arp 274 spans about 200,000 light years across and lies about 400 million light years away toward the constellation of Virgo.

This is interesting, to me, for the following:

The collision is a "non-event." Sure, it'll happen but take almost forever to do so.
The collision will effect little: When it happens there is little actually colliding, just dust and gas. Yawn!
The galaxies seem to have spirals in the opposite sense: This actually is interesting. The middle galaxy is spinning clockwise while the galaxy on the right is spinning counter-clockwise. I find that pretty neat.

The Rest of the Story

2009-04-05T21:00:00.002-05:00

Here's a story for your Sunday:

So, I'm riding my bike tonight, it's almost 6:30 p.m. now and I just got back. I'm still in my sweaty clothes, typing.

As I'm coming home, just two blocks from home, I'm in the street and riding about 16 mph. Cars parked on both sides, I'm on the right but in the street next to parked cars.

Ahead is a car coming straight for me, with a girl on a cell phone. I think she'll stop, she doesn't. I stop and almost hit the car. Well, not that close, but on a bike, you know what I mean.

Lo and behold, it's my daughter Shayna in MY car. She calls out "Dad, what are you doing?"

I turn around and pedal to her.

"Shayna, you almost hit me."
"I saw you, dad."
"You could have killed me."
"Dad, what are you doing in the street?"

(Think Lebowski, "his health is bad" scene...)

"Shayna, you almost killed your father! Shayna, you're killing your
father!" (I actually said this, too.)
"Dad, what are you doing in the street. Get out of the street."
"Shayna, you almost hit me. I could be dead."
"Dad, Get out of the street. Why are you in the street?"
"You're killing me. You know that? Shayna, where are you going?"
"Dad, go home" and, as she drives away I hear "and get out of the street!"

She's off and I go home.

Now, the "rest of the story:"

So, why was Shayna on her cell phone when she almost hit me? Because
her mother called her. That's right, I could be dead because my
daughter could have hit me while taking a call from her mother.

My son said to me: "So, if you got hit, you'd have to pay in some way. How's that make you feel?"

Being in the picture

2009-04-02T14:24:00.002-05:00

Here's a jacket to lett you feel a movie. To wit:

The jacket contains 64 independently controlled actuators distributed across the arms and torso. The actuators are arrayed in 16 groups of four and linked along a serial bus; each group shares a microprocessor. The actuators draw so little current that the jacket could operate for an hour on its two AA batteries even if the system was continuously driving 20 of the motors simultaneously.

So what can the jacket make you feel? Can it cause a viewer to feel a blow to the ribs as he watches Bruce Lee take on a dozen thugs? No, says Lemmens. Although the garment can simulate outside forces, translating kicks and punches is not what the actuators are meant to do. The aim, he says, is investigating emotional immersion.

I love this! Movies have terrific visual effects, even 3-D. The sounds is awesome, too. Now, to be able to feel, to have your sense of touch, as part of the experience, that's just terrific. I hope these can be mass produced and that movie makers and theaters will cater to it.

Valentine's Heart: Sierpinski Gasket

2009-02-13T10:44:00.002-05:00

A valentine's as a Sierpinski gasket, it's great.

The Intenet in 8-minutes

2009-02-10T15:56:00.001-05:00

The link above takes you to a great animated video on the development of the Internet. The animation is limited, but the narration and script are excellent and fun to watch.

Enjoy.

Beet bottle vibrations

2009-02-03T17:36:00.007-05:00

Here's a study of vibrational modes for a beer bottle. I'm not sure what good it is, but for fun it's worth reading. Enjoy.

Drugs in the future

2009-02-03T17:28:00.003-05:00

Here's a possible future. Put on the goggles, attach earphones, and you are in another place, another time, and tuned out of the world.

Likely, who knows? Certainly it's a possibility.

Your senses as sensors for the universe

2009-02-03T11:33:00.002-05:00

In response to a friend's post, I wrote the following. Please enjoy the following.

It's an interesting, no, fascinating discovery that blind people can take such pictures. That they know of cracks in the sidewalk, where people’s heads are, and how to photograph, are amazing feats. It is truly wondrous and miraculous.

Or is it?

Is it so hard to believe that the blind can take beautiful pictures? Perhaps. But, may be not. Let’s explore our senses and see what we might find.

There is a current view in physics that the universe is a computer. This view holds that information is conserved and that it cannot be destroyed. What is information? Well, let us posit that information is a description of the universe, or of a part of that universe that we are experiencing at a specific place and time. There may be more to it, but clearly this is part of information of the universe.

We experience the universe through our senses: seeing, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Instead of calling them senses, let’s call them sensors. Our sensors don’t so much sense the universe as they measure the universe. When we drink tea, our mouths measure the temperature, either hot tea or ice tea. Our taste buds measure the sweetness. When we look we measure objects in our view for shape, color, and position relative to other objects in our field of view. Thus, seeing is really an act of measuring. Some of our senses have a higher resolution than others; we can hear a wide range of amplitudes, see an extremely diverse set of colors, but we cannot discern different tastes so well.

From our measurements we derive a sense of our universe. How do we derive that sense? Our brain. Our own internal, massively connected, computer. Our brains take measurements from our sensors and use those measurements to make sense of our universe. Our brains integrate our sight with our hearing, with our smell, with every sensor we have to describe our world.

For example, we can easily recognize smoke in the kitchen from a pot that’s on fire. We see the flames, see the smoke, hear the crackle, and smell the burn and feel the heat. We know where we are and our brains deduce a pot on fire.

Are our senses limited? In a way, yes, they measure one thing such as sound with our hearing. But that is not a true limitation. Consider a bat. Bats, as you know, emit sound, listen for reflections (echoes) and their brains are able to “see” and easily navigate in the dark of night. Thus hearing can be seeing.

Consider next: sonar. Ships send sound waves through the ocean and from these sound waves computers can print maps of the ocean floor. From sounds come pictures. One sensor can be used to produce what another type of sensor would produce. The trick, the key, is the processing.

Or, if you like, consider radar. A plane sends electromagnetic radiation to the ground and with special processing, that radiation is transformed to a picture of the ground complete with buildings, foliage, cars, and other objects present. It’s not sight, it’s radar and it’s call SAR: Synthetic Aperture Radar.

With those ideas in mind, let’s consider this book. The blind taking pictures. Far fetched? I should think not. Inside each of these creative and inventive people is a brain, a processor. This processor can take all sorts of measurements and with the proper program, call it training, give the user (that person) a sense of his surroundings. Hence, the beautiful story of the girl who “sees” cracks in the sidewalk with her stick. Her vision fails her but her brain is undeterred and processes measurements of touch to give her a sense of the ground beneath her feet.

Our bodies are fascinating and marvelous.

What can we learn from this beyond the lovely pictures and, possibly, what more one can do with a camera? I am no great photographer like my bowling buddy. However, I submit we all can learn to use our sensors in new ways that we are not now trained to do. And with that we can draw new beauty, and new visions, from the universe around us.

Michael Crichton's Speeches

2008-11-09T23:05:00.002-05:00

Michael Crichton passed away this past week at the age of 66. While I've enjoyed many of his novels and movies, what I didn't know is that he had deep and thoughtful opinions about how science is conducted.

If you go to his site, click on speeches and take a look at any of them. You'll find them insightful, thought provoking, and I think, spot on as to one area that wrong with scientific research today.

A Letter to President Bush

2008-11-09T23:00:00.003-05:00

As the second and last term of President Bush comes to a close, I'd like to share with you a letter I sent him. Here it is:

November 9, 2009

Dear President Bush,

I wanted to write you a short note to tell you that I'll miss you at the end of your second term. I voted for you twice and I have been proud to support you. You've kept our country safe after a terrible attack, you've been true to your values (and to values I share with you), and you've let me rest easy these past eight years.

An article by Jim Towey in this weekend's Wall Street Journal struck me and encouraged me to write you to say thank you. (It's entitled "Why I'll Miss President Bush.")

Thank you for being my President. Thank you for your leadership these past eight years. Thank you for protecting our country. Thank you for making difficult decisions. And thank you for devoting yourself to our nation.

I hope that the rest of your life will be filled success and joy. May G-d give you continued strength and guidance.

Sincerely yours,
David S. Mazel

2008-11-09T23:00:00.001-05:00

The Large Hadron Collider: Rap Video

2008-09-04T09:55:00.003-05:00

This video is not only fun, it's descriptive of the collider program.
Enjoy.

Periodic element videos

2008-08-18T16:48:00.002-05:00

Videos for each element of the Periodic Table.

Cool.

Snag Films

2008-07-20T21:36:00.001-05:00

Here's a new website for documentary films that you can watch and easily link to in your own site.

I found out about it from Walt Mossberg's Wall Street Journal column.

Enjoy!

Intelligence takes a holidy

2008-07-10T21:39:00.001-05:00

Is "black hole" a racially insensitive term?

Apparently to some. From the City Hall Blog at the Dallas Morning News:

A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.
County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole."

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

Mayfield shot back that it was a figure of speech and a science term.

Judge Jones should be very glad that the central collections office has not become a white hole, a theoretical object that ejects matter from beyond its event horizon, rather than sucking it in. It wouldn't be fun for Dallas to find itself so near a quasar.

The deep level of ignorance is overwhelming.

Global Warming: Yellow Science

2008-07-02T10:26:00.002-05:00

This is one the best essays I've read on why we should all worry about global warming. But it's not the idea of global warming, rather it is the "science" such as it is, of the so-called experts.

[O]ver the past several decades an increasing number of scientists have shed the restraints imposed by the scientific method and begun to proclaim the truth of man-made global warming. This is a hypothesis that remains untested, makes no predictions that can be tested in the near future, and cannot offer a numerical explanation for the limited evidence to which it clings. No equations have been shown to explain the relationship between fossil-fuel emission and global temperature. The only predictions that have been made are apocalyptic, so the hypothesis has to be accepted before it can be tested.
The only evidence that can be said to support this so-called scientific consensus is the supposed correlation of historical global temperatures with historical carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere. Even if we do not question the accuracy of our estimates of global temperatures into previous centuries, and even if we ignore the falling global temperatures over the past decade as fossil-fuel emissions have continued to increase, an honest scientist would still have to admit that the hypothesis of man-made global warming hardly rises to the level of "an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure." Global warming may or may not be "the greatest scam in history," as it was recently called by John Coleman, a prominent meteorologist and the founder of the Weather Channel. Certainly, however, under the scientific method it does not rise to the level of an "item of physical knowledge."

Read the whole thing.

The Matrix: Brain Probe

2008-06-03T21:06:00.002-05:00

A team at Caltech is working on a MEMS-based robot probe that will be able to slowly creep electrodes into your brain to connect up to specific neurons. Creepy indeed, but with potential uses for advanced control of prosthetic limbs, Luke Skywalker-style. But the idea has greater potential for "state-of-the-art experimental techniques for electrophysiology." according to team-leader Michael Wolf. And that's just got me picturing the neural probes of The Matrix.
The device would sense its way in, using MEMS motors to carefully push in multiple electrodes into the brain and detecting electrical activity at their tips. When the system senses an activity spike, the robotic probe would adjust microscopically, and then either stay put or move on to find a better signal. The micro-mechanical part is still in development, but the team says the software side of the device (that would enable it to find the right neurons and adjust the probes locations if signals faded) is all but complete. It uses an algorithm inspired by one the US military uses to track aircraft.

Seeing Magnetic

2008-06-03T20:51:00.001-05:00

Click at the link above for a movie showing magnetic fields. It's worth a look, enjoy.

(Hat tip: Ilachina and thanks very much!)

Quants on Wall Street: Silly Science

2008-04-07T21:54:00.002-05:00

“Maybe we need to build a computer simulation that has 50 million people, with complicated rules for each,” Fludzinski says. “It’s very difficult to explain why people behave irrationally.”

Quants, mathematical experts (some are physicists), try to model the stock market and that entails modeling humans. Human are complex systems that defy prediction. Complexity (or, say, cellular automata) are great for explanatory studies but do little for predictive behavior.

Read the article with a smile.

High School Robots Battle it Out!

2008-04-07T21:51:00.001-05:00

Cool video of what high school students can do with robotics.

A great idea for students to gain interest in engineering and science.

Human Growth Hormone or Human guinea pigs?

2008-04-07T21:27:00.002-05:00

Eliene Augenbraun discusses the trade-offs of being short compared to taking human growth hormones.

When I was a toddler in the early 1960s, my parents were very concerned when I suddenly stopped growing. I seemed healthy enough – my doctor tested everything he knew to test, but he was puzzled. He got me into a study of short stature at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore.

I spent days there being poked and prodded. Using what was cutting edge technology at the time, they found me to be: very short; very anxious (wouldn't you be if you were 4 or 5 years old, caged in a hospital far from your family, and stuck with needles every hour all day and all night for 3 days!?); and making normal amounts of growth hormone. They enrolled me in a long-term study of the effects of growth hormone (hGH) injection. I was in the control group – I got nothin'.

The subjects that got hGH got a little more: Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD).

Read the rest.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

2008-04-07T21:13:00.002-05:00

The link is to Prof. Randy Pausch's "Last lecture." It's the whole lecture in one file; I watched it in pieces months ago so having a single link is a convenience.

Wednesday, April 9, 20/20 will have an update on Prof. Pausch, here's the link for a preview:

http://abcnews.go.com/gma/lastlecture

I spent 10-1/2 years in undergraduate and graduate school and I never had, nor met, anyone who comes close this professor.

My speech for a colleague

2008-04-07T21:00:00.002-05:00

Last Friday was the last day for a friend of mine at my company. I said a few words about her at a gathering.

-------------------

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Today reminds me of a time not long ago. It was May 14, 1998, and after nine highly successful seasons, one of the greatest television comedy shows of our time came to an end. (The good news is that May 14 is John’s birthday!) When the show finally ended, its star was asked "Why stop now? You're at the top?" His reply: "When would you like me to go? The right time is when you're on top."

So, this week our friend Ann is calling her time at TSC to an end. She's at the top of her game. And unlike the television show, she's had a run of 21-years, or in TV-terms, 12-seasons longer than the show.

I know many of you have worked with her before, and many of you have spent more time with her than I. I envy you for what you must have shared. For me, it was almost 3-seasons ago that I joined the ASDP cast of characters and what a series it's been with Ann.

The ASDP, in my short time, has gone from an installation at Seattle-Tacoma airport, to an in-depth development of SPAN, two installations at JFK International airport, to our current projects at La Guardia and San Francisco, and even to new and evolving improvements at JFK.

Like a good television program, we've had some actors work with us and move on to other shows like Steve Romine and Mark Bond. Still, they never completely left us. Mark has helped us with our current work and Steve makes an occasional cameo appearance. We even had the pleasure of a special guest appearance with Sean Muldoon, who did wonderful work with us on an IRAD project at JFK. I think that's the first time I've ever walked so close to passenger airplanes taking off and landing. It was definitely the first time I've had direct communications between me and the air traffic control tower, that's where John and Sean were stationed!

Speaking of the IRAD, we had a guest director in the person of Lee Moyer. Lee has been a special guest: part engineer, part mentor, and part sage. He’s exceptional and we were fortunate and blessed to have him.

A time of travel we've had, and you may notice that our "home-base" has pretty much been New York. Like the comedy show, we even have a favorite restaurant; only it's not Monk's Cafe, it's a kosher steakhouse in Queens.

Like a good show, we've had our share of writing and ad-libbing, too. With Ann as director, we have presented papers at the past two International Carnahan conferences and we have another one at the IEEE Homeland security conference in May. Each paper has borne the mark of Annie with her crisp use of language, explanatory graphics, and remarkable descriptions of why there is no other system like ASDP available outside of TSC. And if you find something like it, best to keep that to yourself.

Let me introduce you to some of the cast, all of whom I know will miss Ann:

First, our newest actor is Shaudi. For those that missed it, Shaudi was featured in the last TSC newsletter, or you might say "Playbill." I urge everyone to read about her. If you know Shaudi, you won't learn anything you don't already know, but if you don't know her, well, she's a remarkable engineer and you owe it to yourself to find out why.

Our next cast member is John O'Neil. Ann auditioned John before I came to the show and it's easy to see how well Ann works at casting calls. John is everything one could want in an engineer, programmer, systems developer, tester, writer, hardware guy, software guy, camera controller, cabling, and the list goes on and on. If we could give an Oscar for best engineer, John would win it every year.

Let me say a few words about our star, Annie.

Annie has been gracious yet driven, funny yet serious, gentle yet forceful. She is helpful when asked, polite at all times, and caring in her manners and dealings with others.

When I was worried she sought to soothe me. When others were edgy, she calmed them. She has a gift for nurture and it comes through everyday.

Over our shared seasons, I've often started my days with Annie, vicariously (and only vicariously) climbed mountains with her, and oftentimes, I ended my days with her as well. There have been few people I've spent so much time with for so many days at a time. My wife even calls her my "work spouse." I guess there's something to that, in a sense anyway. And in that time, no matter what, she's rarely been upset or, shall we say, changed channels on me.

Ann, thank you for all your work, for your time and for the fun and good times, too. Best of luck to you as you change networks and seek audiences on other stations.

And the comedy show, what was this top rated comedy? Well, it had characters such as George Castanza and Cosmo Kramer. I would have to say that Annie is our Elaine. Elaine gave the show flair and fun, she was interesting, funny, and as we say about Annie, the eye candy.

It's been a great run; thanks for all you've done. Good luck and may God bless you.

The risk of nuclear war

2008-04-07T20:54:00.001-05:00

How risky are nuclear weapons?
Amazingly, no one seems to know.

My name is Martin Hellman and I'm a professor at Stanford University. When I started this project, I looked for studies which estimated that risk. I also asked prominent authorities on nuclear weapons, national security, and risk analysis if they knew of any such studies. I found nothing.

Next I did a preliminary analysis of the risk we face and found that it was equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants. So I published a paper which urgently calls for more detailed studies to either confirm or correct that startling conclusion.

Informed, subjective estimates support the need for in-depth studies. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry puts the odds of a nuclear terrorist attack in the next ten years at 50-50. Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar's survey of 85 national security experts reached a similarly alarming conclusion.

Check out the site, it's worth reviewing.

I don't know how you measure the risk of nuclear war given that the U.S. is the only nation to ever employ these weapons but the thinking will open your mind.

Tetris on an Oscilloscope: See it to believe it

2008-02-16T22:07:00.003-05:00

Engineer Lars Pontoppidan created Scopetris using an AtMega32 micro-controller to drive the beam of an oscilloscope to mimic the game play of the classic Soviet puzzle game.

Using his significant programming prowess, Pontoppidan programmed the circuit to manage each individual as an independent object, allowing it to behave very similarly to the original arcade classic.

There's a video link on the site, you can see the game in action. It's worth it to marvel at the technical prowess of this engineer.

MCell: Found It!

2008-02-11T23:09:00.000-05:00

Ah, here's the site for cellular automata. I found it but it took a trick or two with yahoo.com. Yes, this is it.

MCell program

2008-02-11T23:04:00.001-05:00

I ran across this site while looking for code on cellular automata and I thought it was worth a post. I hope to visit the site more later.

World Clock

2008-02-11T22:37:00.000-05:00

Mathematics with my son and daughter

2008-01-17T21:15:00.000-05:00

For the past few years, I've had the pleasure of helping my children with homework. I think the best times are when we study mathematics. It's not just that I like math but I find that in helping each of them I learn more about math that I didn't learn in high school.

For example, not long ago my son, who's in the eighth grade, was learning about functions. So, in his homework there was a function, say, g(x) = x+5. Pretty simple.

One problem asked him to evaluate g(3). Now, most of us would say g(3) = 8. Simple. He didn't.

He said, well, g is a function, the parentheses without any operator imply multiplication. So, g(3) is not, as we might say "g of 3" but is simply "g times 3." "It's 3g, Dad, that's it."

I had to think about that because on the one hand one response is "No, that's wrong." On the other hand, we do write terms like g(3) to mean "g times 3." It came to me that here is an example of ambiguity within mathematics and how one has to know what the statement means at a level above the statement itself.

Here's another observation. Two nights ago I was helping one of daughters with math; she's in the 11th grade. She had to solve quadratics and one problem involved a term such as sqrt(x-3). So she manipulated the equation, put the square root on one side, with other terms on the other side of the equation. She squared both sides and solved for x. Simple. Not really.

After she determined the answer, I told her, "Let's try these answers in the original problem." As quadratics we found two solutions. So, she substituted her solutions, and lo and behold, with each answer she had two possible paths. For x=12, one of the solutions, the term sqrt(12-3) is 3 but it's also -3. As she explored each possibility, only the solution of 3 worked. Another solution was, I believe, 7. So the term sqrt(7-3) is 4 or -4. Well, x = 4 did not work but when she selected x = -4 this worked!

I told her, you're on to something deep here. You found two solutions but when you substitute them back in the original problem you then have to make choices as to how to use them to get the solution to work.

I asked her to talk with her teacher about this and I haven't heard if she did.

My takeaway message is this: When you have a chance to go back to elementary levels of work, you may find new insights worth your time. I know I have.

Papers: Rejection and publication

2007-12-10T22:00:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-20T18:35:00.001-05:00

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

2007-11-20T18:28:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-01T08:42:00.001-05:00

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

2007-10-31T20:25:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-30T20:16:00.001-05:00

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

2007-10-30T20:07:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-20T10:31:00.000-05:00

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 3.085Ã—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

2007-09-20T10:19:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-30T10:44:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-29T14:31:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-08-29T09:10:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-28T11:49:00.001-05:00

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

2007-08-28T10:11:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-24T13:57:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-24T13:47:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-24T13:32:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-08-10T16:23:00.001-05:00

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

2007-08-10T16:09:00.000-05:00

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..

2007-08-10T16:03:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-27T12:09:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-20T11:37:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-20T11:30:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-19T13:21:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-19T12:09:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-17T11:50:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-11T09:50:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-09T08:25:00.001-05:00

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

2007-07-06T16:04:00.001-05:00

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

2007-07-06T09:07:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-27T13:40:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-27T13:00:00.000-05:00

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.

Bytes of Science

From Best of the Web on the Wall Street Journal Opinion web page

Found: Missing Mass

Bedbugs: They're Baaack

The Touch of the Master's Hand

Physics: Not all it seems to be

Great slide show: How to tear down a nuclear power plant

The finger of God

Tuition costs: Dependent on your major

PHD comics: The grand unified theory

Bing versus Google

Sonar cloak

Solar cells on toilet paper

Atomic weights: Your results may vary

Invisibility: Now available

Cross breeding: Good or Bad or Both?

"Arctic ice melt may promote cross-breeding, further imperiling endangered animals"

Poop: It's not all the same

Bouncing water

Fabulous cartoon, for fun

Waste isn't waste...it's fuel

For your funny bone

Check out the Bar Codes

Dogs: Ethics with a tail!

Laptops out of some classroom

Salt: Good for you or not?

Fractal Video, to 10^214 in scale

USA Science and Engineering Festival

Festival Dates: 10/10/10 - 10/24/10Expo on the National Mall: October 23 & 24, 2010

Extraordinary Video

Fish comes back

A quote on string theorists

They knew more than we think

Snowflakes or fakes?

Santa Physics: His existence is a miracle!

A reason NOT to go into law

The Family Guy does physics

Humans: Some of what we don't know

Cheerleader for Science

Laptops and real viruses: A winning combination

Astronomy Picture of the Day

The Rest of the Story

Being in the picture

Valentine's Heart: Sierpinski Gasket

The Intenet in 8-minutes

Beet bottle vibrations

Drugs in the future

Your senses as sensors for the universe

Michael Crichton's Speeches

A Letter to President Bush

The Large Hadron Collider: Rap Video

Periodic element videos

Snag Films

Intelligence takes a holidy

Is "black hole" a racially insensitive term?

Global Warming: Yellow Science

The Matrix: Brain Probe

Seeing Magnetic

Quants on Wall Street: Silly Science

High School Robots Battle it Out!

Human Growth Hormone or Human guinea pigs?

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

My speech for a colleague

The risk of nuclear war

How risky are nuclear weapons? Amazingly, no one seems to know.

Tetris on an Oscilloscope: See it to believe it

MCell: Found It!

MCell program

World Clock

Mathematics with my son and daughter

Papers: Rejection and publication

About Rejecta Mathematica

Edge: An interesting site

Brian Hayes on Complexity

Invisible tank

Videos for Science: Journal of Visualized Experiments

Mapping the Internet by Function, Not just connnectivitiy

Art of sizes

Various measures: obscure to unknown

Computer agents: Testing theories of social interaction

Festival Dates: 10/10/10 - 10/24/10
Expo on the National Mall: October 23 & 24, 2010

How risky are nuclear weapons?
Amazingly, no one seems to know.