Sky gazing and Satellite tracking

This months Wired magazine has a great article on tracking satellites. Well, the article is not that great, but the website they give is pretty darn good: http://www.heavens-above.com

Check it out for satellite tracks and other astronomy goodies.

Great cartoon

Numbers: TV and Mathematics

Here's a good article on the television show Numb3rs.

I've never seen this show but a friend of mine likes it. What do you think of it?

Young scientists compete

This March, Washington, DC, will host a science competition. The forty finalists will be there competing for half-a-million dollars in scholarship money.

I went to this a few years ago and it is truly amazing to see the level of scientific achievement of the students. I hope I can go again this year.

43rd Mersenne Prime Found!

Quoting from the site:

"On December 15, 2005, Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone, professors at Central Missouri State University, discovered the 43rd Mersenne Prime, 2^30,402,457-1.

The discovery is the largest known prime number.

The new prime is 9,152,052 digits long. "

Dangerous Ideas: What's yours?

The Edge Annual Question — 2006

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

Click the link and have fun reading leading thinkers' thoughts. I don't believe much of what they say, after all, what do they really know? But it's fun reading.

Spread sheet errors: They're there

"It is completely within the realms of possibility that a single, large, complex but erroneous spreadsheet could directly cause the accidental loss of a corporation or institution," Croll added. "If the uncontrolled use of spreadsheets continues to occur in highly leveraged markets and companies, it is only a matter of time before [some random] event occurs, causing catastrophic loss."

Spreadsheets, so common today, are prone to errors and mistakes. Be careful that what you see and calculate is really what you want.

Cancer Researcher Fakes Data

It wasn't bad enough that Hwang in Korea doctored his stem cell research. No. Now a cancer researcher at Norway's Comprehensive Cancer Center faked, completed fabricated, his data.

What a disgrace?

Research dollars are already hard to come by, fewer and fewer people are even doing research, and now this?! It's a sad day, a sad, sad day.

I wonder though if the lack of funding causes such stiff competition that prompts researchers to cheat.

What do you think?

Seed Vault: The Norwegians are mad

The Norwegians plan to build a vault to hold all varieties of seeds. So, if there's a global catastrophe there'll be seeds left for future generations to plant. At first blush, this may seem like a good idea. But if there's a global catastrophe, who will be here to plant the seeds? What's more, given the catastrophe they envision: nuclear war, severe global warming (whatever that means) how will the seeds even grow?

If there's a catatrophe that would require such seed storage you can bet few humans will be able to use those seeds.

Coffee mug shows global warming

The mug is decorated with, naturally, a heat-sensitive world map. When it's filled with a steaming beverage, the shorelines retreat, reflecting an extreme version of what scientists say will happen as melting ice and warming water raise sea levels.

Now we're seeing some good from the global warming scare.

I'll drink to that!

Explosion on the Moon

An asteroid hit the moon and it probably looked like something in this picture. This happened in late October or early November. While our tiny planet is protected from asteroids, at least the small ones!, by our atmosphere, the moon has no atmosphere and therefore, no protection.

Chaos for Encryption: Snake Oil

An earlier post of mine talks about an article describing the use of chaos for cryptography. Turns out, Bruce Schneier has an extensive discussion of this in his current Cryptogram newsletter. Schneier points out the method is not good for cryptography and that the article should, basically, have never been published.

Fake stem cells: Science works

"A doctor who provided human eggs for research by cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-suk said in a broadcast Thursday that the South Korean scientist agreed to withdraw a key research paper because most of the stem cells produced for the article were faked. Roh Sung-il, chairman of the board at Mizmedi Hospital, told KBS television that Hwang had agreed to ask the journal Science to withdraw the paper, published in June to international acclaim. Roh was one of the co-authors of the article that detailed how individual stem cell colonies were created for 11 patients through cloning."

And then:

"This is something I shouldn't have done," said the researcher, who was identified only by his last name, Kim, and whose face was not shown. "I had no choice but to do it."

So, Hwang faked his work. He published his so-called findings in Science to great acclaim. Rumors of a Nobel prized swirled. In the end, it was phony. The results were fake, plain and simple.

But...

Science worked. The claims were wrong but they were uncovered through the honesty of others who felt guilt for what they did. Yes, the wrongs should have never been done, but they were. Now, the guilty are admitting to it. That's a system that's working.

If you think I'm too optimistic ask yourself this: If this were a phony political claim, would we see people coming clean? I don't think so.

Cute sight, just to watch it

This is just a cute animated image to watch.

Chaos for Encryption

"FUZZY INFORMATION. The top signal is an electronic version of the message. It's hidden within the chaotic signal (middle). The bottom signal is the recovered message."

An international team has encrypted a message over fiber optic lines with the help of chaos. The message is embedded in a light beam that "undergoes chaotic intensity fluctuations." At the receiver, the chaos is taken out to reveal the hidden message. This had been accomplished in a laboratory but not over this distance of 120-kilometers.

"In this new encryption strategy, a private message is converted into and travels as laser light. The information is hidden within a laser beam that undergoes chaotic intensity fluctuations. Such chaos-encrypted communication had already been mastered in laboratories. In the Nov. 17 Nature, an international team details how it sent such a message over 120 kilometers of fiber optics running throughout the city of Athens.

"The main achievement ... is the fact that the transmission has been made over a commercially installed fiber network," says Alan Shore of the University of Wales in Bangor. His team didn't have to modify the optical lines. It was quite a "nice surprise" to see that the team's lab setup translates well to a real-world setup, says Shore."

Outrageous: Medical Journals

From the Wall Street Journal (December 13, 2005):

"In 2001, the American Journal of Kidney Diseases published an article that touted the use of synthetic vitamin D. Its author was listed as Alex J. Brown, an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

But recently, that same article was featured as a work sample by a different person: Michael Anello, a free-lance medical writer, who posted a summary of it on his Web site. Mr. Anello says he was hired to write the article by a communications firm working for Abbott Laboratories, which makes a version of the vitamin D product. Dr. Brown agrees he got help in writing but says he redid part of the draft.

It's an example of an open secret in medicine: Many of the articles that appear in scientific journals under the bylines of prominent academics are actually written by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies. These seemingly objective articles, which doctors around the world use to guide their care of patients, are often part of a marketing campaign by companies to promote a product or play up the condition it treats.

Now questions about the practice are mounting as medical journals face unprecedented scrutiny of their role as gatekeeper for scientific information. Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine admitted that a 2000 article it published highlighting the advantages of Merck & Co.'s Vioxx painkiller omitted information about heart attacks among patients taking the drug. The journal has said the deletions were made by someone working from a Merck computer. Merck says the heart attacks happened after the study's cutoff date and it did nothing wrong."

It used to be you could trust the scientific articles in medical journals as free from bias.

No more.

Worms that speak

Computer worms are getting smarter. A new worm talks back! When you get the worm, you can ask it if it is a virus. Of course, it says no and intices you to download software. This worm is really an instant message.

"Now it seems that the latest worm to infect AOL's instant messaging community, Aim, actually chats with the users it is targeting in order to persuade them to download and run an infected file.

Called IM.Myspace04.AIM - and someone really needs to think about the naming scheme used for viruses and worms, because that one is just dull - it uses infected computers to send itself to people on any Aim buddy list it finds, and even responds to messages sent to it in order to allay suspicion."

The article continues that the worm in not malicious. Of course, this is the first with intelligence, who can say what the next intelligent one will do.

Simpson's Math

Mathematics in the Simpsons! Yes, this is great.

Dr. Sarah J. Greenwald, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, and Dr. Andrew Nestler, Santa Monica College, Santa Monica, CA, put together this site of mathematics as presented on the show.

Take a look and enjoy.

Fly through Escher's work

Click on the link above, then go to downloads. Click on an MPEG and fly through an Escher painting in 3-D!

I've seen explanations of Escher's work that typically say something like:

"Escher's work looks just fine and reasonable because you see a certain projection of 3-D on to 2-D. But that projection is what makes the impossible possible. When you look at the actually 3-D structure needed to give that oh so special projection, well, that's where the problem comes in."

See the 3-D structure now.

Many against one: Squirrels kill dog

Seems a pack of black squirrels killed a dog in a Russian forest. If true, this is an amazing example of where many small creatures, working in harmony, can overwhelm a larger foe and win.

Complex systems folks: Take note. Maybe there's something to this idea of the many small over the few large, after all!

(hat tip: Ilachina)