Science in the Backwater

Science Wrap-up for 2010

2010-12-31T10:32:00.001-06:00

Ah, that time of year again. Sit by the fire, sip a beverage, and reminisce over the significant events of the past year.

Editorial
One decade into the 21st century, science (and physics in particular) has started to congeal into a very different model than was norm for most of the 20th century. We live in world in which anti-science sentiment seems to be on the increase, both from religious folk who turn to fundamentalism as a bulwark against modernism, and also from a large number of educated and secular people who seem to feel that science simply has not delivered on its promises. This is not just the "what have you done for me lately crowd" (although there are plenty of them), but "post modernists" who are skeptical of rationalism and the scientific method as world views. These are the folks who embrace the concept of multiple equivalent routes to truth, to which as a good empiricist my response is "prove it."

I wonder if the rise of scientific research and technological sophistication in Chinese, Indian, and other non-European societies may be affecting this point of view. I would like to see a serious study of philosophical and religious viewpoints among Chinese and Indian scientists. I have certainly heard very well-educated researchers claim to believe in some rather seriously flawed superstitions from areas outside of their area of expertise. These were nations that were not directly heirs of the European Enlightenment, and instead had very long-standing and entrenched philosophical systems (Confucianism, so-called Vedic Science, the Kerala School of mathematics) which mixed rational and non-rational elements. Of course, the move from rationalism is just as strong among Western academics, and you have to look no farther than the Huffington Post or Oprah to see people like Deepak Chopra or oz Garcia or Andrew Wyland peddling a mixture of science, pseudoscience and spiritualism.

But the irony is that this a time of remarkable scientific achievement. The by-word of early 21st century science is "interdisciplinary", and many of the most notable achievements of recent years, like those in nonlinear dynamics and metamaterials, cross traditional disciplinary lines. That is not to say disciplinary research is dead, and certainly in my own field of particle physics it has been a banner couple of years.

Particle Physics
The biggest news in particle physics in 2010 was, of course, the turn-on of the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC had an initial short run, at lower energies, in late 2009, but starting March and continuing with remarkable efficiency until the scheduled Christmas shutdown, the collider operated at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV, half the target energy of 14 TeV. A short late heavy ion run in November demonstrated the LHC's ability to accelerate nuclei, and produced some interesting new results. I was at CERN just before Thanksgiving when my experiment, ATLAS, announced the measurement of "centrality-dependent dijet asymmetry" - no. I didn't know what that meant at first either, but it turns out to be an important signature of the formation of quark-gluon plasma. We were also able to produce first results for the summer conferences, also a remarkable achievement since usually there is a year or so between first data and finished analyses. We already have several papers published. No Higgs boson...yet.

My graduate student, Ram Dhullipudi (far right in tan jacket) in the ATLAS control room during first 7 TeV LHC collisions

The same week the ATLAS was finalizing the dijet asymmatery results from the heavy ion run, two other experiments at CERN, ALPHA and ASACUSA, announced the first sample of trapped antihydrogen atoms. Antihydrogen, fromed from an antiproton and an antielectron, was first produced in 1995, but it has taken until now to develop techniques to trap these antimatters atoms. The trapping times are only on the order of 0.1 seconds, but once the discovery is made, its just engineering after that.

The Tevatron is still running, and like a well-loved old car that just seems to keep running, the old collider continues to produce some interesting results. My experiment, D0, published on the most controversial results in particle physics this year - like-sign dimuon anomaly. This observation of an excessive asymmetry
A≡(N⁺⁺-N^--)/(N⁺⁺+N^--) between pairs of postive and negative like-sign pair of muons may signal a new and significant source of CP-violation, which leads to the excess of matter over antimatter in our universe. The result was summarized in an excellent "Editor's Viewpoint" editorial in Physics. I will let the editor, Roy Briere, summarize:"If this intriguing hint of new physics holds up to scrutiny and is confirmed elsewhere, it will join other significant milestones of high-energy physics. Even if it fades away, it can still live on as part of a testament to the proper workings of empirical science. Indeed, the advent of modern scientific methodology, which forms the root of all our work, is the greatest milestone of all."

A few years ago, the U.S. particle physics community came up with a pithy way of classifying the experiments we do. The devised three categories: The Energy Frontier, The Intensity Frontier, and The Cosmic Frontier. The Tevatron and now the LHC represent the Energy Frontier. The Intensity Frontier would be future neutrino experiments, for example from the Project X at Fermilab after the Tevatron shuts down. The Cosmic Frontier is the realm of searches for Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Just like last year, there were some intriguing hints from Dark Matter searches, particularly results from the Fermi experiment (named after the person, not the lab - it used to be called GLAST) and DAMA. In March 2010 Fermi announced that active galactic nuclei are not responsible for most gamma-ray background radiation. This leads to new models that have to include Dark Matter interactions. The DAMA experiment in the Gran Sasso mine continues to accumulate evidence for Dark Matter in the Milky Way galactic halo.

As I am typing this article, I just received an email update from Scientific American that the IceCube experiment has been completed at the South Pole. With 86 strings of detectors reaching down 2.5 kilometers i the Antarctic ice, this is the largest neutrino observatory ever constructed. An extension of the old AMNADA project, IceCube will look for neutrinos from cosmic sources such as supernovae and gamma-ray bursters.

Lastly, the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in Iceland. What does this have to do with particle physics? Well, it happned the week of one of the largest conferences, the 18th International Workshop on Deep Inelastic Scaterring, held in Firenza. Several attendees were stranded or unable to get to the conference. Personally I made it as far as Barcelona, and ended up giving two talks over the phone from my hotel room. Barcelona is a nice city to stuck in, though...

Students demonstrators in London

Elsewhere in Physics & Astronomy
The search for exoplanets continues to be a great adventure. Astronomers discovered a potentially habitable planet of similar size to Earth in orbit around a nearby star, shown in this artist's impression. Gliese 581g is in its solar system's 'Goldilocks zone' – not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist. Personally, if this discovery pans out - some groups are skeptical of the claim - I prefer the other name the discoverers gave the planet: Zamira's World.

Artist's impression of Gliese 581g

Another exoplanet was discovered around a dying star HIP13044, that appeared to have originated outside of our galaxy.

Other Science News
Biologist and entrepreneur Craig Venter and his team revealed that they had created the world's first 'synthetic life form', paving the way for designer organisms that are built rather than evolved. They synthesized the genome of an existing bacterium from scratch and used it to 'reprogram' another bacterial cell

We now know that, around 100,000 years ago, there were four distinct hominds lived simultaneously on this Earth of ours. Besides our Homo Sapiens ancestors, there were the Neanderthals, the Hobbits of Flores Island, and a newly discovered species in what is now Russia called H. Denisova. These Denisvoans may have interbred with H. Sapiens, according to genetic evidence announced late this year.

But maybe the biggest news in the long run came in late November, when researchers in Berlin announced that they had cured a man of AIDS using stem cell therapy.

Notable Physics and Astronomy Deaths

Georges Charpak - inventor of the wire chamber. An experimental particle physicist and detector developer, he turned to medical imaging later in life. A Polish-French Jew, he fought in the resistance and was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp. He was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physics

Nicola Cabibbo - should have won the 2008 Nobel Prize, with laureates Kobayashi and Maskawa. I mean, we call it the CKM matrix, for cripes sake! An outstanding Italian physicist who also fought for rationalism in Italian education.

I had the opportunity to see both Charpak and Cabibbo at CERN. One of the real joys of working in an environment like CERN.

Benoit Mandlebrot - another Polish-French Jew, who emigrated to the United States. And another giant of 20th century science who should have won Nobel. Mandelbrot is best known, of course, for his work in maps, fractals, and nonlinear systems.

Andrew Lange - CalTech astrophysicist who worked on balloon-borne measurements of the cosmic microwave background.

Geoffrey Burbridge - astronomer and developer of the "quasi-steady state" model of the universe.

Ulrich Baur - was a friend of mine. An exceptional theorist who a professor at SUNY-Buffalo, I best remember Uli as someone who was willing to discuss physics with anyone, including a dumb graduate student. He will be missed by a lot of folks int he field.

Brian Marsden - director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, which was founded by the International Astronomical Union in 1920.

Allan Sandage - made the first accurate measurements of the Hubble constant and the age of the universe.

Martin Gardner - the intellectual's friend. Mathematician and science writer.

Jack Horkheimer - popularizer of astronomy, the Star Hustler.

The Worst Thing to Happen to Science in 2010

The worst thing to happen to science is the continuing campaign of lies and mis-characterizations surrounding global climate change. The Right Wing in the United States (with allies globally) have indoctrinated their followers into rejecting any suggestion that climate change is happening, or if it is happening that it has any human-made causes. This is bad for all of science of course, since the methodology of our colleagues in climate studies are not so different than those employed by the rest of us. Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of one group of scientists is an attack on us all. Unfortunately the scientific community has been very timid in answering these attacks, and that can only spell trouble later on. Not mention, of course, that the whole business causes us to lose time in possibly combating climate change, while we may have the ability to affect outcomes over the next century,

Why Do Universities Engage in Research?

2010-12-26T18:21:00.005-06:00

In the course of the ongoing conversation over how much higher education budgets in Louisiana will be cut, and how those cuts will be distributed, there have been attacks on university faculty as being inefficient and unproductive. Two major claims of non-productivity are sabbaticals and research. I will leave sabbaticals for another post, except to say that at Louisiana Tech they are so rare as to be a complete non-issue. In the six years I have been an administrator, there have been two paid sabbaticals in my departments, and one of them was taken at LSU (so that the state retained all of that faculty member's productivity despite the sabbatical!)

The other claim is that professors devote too much time to research, that they are paid to teach but instead engage in research rather than concentrating on instruction, and that when they do deign to teach their instruction is subpar because their real focus is on research. These views of university research are rooted in a misunderstanding of the role of research at a university, and are simply wrong. Research is not separate from educational instruction. In fact, research is a necessary and integral part of instruction. However, that is not to say that all institutions of higher education in Louisiana should be engaged in research. Let me explain.

I often use the expression "Research is the zenith of education". The last, best lesson a student learns is how to add new knowledge in his or her chosen field. This is a required educational component for students pursuing a graduate degree, original research being required for a Masters thesis, and even more extensive original research for a doctoral dissertation. All institutions which grant graduate degrees must have faculty who are engaged in ongoing research, in order for these students to complete their degrees. Research does not just start from scratch at a moment's notice either; it takes years to build a lab, to develop a publishing record, and to obtain the grants and other funding to operate a research program.

Research also involves undergraduates. At Louisiana Tech, all of our chemistry and physics majors have to engage in a research project by their senior year, as a condition for graduation. Other programs have similar requirements. My own research group consists of three faculty (all of whom teach regular classes, by the way), two postdoctoral researchers, six PhD students, two Masters students, and four undergraduate students. When I am in the lab or at my desk working with these students, I am teaching in the oldest and best way: one on one, passing on my knowledge of the field to the next generation of scientists.

I have not spent a lot of time talking about research as a money-making venture for universities, because I do not believe it is the most important reason why universities have on-campus research. But it is a fact that researchers bring in money for the universities. Most people are unaware of what are called "indirect costs" - portions of grants that go directly to the university to offset the costs (electricity, staff support) of doing research. My grants generate enough in indirect funds each year to pay for one full-time employee at Louisiana Tech. In addition, grants generate funds to pay for graduate students to attend the university, and to pay undergraduates to work in our labs. They buy equipment, much of which is also used in courses, and pay for technical staff. Then there is the occasional big money prize: the research that turns into a commercial product. Louisiana Tech researchers have one of the best track records in the nation for producing commercial products and licenses, with the highest number of patents per research dollars expended.

The presence of research universities is directly tied to economic development. These universities can be engines of economic growth. From the North Carolina Research Triangle and the Alabama Tuscaloosa-Birmingham corridor to Austin and Silicon Valley, high tech enterprises are always associated with the presence of comprehensive (and well-funded) research universities. Universities provide the basic research, which industries then turn into applied R&D and, eventually, commercial products. Make no mistake about this - our competitors in the global market know this. China, India, Japan all are investing in university research.

What of the argument that research-active faculty are poor teachers? The opposite is more often the case. A professor who is engaged in his or her field, and who knows and understands the latest developments in it, is invariably better at communicating his or her passion for that discipline to students. In 1995, when an experiment I was on at Fermi National Accelerator Lab discovered the top quark, an article was published in the New York Times that addressed this question of whether researchers also teach. Entitled "'Top' University Scientists Do Teach", it found that all but 12 of 123 PhD faculty engaged in the search for the top quark had taught a class that semester (and eight of those 12 were scheduled to teach the following semester). Together they taught nearly 10,000 students during the term when the top quark discovery was announced.To quote from the article: "We are mistaken in portraying the university as a teaching institution. It is a learning institution, and learning must take place at all levels from the newest freshman to the most senior professor. How can one learn from someone whose own learning is a dusty, distant memory?"

If research is both a desired and a necessary component of education, then should all faculty at all of Louisiana's colleges and universities engage in research? Unfortunately, the answer to this has to be "No." Not all universities in the state are graduate-degree granting, and we have neither the resources nor the population to take them all to that level. Certainly research should be encouraged at LSU and at the three other research intensive universities - Louisiana Tech, UL-Lafayette, and the University of New Orleans. Other schools with a narrow offering of graduate degrees, like the pharmacy program at UL-Monroe, have to be allowed to have research-active faculty in that area and in allied disciplines. But many schools in the state are, and should remain, primarily undergraduate institutions.

This state has hard choices to make. What kind of higher education system do we want? How will we pay for it? Which institutions will be allowed to function as comprehensive graduate universities? My hope is that these questions can be discussed and debated without attacking faculty for doing what they were asked to do when they were hired: Teach well, and do world-class research.

Dear Science: Republicans are just not that into you...

2010-12-16T11:13:00.001-06:00

Interesting and well-written read on the slow breakup between Republicans and Science. Only 6% of working scientists identify themselves as Republicans:

THEN

NOW

XKCD nails physicists again

2010-09-16T08:10:00.000-05:00

http://xkcd.com/793/

Welcome to college, future colleagues (advice for science undergrads)

2010-09-16T07:36:00.000-05:00

Welcome to college, future colleagues (advice for science undergrads)

David Vitter’s Beloved Drunken Aide Slashes Girlfriends

2010-06-24T08:11:00.002-05:00

Wonkette : David Vitter’s Beloved Drunken Aide Slashes Girlfriends

Palin pwned by Actress with Down's Syndrome

2010-02-20T04:11:00.003-06:00

I do not by any means wish to suggest that the former partial-term governor of Alaska, mayor of Wasilla, AK, and Action News sport reporter Sarah Palin is in any way retarded, but she did get completely burned by an actress with Down's syndrome who voiced the character of Ellen in a recent controversial episode of "Family Guy":

My name is Andrea Fay Friedman. I was born with Down syndrome. I played the role of Ellen on the "Extra Large Medium" episode of Family Guy that was broadcast on Valentine's day. Although they gave me red hair on the show, I am really a blonde. I also wore a red wig for my role in " Smudge" but I was a blonde in "Life Goes On". I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line "I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska" was very funny. I think the word is "sarcasm".

In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.

Rest of the statement is here.

Now, I have mixed feelings about Family Guy. It is really juvenile and low-brow and often I kind of dirty for having watched it. But like South Park, and to a lesser extent The Simpsons, it is about the only TV show that dares to push the envelope in social commentary and satire. I think it is a truism of satire that it misses more than times than it is on the money (SNL, anyone?) but at least they try.

(One of these women is more qualified than the other to comment on current events...)

Is it a pioneer of a brave new world, or someone with OCD?

2010-02-19T09:20:00.003-06:00

H+ magazine, which champions the idea of Transhumanism, has a blog by an anonymous author who has decided to take up the motto of "Just Do It" and take the step into transhumanism himself. He has started mounting various eletronic interfaces to his body. Is this cool, or disgusting or what? I realli cannot make up my mind about it. Reminds of a late 80s Japanese horror movie I vaguely remember.

Scrapheap Transhumanism | h Magazine

Waaaaaay down the rabbit hole!

2010-02-11T19:26:00.001-06:00

I teach a nonlinear dynamics course, and at some we talk about fractal dimensionality and self-similar structures like Mandelbrot sets. I LOVE this video, which zooms down into a Mandelbrot set through 214 orders of magnitude. I will let you figure out what an outrageous change in scale that is.

Mandelbrot Fractal Set Trip To e214 HD from teamfresh on Vimeo.

Eureka's Top 30 Science Blogs

2010-02-10T06:23:00.000-06:00

Word of warning - the last one is a climate-change denialist, but I suppose the Times Online felt they had to give "equal time to opposing views"(tm). The first one is great, full of steam punk style comics. I plan to read through the archives.

Times Online - Eureka Zone - WBLG: Eureka's Top 30 Science Blogs

Me and Bobby Mcgee

2010-02-03T17:44:00.001-06:00

This is probably the song I want to be listening to when I finally step off this train.

Now, all together -

LIGO Exhibit Coming to LA Tech

2010-01-07T12:21:00.002-06:00

Science New Year's Resolutions

2010-01-02T10:29:00.002-06:00

I have a few very specific science-related resolutions for the new year. Not sure if they will be of interest to anyone else, but maybe by writing them down, it will help me stick to them:

1) Publish the DZero jet ratios measurement I am working on with Markus Wobisch and our student Scott Atkins. This should be easy to keep, the analysis is pretty good shape. I expect we will have a preliminary result ready for the winter conferences.

2) Get my other student. Ram Dhullipudi, transitioned form service work to analysis on the ATLAS experiment. Lot of challenges here: not a lot of data yet, the work he is doing on calorimeter data quality is important and the group is small, there is a long line of ATLAS students who want to finish soon, and LA Tech is a relative new-comer in the experiment.

3) Develop a second Honors senior class for next winter, most likely a laser physics course. I have had several requests for this, but with the crazy budget situation and being short a faculty member, I am not 100% sure I will pull this off.

4) Do some more work on non-linear dynamics, try to get a few undergrad physics majors involved with this. I have one lined up who says he wants to work in this area, but family matters have taken up a lot of his time.

2009 - A Year That Was...in Science!

2009-12-28T09:07:00.004-06:00

So looking back over the last year as a scientist, what stands out most in my mind? If anything, it was a remarkable number of events connected with the 1960s. More about that in a moment. Personally, the big event of the year was the restart of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. From the point of view of picking events that will have the greatest lasting effect on science, once again it was probably from the areas of astrophysics and particle astrophysics, namely new deep field images from the Hubble space telescope and several hints at the existence of dark matter (including the FERMI and ATIC results and the two CDMS events). Although it did not get much press coverage, I have followed the extremely long solar minimum, which extended into this year. (Only in recent weeks have a few sunspots from the new solar cycle began popping up.) Outside of physics, I would have to say the biggest science stories were the discovery of Ardi (Ardipithecus Ramidus), a common ancestor of hominids and apes; and the H1N1 virus outbreak, which has taxed public health systems across the globe.

A 1960s Redux

A few details are in order. The 1960s echoed in the science of 2009 in a number of ways: The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded for work done in the sixties, to (with some controversy) Willard Boyle and George Smith for the Charge-coupled device or CCD, and to Charles Kao for the development of optical fibers for communications. The CCD was patented in 1969, based on work done by a Bell Labs semiconductor group formed in 1964. Work on optical fibers date back to 1958, when Sam DiVita of the US Army Signal Corps Lab began working on the idea of transmitting signals through silica fibers (he patented the idea - why did the Nobel committee not recognize his work?) Kao and another scientist, George Hockham, working at a British telephone company, proposed ways to reduce the attenuation in optical fibers, considered a breakthrough toward their practical use for communication.

July 2009 was the 40th of the greatest event in human history, the first human landing on another world, the Apollo 11 mission of Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the Moon. I have posted about this earlier, but in many ways this was a defining moment of my life. I may never get into space, particularly with the stochastic way that NASA's future is being planned, but I owe my career in science to the space program and the library card my mother got for me when I was still in kindergarten.

The Moon still holds interest, both scientifically and technologically as a future base for space exploration. The most important Moon-related discovery this year was the presence of large amounts of water at the lunar south pole. The LCROSS mission, which crashed two probes into a dark crater, threw up a plume of dust and vapor which, after careful analysis, showed the presence of significant amounts of water as well as sodium and other unexpected minerals. For the millions who watched the LCROSS impacts live (including me and my son) it seemed like a bust at first - no big visible impact plume - but in the end careful planning and and the hard work of painstaking science paid off, with clear evidence from both infrared and UV spectrometers that were trained on the impact.

The LHC, the LHC, Will I Live to See the LHC?

It was starting the become a running gag in high energy physics circles: The LHC will turn on next fall. Fall 2005, fall 2006, fall 2007, fall 2008,.... After the disastrous start last year, interrupted by a magnet quench that took out a sector of the accelerator and caused a year-long shutdown while repairs were made and new safeguards put in place, people actually began hypothesisizing semi-serious scenarios in which the Higgs itself (or God or future civilization) was trying to keep the particle from being detected. CERN was at a critical juncture - Austria temporarily withdrew from CERN, until the outcry within the scientific community forced the Austrian chancellor to reconsider - and needed to get the LHC started again as smoothly and error-free as possible. The CERN management decided to forego a big press event (unlike 2008) but the press caught wind of what was happening anyway.

Fortunately, the re-start has gone extremely well, much better than most of us could have hoped for. Personal anecdote: I took a group of students to Fermilab in late November. We were touring the lab, looking around Wilson Hall, when the first single beams were being injected into the LHC. I talked Judy Jackson into letting us go into to the CMS remote control room for a little while, and the students were very excited to watched the first "splash events" being recorded. I figured they would run in this mode for a week or so, injected one beam and then another. By the time we drove back that weekend, there had already been collisions!

The LHC has already run at energies higher than the Fermilab Tevatron (up to 2.34 TeV center-of-mass, compared to the Tevatron's 1.96 TeV collision energy) although most of the data taken so far has been at 900 GeV. The LHC was stopped without incident for the winter shutdown, will start operations again in February, and if the schedule holds will be colliding beams at 10 TeV by the end of the year. That is the point where interesting things (Higgs, supersymmetric particles, micro black holes, ????) should start happening.

And if they don't? Then the LHC becomes the world's last particle collider. Simple as that.

Whispers in the Dark

What is Dark Matter? Astrophysical evidence, including the WMAP data (second only to the Hubble Space Telescope in revolutionizing our knowledge of the universe) suggests that 23 per cent of the universe is a heavy, rarely interacting particle which we have dubbed "dark matter" for lack of a better term. There are candidate particles for Dark Matter, like the lightest supersymmetric particle (which would not be able to decay into ordinary matter) or axions or heavy sterile neutrinos. Whatever it is, it is nearly five times more common in the universe than the ordinary matter of protons, neutron, and electron.

The year started out with observations from ATIC high-altitude balloon mission that suggested a source of dark matter may lie relatively close to our solar system. In May, the former GLAST experiment, now re-christened FERMI, showed evidence for excess electron/positron production which would also be consistent with dark matter annihilation. The year ended with a tantalizing announcement from the CDMS experiment of two events consistent with weakly interacting massive particles (or WIMPs). All hints that something is out there, but at this point not conclusive enough to claim discovery.

While on the astro side of things, this year marked the return of a refurbished deep field camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, a result of the final re-servicing misison. One of the best, if not the best, astronomical photos of the year was an image of thousands of galaxies (extremely large high-res image available here). There were more great discoveries in the Saturn system, including methane lakes on Titan and incredible images from the continuing Cassini misison. There was the first evidence of a "water world", a super-Earth exoplanet with large amounts of water. The first sunspots of the new new solar cycle began appearing, after a solar minimum that was one of the deepest in a century.

Necrology
The greatest scientist who passed away during the last year was Norman Borlaug. You probably never heard of him. He won a Nobel Prize, but not in one of the science areas. Instead, he was given a the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. This unassuming botanist, born in Iowa, was probably responsible for saving more lives than any other human who has ever lived. He is credited with creating the Green Revolution, bringing hearty crop strains to poor nations and changing their agricultural systems from subsistence to single-crop. It is estimated that as many as a billion people have escaped malnutrition and death from famine due directly to his efforts.

Another towering figure in science who passed away this year, this time from the social sciences, was Claude Levi-Strauss, the father of modern antropology. The French honor their intellectuals (perhaps too much) and Levi-Strauss was considered a French national treasure. He began his career studying native tribes in Brazil.

From the physics community, notable passings include

Kazuhiko Nishijima (particle theorist who helped develop the quark model),
Vitaly Ginzburg (Gizburg-Landau theory as well as the Soviet hydrogram bomb),
Joseph Purcell (NASA project director for the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory satellites),
Aage Bohr (son of Niels Bohr and a Nobel Prize winning nuclear theorist in his own right),
Jack Eddy (who first imaged an individual atom),
Jack Good (one of the Bletchly Park code breakers),
Stanley Jaki (physicist and theologian),
Martin Klein (science historian), and
Frank Shoemaker (who helped design the Fermilab Main Ring).

In my younger, more religious days when I was giving serious consideration to becoming a theologian myself, I was influenced greatly by Stanley Jaki's writings. A Bendictine priest, he was an enormous intellect who was as comfortable writing about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem or Grand Unification in particle physics as he was the role of Mary on Catholic worship.

The Worst Thing to Happen in Science in 2009

The year in science started on a positive note. As part of the economic stimulus package, science funding was given a significant boost. Baseline funding for the main science agencies looks strong under the Obama administration, although the growing budget deficits threaten all discretionary spending.

But science has had it hard in recent years, and took a couple of body blows in 2009. I am not talking just about the continuing denigration of scientists in the eyes of the public (commercials for the "Geek Squad", the stereotype-laden TV shows like The Big Bang Theory and Fringe). I also mean incidents that pint out a deepening divide between professional scientists and the general public. The worst incident was clearly the release of stolen emails from the University of Essex Center for Climate Research. First of all, where was the outrage over the lawbreakers who committed this theft? Nowhere, certainly not among the anti-science types who used this as a field day for conspiracy theories and charges for fraud. In the end, there was no evidence for anything approaching falsification of data or attempts to publish misleading conclusions. What the emails showed were simply people talking privately and colloquially about subjects that they would have spoken more careful about if they new their comments would be published. That is no different from any other professions, but somehow it comes off differently when scientists are involved. Perhaps it is the Mr Spock stereotype, that scientists are not supposed to have passions or emotions.

But my conversations with non-scientists have unearthed troubling and frightening misunderstandings of how scientists do their jobs, and of their motivations. Particularly among conservatives and the religious, there is a deep-seated animosity towards scientists, even when some of the particular advancements of science (the space race, high tech weapons, medicines) are appreciated. But even among some who might be considered liberals, there are growing signs of anti-science. Anti-vaccination hype no knows political bounds, for example, and some environmentalists seem more than ready to throw any scientist under the bus who challenges conventional wisdom in their circles. The fashion of most people today is to believe that science which re-affirms your preconceptions, and to reject that which you find uncomfortable or challenging. Curiosity, inquiry, and an open-mind to new discovery are sadly becoming the hallmarks of a bygone era.

The Biology of B-Movie Monsters

2009-11-28T08:23:00.000-06:00

I have read other calculations of bio-mechanical limits, but
The Biology of B-Movie Monsters
by University of Chicago biologist Michael LaBarbara has to be the best and most complete discussion on the subject I have seen.

Home

2009-11-27T09:34:00.000-06:00

This seems appropriate for Thanksgiving week - 10 views of the Earth, as taken by different solar system probes. Includes the very first picture of the Earth from the Moon, taken by the Lunar Orbiter 1 mission in 1966.

10 Views of Earth from the Moon, Mars and Beyond [Slide Show]: Scientific American Slideshows

Playing Catchup on a Busy Science Week

2009-10-17T10:03:00.003-05:00

Wow, where to start:

1) Last Friday I got up early and watched NASA television's coverage of the LCROSS impact. There were plans to try to record the impact with Louisiana Tech's new observatory, but we have been socked in with rain for weeks now. Anyway, as most of you know, the actual impact appeared to be a dud. No bright flash or spectacular plume kicked up when the rocket booster and the LCROSS spacecraft itself crashed into the Cebeus craters near the Moon's south pole.

Of course, that was not the end of the story. While the news media moves on to other things (Lindsey Lohan's probation violation, missing kids who may or may not be in a hot air balloon) the scientists got to work on analyzing the data from the impacts. Now we know that there was a plume, just at the low end of what was expected in terms of brightness. And early spectroscopy indicated the presence of sodium, which was a surprise. Still no word yet on water vapor, but stayed tuned.

2) The LHC is back in the news, as we get closer to re-start at the end of November. My student, Ram Dhullipudi, who is stationed at CERN, is very busy these days with the software being used to monitor the data. Our experiment, ATLAS, is already taking shifts just like we will during data taking, recording cosmic ray events and trying to exercise the "machinary" of data taking and distribution. The final sectors were cooled down at the end of the week, now the whole accelerator is colder than deep space.

But the biggest news coverage came last week from the arrest of a postdoctoral researcher on terrorism charges. The physicist, who worked on the LHCb experiment and was employed by EPFL in Lausanne, was accused of having ties to Al Quaida in the the Maghreb, a North African terror group. The first I heard of ths was when all CERN users were sent an email from the Director General after the arrest in Vienne, France, reminding users that CERN is an open lab and did not engage in secret or military research.

Research at these large international labs produces an unusual and unqie environment. During the Cold War, Fermilab was the only U.S. grovernment-run site that flew the Hammer and Sickle of the Soviet Union (along with the flags of all the other nations that had scientists working at the lab). At CERN an American and an Isreali might work side-by-side with an Iranian and a Pakistani. The science does not respect national borders, and to the extent possible with the real problems in the world, the labs also try to to produce an work atmosphere free of national rivalries.

3) Speaking of science that goes beyond borders, a team of researchers in Nanjing, China, have created an electromagnetic analog of black holes in metamaterials. There is a cool local tie-in, since this is experimental verification of an effect predicted by Louisiana Tech researcher Dentcho Genov in his recent Nature Physics article (which is reference no. 5 in the Chinese scientists' paper).

4) What is up with apparent magnetic monopoles produced in solids and so-called magnetricity? This is an effect in materials that behave as "spin ices", and as far as I can tell are like phonons and other lattice quanta in that they are not a "real" particle but a quantized effect in the lattice. But this is getting beyond my depth - something I will have to understand better before I teach electricity & magnetism again.

Physics Nobel Goes to Internet Porn Pioneers

2009-10-06T10:03:00.003-05:00

Well, once again the discovery of the top quark, and my chance for residual glory, has gone unrecognized by the Swedish Academy of Sciences. Instead they gave the award to Charles K. Kao(for the development of fiber optics), and Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith(for the development of charged coupled devices, or CCDs). Fiber optics, of course, are the transmission route for high speed digital communications. CCDs are used in digital imaging, everything from medical imaging to the camara in uyour cell phone. We used huge arrays of CCs in the tracking elements of high energy physics experiments like ATLAS, where they are sometimes refered to as pixel detectors. (Dick Greenwood here at LA Tech works on the ATLAS Forward Pixel Detector, for example.)

The Nobels in physics seem to have taken a decidedly applied turn in recent years. I wonder if tis is a trend, or if the acdemy feels they are making up for a lack of recognition of applied areas in the past.

This marks the eighth Nobel prize awarded for work at Bell Labs, which is no more. Bell Labs were spun off into Lucent, which subsequently got out of the research line. Industry does not do fundamental research, and really very little research, these days - another reseaon why strong funding of academic research is so important.

LA BESE Board Caves to Fundamentalists

2009-10-06T09:14:00.003-05:00

I am a member of the LA Science Coalition (also on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=119388221430). They have been putting out some great updates on the way the Board of elementary and Secondary Education has completely caved in to the fundies, led by the Louisiana Family forum, as a result of the disastrous 2008 LA Science Education Act. Full details can be found at http://lasciencecoalition.org/2009/09/30/creationists-dictate-bese-policy/

If you are a Louisiana scientist or educator:
1) Join groups like the La Science Coalition and keep up with what is happening.
2) Can an open ear to what is happening in your community, partocularly if you have school age kids. My daughter is taking biology this year in high school, ans so far there has not been attempt to sneak any of the Discovery Intitute propaganda into her class, but I am worried.

It will eventually take professional organizations and others refusing to visit Louisiana for conventions and meetings, and companies refusing to locate in a scientifically illiterate state, to get changes. Here is one interesting quote - In August 2008, the president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, which met in New Orleans in April 2009, had already called for scientists to protest such decisions “with our feet and wallets”:

I think we need to see to it that no future meeting of our society will take place in Louisiana as long as that law stands, nor should we hold it in any other state (are you listening, Michigan and Texas?) that passes a similar law. And I call upon the presidents of the American Chemical Society, the American Association of Immunologists, the Society for Neuroscience, and all the other scientific societies around the U.S. and the world, to join me in this action and make clear to the state legislators in Louisiana, the governor of the state, and the mayor and business bureau of New Orleans that this will be the consequence. (ASBMB Today [pdf], August 2008)

Good old Adri!

2009-10-02T09:23:00.001-05:00

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Fossil finds extend human story

discusses the announcement of Ardipithecus ramidus, a early hominid ancestor with many characteristics of both humans and chimpanzees. It has taken 17 years of study to put the fossils in the correct context, but that is how science works - carefully, meticulously, building upon prior work.

UPDATE: This is a really good article from Science, discussing how the Ardi find fits in with the Lucy discovery in 1974. In a nutshell, Lucy showed us that early hominids walked upright, while Ardi showed that even earlier hominid precursors also had a form of upright walking, while also spending time in tress.

How cool is this? High school chemistry was right!

2009-09-24T09:37:00.005-05:00

Well, this is neat: Scientists at the Kharkov Institute in the the Ukraine have released the first photographs showing the details of the electron configurations in a single atom. And guess what? The orbitals look exactly like the expectations from years of solving the Schrodinger Equation:

In the immortal words of the comic xkcd:

Please stay on the HOV lane until you reach Ganymede

2009-09-24T09:35:00.001-05:00

A news story in the Daily Telegraph describes how mapping the Lagrange points for the planets and moons of our solar system will allow interplanetary and intersatellite travel with much less fuel consumption. I was amazed by the figure they quoted for the Genesis mission in 2004 (the only one to make use of this idea so far) - a factor of 10 less fuel used compared to a traditional mission profile.

Two things come to mind:
1) It could not happen with out computers. Dogin the three-body problem, even the restricted three-body problem in which one mass is much less than the other two, is hard. Gluing the various solutions together to make this map could have only hapenned n the era of high speed processor and large memory.

2) Why do British papers have such good science writers?

Two August Anniversaries

2009-09-12T11:07:00.005-05:00

I meant to post on this earlier, but life just got in the way. There were two interesting anniversaries in August, in the same week in fact, and I am not sure many people have noticed the significance of this particularly conjugation of dates.

The first, August 19, was the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the Burgess shale. For those of you who took biology in a Louisiana public high school, the Burgess shale is a fossil formation from British Columbia, dating back half a billion years to the middle of the Cambrian period, the time of the "Cambrian explosion" when life on the planet (exclusively aquatic at the time) underwent a tremendous increase in both the complexity and diversity, a veritable freak show of multi-tentacled thimgamubobs and toothy terrors and armor-plated doodads - OK, I'm a physicist, not a biologist, so I would have to go to Wikipedia to get names but the point here is that even biologists and paleontologists have difficulty classifying all the Cambrian weirdness. I mean, they named one of the species Hallucigenia, fer cryin' out loud. That's how weird it is! The famous trilobites date from this period, and they are some of the least strange creatures from the Cambrian period. Much of this fauna is unique to this period, dying out in one of the great extinction events that marked the transition from the Cambrian to the Ordovician period, when the first land plants begin to appear.

Let us sleep, and dream out our dreams, and hope those dreams are not disturbed by visions of chthonic monsters who dwell in the deeps. For when we awake, it is August 20, the birthday H. P. Lovecraft. In fact, it would have been his 119th birthday, had he not died at the relatively young age of 46 (an age of relevance to your humble blogger). Lovecraft is known, of course, for his contributions to the modern horror story, of creating the Chthulhu mythos and the Lovecraft school of writers, ranging from his contemporary August Derleth down to modern writers like Neil Gaiman, who has set more than one short story in "Lovecraft Country". It is Lovecraft who gave us the Necronomicron, the ghastly village of Arkham, Miskatonic University, the Dunwich Horror. He was the one responsible for turning romanticism and gnosticism on its head, imagining a universe where it is better not to know the ultimate reality, a universe in which ultimate reality is unspeakably evil, where secret cults pray to a mad sleeping god who will destroy them and everyone else when he awakens.

Lovecraft's first interest was in science, chemistry and astronomy in particular. He even published a Science Gazette when he was a youngster, but he could not do the math to become an astronomer. Alas, another life cut short by differential equations.

So here is an exercise for the reader: Which of these images are creatures found in the Burgess Shale, and which ones are the Old Ones from the Chthulu mythos? Has any English majors written any dissertations yet on how the paleontological discoveries in the Burgess Shale, first made as Lovecraft turned 19, influenced the imagery of his later writings?

(Answers: Top - An artists rendering of Cambrian sealife; Center - Anomolocaris, or "Unusual Shrimp", a meter long monster found in the Burgess Shale; Bottom - Old Chthulhu himself, said to be sleeping in the dead city R'lyeh.)

Want to go to law school? Study physics!

2009-09-07T14:59:00.000-05:00

A new study looks at the average LSAT scores of students with different undergraduate majors, sometimes grouping related fields together to gather a statistically significant sample. (Via.) And the best scores were attained by students studying:

Physics/Math (160.0)
Economics (157.4)
Philosophy/Theology (157.4)
International Relations (156.5)
Engineering (156.2)

At the bottom of the list? Prelaw (148.3) and Criminal Justice (146.0).

20 Fascinating Ancient Maps

2009-08-27T10:25:00.001-05:00

20 Fascinating Ancient Maps

2348 B.C.

2009-08-09T11:17:00.004-05:00

The biologist PZ MEyers, (in)famous for his "New Atheist" blog Pharyngula, was part of a group from the Secular Students Alliance who visited the Creationist "Museum" in Kentucky. I will leave you to read about the experience on his blog, but I was struck by something Myers describes as "A little taste of strangeness": All ofthe dinosaur exhibits carry geological strata information on the fossils (Jurassic, Upper Cretatous, etc) but all of the fossils are listed as dating from "~2348 B.C."

Why 2348 B.C.? Well, just do a quick Google search. You will see that it is the date of the Great Flood, according to Bishop Ussher's dating system, which he published between 1642 and 1644. You will also see that the Internet is chockablock with Fundmentalist crap that carries that dating system - books, wall posters, websites, materials for home schooling, etc.

Just out of curiosity, what do we know of the world of 2348 B.C., when our Conservative Christian friends tell us the population of the earth was wiped out, with only 8 survivors? Here is what Wikipedia has:

c. 2383 BC: Pepi II Neferkare, the longest reigning monarch of all time, started to rule at age 6.
c. 2360 BC: Hekla-4 eruption.
c. 2350 BC: End of the Early Dynastic IIIb period in Mesopotamia.
c. 2350 BC: First destruction of the city of Mari.
c. 2345 BC: End of Fifth Dynasty. Pharaoh Unas died.
c. 2345 BC: Sixth dynasty of Egypt starts (other date is 2460 BC).
c. 2340 BC - 2180 BC: Akkadian Empire.
c. 2334 BC - 2279 BC: Semitic chieftain Sargon of Akkad's conquest of Sumer and Mesopotamia.
c. 2333 BC: Dangun founded the state Gojoseon (Modern-day Korea), during the reign of the Chinese Emperor Yao
City of Lothal founded under the Indus valley civilization.

Under "Significant Persons" -

Urukagina
c. 2332 BC — Sargon of Akkad starts to rule
Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon, priestess and the first author known by name
Ptahhotep, ancient Egyptian Vizier, author of The Maxims of Ptahhotep

Boy, those Egyptians and Sumerians came back in a hurry, especially considering Noah and his crew were on a mountain side in Armenia just 35 years before Pepi II takes the throne! And what about those Chinese, maintaining records despite the worldwide flood? However, to be fair there is a flood mentioned as occurring in the time of Emperor Yao. Probably there was a devastating flood during this period, or a few generations previously, the memory of which was handed down trough oral tradition and embroidered until it became the Great Flood of the Bible, along with several other similar legends. But no, the human population was not entirely wiped out in 2348 B.C., and neither were those poor dinosaurs.

Advice on writing research articles

2009-08-02T09:50:00.000-05:00

Andrew Gelman has a good article called Advice on writing research articles - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

I am thinking about printing this out and giving it to my graduate (and maybe undergraduate) students. Here are his main items:

1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you've found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you'll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you're talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you'll need to give.

2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims.

3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings.

4. Now go back and write the literature review and the introduction.

5. Moving forward one last time: go to your results and conclusions and give alternative explanations. Why might you be wrong? What are the limits of applicability of your findings? What future research would be appropriate to follow up on these loose ends?

6. Write the abstract. An easy way to start is to take the first sentence from each of the first five paragraphs of the article. This probably won't be quite right, but I bet it will be close to what you need.

7. Give the article to a friend, ask him or her to spend 15 minutes looking at it, then ask what they think your message was, and what evidence you have for it. Your friend should read the article as a potential consumer, not as a critic. You can find typos on your own time, but you need somebody else's eyes to get a sense of the message you're sending.

And that is the way it was...

2009-07-18T05:18:00.004-05:00

I was a six year old kid, forty years ago this week, glued to a black and white television set as Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins headed to their rendezvous with the Moon and history. They were my heroes, the Apollo astronauts, I knew every experimental payload they would leave on the moon, every excursion that was planned, the pitch/roll/yaw of the spacecraft, the alphabet soup of NASA acronyms.

We only got two channels back then, and we almost exclusively watched the CBS affiliate. CBS news carried live coverage of the flight, narrated by two historic figures in their own right, both coincidentally named Walter: One was astronaut Wally Schirra, the only astronaut to fly in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. The other was Walter Cronkite. Cronkite was a towering figure - journalist, war correspondent, Morrow Boy, host of television programs like "You Are There", and the greatest news anchor in television history. His was voiced we listened to every night through the turbulence of the Sixties and Seventies, his soft Missouri accent carrying both authority and reassurance.

Good night, Walter Cronkite.

A Gap in Appreciation, or Understanding ?

2009-07-10T07:04:00.002-05:00

From this morning's "First Bell" email, a daily news round-up of science and engineering sent out by ASEE:

Survey Shows Gaps Between American Public, Scientific Community.

The AP (7/10, Schmid) reports, "The share of Americans who see science as the nation's greatest achievement is down sharply, even as the public continues to hold scientists in high regard," according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, which "indicates that 27 percent of Americans say the nation's greatest achievements are in science, medicine and technology, more than any category other than don't know." However, that figure is "down from 47 percent in a similar study a decade ago." Still, the poll found that, "overall...science remains well thought of by Americans, with 84 percent of respondents saying it has a mostly positive effect on society," even in cases "when they disagreed with some findings."

The New York Times (7/10, A16, Dean) reports, "On the whole, scientists believe American research leads the world. But only 17 percent of the public agrees." Additionally, "while almost all of the scientists surveyed accept that human beings evolved by natural processes and that human activity, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels, is causing global warming, general public is far less sure." Specifically, "almost a third of ordinary Americans say human beings have existed in their current form since the beginning of time, a view held by only 2 percent of the scientists." Regarding climate change, "about half of the public agrees that people are behind climate change, and 11 percent does not believe there is any warming at all." A large proportion of "science association members surveyed said public ignorance of science was a major problem," and classified "coverage of science by newspapers and television" as "fair" or "poor."

USA Today (7/10, Vergano) reported that, regarding animal research, "52% of the public and 93% of scientists support drug testing or other experiments on animals." And, "51% of the public and 70% of scientists support nuclear power development." Science author Chris Mooney said the results were not "hugely surprising," but were "hugely important in telling people in science that maybe they need to reach out to the public better." Alan Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) made similar comments, saying, "The results tell us we have a lot of work to do, not only on getting the word out about scientific findings, but about how science works."

The Christian Science Monitor (7/10, Spotts) reports, "Organizations like the AAAS are trying to encourage scientists to do a better job of communicating what they do to the general public," and frequently "focus on what the public and educators need to do to boost scientific literacy." However, Mooney argues that "people form their political positions based on a variety of factors, and scientists don't know how or don't try to reach out to them." He advocates greater "personal contact," which "may not change an individual's worldview...but it does have the potential to demystify scientists and the way they approach their world."

In the msnbc.com (7/9) Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle wrote that the poll's results "show that the situation is more complex" than a divide between two groups. For example, "the Pew study points out that most Americans really like science and think it's deserving of support."

What Skepticism Reveals about Science: Scientific American

2009-07-02T06:11:00.001-05:00

I love this quote they use from Leonard Nimoy on an episode of The Simpsons: “The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies, and in the end isn’t that the real truth? The answer is no.”

What Skepticism Reveals about Science: Scientific American

Confronting Scientific Climate Change Deniers

2009-07-02T03:30:00.002-05:00

It is easy for those of us in the sciences to dismiss climate change deniers as simply uneducated or scientifically illiterate. But what about the occasional scientist, like Freeman Dyson, who comes along and challenges evidence for global warming?

I am not expert in these areas and so it is hard for me to evaluate the criticisms competently. This article on the RealClimate
does so very nicely, showing the data and graphs that are being critcized and answering those criticisms in a scientific fashion. This is a good site for climate change information.

The sad fact is that we need to confront the changes to the environment, both natural and man-made, but instead we bicker and squabble. Calling the members of Congress who voted for the recent energy bill "Cap and Traitors" is typical of this very unhelpful attitude.

The Future Map of South Louisiana?

2009-07-01T05:53:00.001-05:00

In an excellent article on National Geographic's website, LSU scientist Michael Blum describes his predictions for coastal erosion between now and the end of the century: Mississippi River Delta to "Drown" by 2100?

The results is not pretty. Here is a projected map compared to today's coastline. It is not just New Orleans that is effected, Mandeville and the north shore, La Place, Donaldsonville, Houma - all gone.

Possibly the greatest ad of all time

2009-06-24T10:14:00.001-05:00

This is the sort of thing Sigmund Freud would have come up with after a six martini lunch, if he worked on Madison Ave. in the Sixties.

BKsevenincher.jpg (image)

Quotes

2009-06-23T05:35:00.000-05:00

Here are a couple of quotes that seem to sum up why the LHC is taking so long to turn on:

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

- Poul Anderson (1926 - 2001)

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001), Mostly Harmless

The Trouble with the Teabagger Philosophy

2009-05-10T17:48:00.001-05:00

What’s Wrong with Education

2009-04-20T12:21:00.000-05:00

A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong with Education | Edutopia

If you want to understand a lot of why the American educational system is so bad (along with parental indifference) then you read this.

The Last Outlaw Poet : Rolling Stone

2009-04-12T18:42:00.001-05:00

The Last Outlaw Poet : Rolling Stone

When I grow up, I want to be Kris M.F. Kristofferson. I always have, I always will.

In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson by Michael Rottman - The Morning News

2009-04-09T16:56:00.001-05:00

In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson by Michael Rottman - The Morning News

Banned album covers - 30 controversial album covers | NoiseAddicts music and audio blog

2009-04-09T16:56:00.000-05:00

Banned album covers - 30 controversial album covers | NoiseAddicts music and audio blog

Marigot

2009-02-09T16:04:00.001-06:00

What is the French word for a backwater? You might think "bayou" but you would be wrong. It is "marigot". And here is a interesting sentence from the French Wikipedia article:"Le terme 'marigot' est parfois employé métaphoriquement pour suggérer des activités plus ou moins occultes, en eaux troubles."

Purity

2009-02-09T14:52:00.003-06:00

How cool is YouTube? Here is Nancy Griffiths and the greatest collections of Texas songwriters ever assembled, doing Guy Clark's great ballad "Desperados Waiting for a Train"

This is a song I will never be able to sing. Nancy Griffith sort butchers the best line:"To me he's one of the heroes of this country..."

(I miss you everyday, H.L.)

Dammit. Just dammit all.

2009-01-28T12:46:00.004-06:00

Lynyrd Skynyrd Keyboardist Billy Powell Dead at 56 : Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily

44

2009-01-21T13:04:00.002-06:00

Guess who else was number 44? Hammerin' Hank Aaron! Awesome!

We are one

2009-01-18T19:56:00.002-06:00

Johnny was there.
Ray was there.
Marvin and Mahalia and Odetta were there.
Woody was there.
You couldn't see them, but they were there.
I heard them.

Clarence B. Jones: The 80th Birthday of Dr. King and the Inauguration of Obama as President

2009-01-12T15:11:00.001-06:00

I found this article on the Huffington Post very affecting. It is written by one of the speechwriters for Martin Luther King, Jr., and it gives his perspective on Barack Obama's election and the 80th birthday of Dr. King.

Much is made by some of the old Civil Right movement activists, and how Obama represents a new generation, and new style, of black leadership. Jones's gives his opinion of how Dr. King might have viewed the Obama election, with a lot of interesting insights and perspectives on King and his legacy.

Most Loathsome People of 2008

2009-01-12T08:24:00.002-06:00

They're back! The annual list of the most loathsome people of the past year, courtesy of the Buffalo Beast. The list is at http://buffalobeast.com/134/50mostloathsome2008.html

I think last year's list was little better, but this one is still pretty good. How bad was 2008? George Bush only came in at #4, and Dick "Dick" Cheney is only the 7th most loathsome person of the year. Don't worry - you're on it, too.

The Best Physics Department You Never Heard Of

2009-01-09T19:44:00.002-06:00

This week, Louisiana Tech started back in session. The first several stories on the university webpage have been dominated about news about our Physics Program. And we are still putting together a press release about Tabbetha Dobbins getting a CAREER grant!

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Tech researchers and Italian National Nanotechnology Laboratory scientists recognized for collaboration - jroberts

Louisiana Tech and the Italian National Nanotechnology Laboratory’s joint project, “Nano-carriers for Cancer Therapy” has been selected among the 20 most important scientific projects for Italy-USA Collaboration by the Progetto Bilaterale Italia-USA. The collaboration was led by Dr. Yuri Lvov, a professor of micro and nanosystems at Tech’s Institute for Micromanufacturing, and Stefano Leporatti of the NNL.

The primary purpose of the collaboration was to develop new nano-carriers and to study their uptake in cells for development of new cancer therapies. The current project is based on NNL’s research on advanced optical and scanning probe facilities and Tech’s expertise in developing advanced nano-carriers for cancer drug delivery developed at the IfM benefited the work.

In addition to the medical applications, the project will be useful in the multi-disciplinary training of graduate students in the bio/nano technology environment.

Also, Leporatti and doctoral student Viviana Vergaro of the Italian National Nanotechnology Institute recently visited the IfM, when Leporatti delivered the lecture, “Engineering Micro/Nano Environment via Layer-by-Layer Composite Films for Breast Cancer Cell Controlled Growth.” On that visit, Leporatti also presented a seminar on using virus arrays for templated nano-lithography.

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Louisiana Tech physicists highlight Top 10 science stories of 2008 - dguerin

Discover, one of the world's premier science and technology news magazines, released its list of the Top 100 Stories for 2008 and features two projects involving physicists from Louisiana Tech University in its Top 10.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project, which involved over 5,000 scientists and engineers from 26 nations, ranked #2 on the list. Drs. Lee Sawyer, Dick Greenwood, and Markus Wobisch led a team from Louisiana Tech that is involved in the commissioning and operation of the ATLAS detector, which will allow scientists to tap into the physics potential of the LHC.

"[Tech] has three faculty members and two graduate students working on the ATLAS experiment, and our post doc at Fermilab has begun the transition to LHC-related work," says Sawyer, head of the physics department at Louisiana Tech.

The LHC accelerates two streams of protons toward each other at nearly 99.99% of the speed of light in an effort to prove, or possibly disprove, the "Big Bang Theory." It could also explain why some particles are massive while others are without mass, why there is matter and not antimatter, and whether or not other dimensions exist.

According to Sawyer, the same faculty members, along with several other undergraduate and graduate students, are also working on the D0 experiment at Fermilab. Their efforts played a significant part in the recent discovery of the Omega_b baryon.

Tech physics professor Dr. Dentcho Genov contributed to research related to technology needed to make an "invisibility cloak." Ranked #7 on the list, researchers are creating laboratory-engineered wonder materials that can conceal objects from almost anything that travels as a wave, including light, sound and, at the subatomic level, matter itself.

According to Discover, these engineered substances, known as "metamaterials," get their unusual properties from their size and shape, not their chemistry. Because of the way they are composed, they can shuffle waves away from an object.

"These metamaterials, undreamed of a few years ago, may prove to be one of the key technologies of the 21st century," explains Sawyer. "Already people are beginning to think of innovative ways of applying these materials. While a lot of discussion has been about 'cloaking devices,' there is a lot of promise in new optical devices and coatings."

In addition to the recognition by Discover, Time magazine also acknowledges the significance of these two projects, ranking the LHC story at #1 on its Top 10 of 2008 list and the "invisibility cloak" story at #7.

"This recognition by Discover and Time magazines confirms that the physics faculty at Louisiana Tech are contributing significantly to relevant and vital science discoveries," says Dr. Stan Napper, dean of Louisiana Tech's College of Engineering and Science. "Our students are directly benefiting from these outstanding researchers who are also outstanding educators."

"Person for person, we have the finest physics faculty in the country," adds Sawyer. "Our faculty offer students at both the undergraduate and graduate level a wide range of opportunities for research at the forefront of science."

Friday, January 09, 2009

Inspection technology by Louisiana Tech researchers to examine underground infrastructure - dguerin

An innovative underground scanning technology developed by Louisiana Tech researchers is the cornerstone of a technology development and commercialization project that has secured one of only nine Technology Innovation Program (TIP) grants awarded nationally by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

"$3.2 million has been secured for this project, of which nearly $900,000 will flow to Louisiana Tech over the next three years," says Dr. Erez Allouche, associate professor of civil engineering and associate director of Louisiana Tech’s Trenchless Technology Center.

Allouche, along with Drs. Arun Jaganathan, Neven Simicevic and Klaus Grimm, is partnering with Elxsi Corporation of Orlando to develop a deep-penetrating scanning system, based on a new technology called ultrawideband (UWB) pulsed radar. This technology will allow for the inspection of buried pipelines, tunnels, and culverts to detect fractures, quantify corrosion, and determine the presence of voids in the surrounding soil.

The project, called FutureScan, incorporates leading-edge simulation, electronics, robotics, signal processing, and three-dimensional (3-D) rendering technologies in a package that can be mounted on existing pipe-inspection robots.

A patent on this new technology is currently pending. This is the first attempt to commercialize UWB for the inspection of municipal pipes around the world.

Using highly directional electromagnetic pulses and special signal-processing algorithms derived from mine and bomb detection technology, the technique can "see" through solid objects and measure both surface and internal structural integrity.

"Our project will greatly increase the ability of municipalities and DOTs to detect developing sink holes around buried pipes before they propagate to the surface and cause collapse of the roadway," explains Allouche.

The consequences of pipeline failure range from disease-causing water pollution to sometimes fatal highway accidents. The United States has over one million miles of buried pipes carrying water to cities, towns, and homes.

"In addition to the federal funding [Louisiana Tech] receives, this award will also mean the establishment of new technical positions, the creation of a new start-up company in Tech's incubator, and the potential for a leading-edge technology, developed at Louisiana Tech, getting into markets around the world," adds Allouche.

TIP was created to support innovative, high-risk, high-reward research in areas of critical national need where there is a clear interest because of the magnitude of the problems and their importance to society.

Allouche appreciates the prestige and exclusivity that this program carries.

"The high dollar value attracts proposals from the best academic institutions in the nation. This award is another example of the growing ability of Louisiana Tech to develop innovative technologies and bring them to a market-ready status."

We are all motherless children

2008-12-03T11:16:00.004-06:00

The incomparable folk singer Odetta passed away this week. News reports say she was slated to sing at Obama's inauguration. Here are a few YouTube videos:

Odetta - Cotton Fields (A great version of the old Leadbelly tune.)

Odetta Playing the Guitar

Odetta - Water Boy

Odetta and Dr. John - Brother Can You Spare a Dime? (One of my all-time favorites.)

Garrett Lisi on his theory of everything

2008-10-15T10:59:00.002-05:00

Very cool and understandable discussion. Experts won't get much detail, but non-scientists should enjoy it. I especially like his video attempts to explain particle by charge spaces, and to portray higher dimensional versions of hypercharge. Plus he does his surfer dude schtick at the beginning.

Garrett Lisi on his theory of everything | Video on TED.com

2008 Nobel Prize for Physics

2008-10-07T07:58:00.003-05:00

The Swedish Academy of Science has awarded this years Physics prize to Nambu, for work on spontaneous symmetry breaking; and to Kobayashi and Maskawa for..well..for the (Cabibbo-)Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix, which describes the mixing of quarks between the strong and weak interactions. All three are hugely deserving of the prize, having worked on some of the most fundamental ideas of the Standard Model.

So, one has to ask: What the fuck!?!? Has the Nobel committees gone completely nuts? First there was yesterday's explicit slap in the face to Robert Gallo, the man acknowledged by a joint Franco-American presidential declaration to be the co-discoverer of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus HIV. He excluded from the award, while the two French co-discoverers were cited From what I gather from news reports, while Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi indeed first published the HIV discovery, it was Robert Gallo who really nailed down the connection between HIV and AIDS. The prizes can be shared by up to three people, and while the recognition of Harald zur Hausen for the discovery of the link between HPV and cervical cancer is deserving (my own daughter has gotten the resulting vaccination) could it not have been a separate prize next year, and let this year's prize recognize all three HIV researchers?

But then we have this Physics prize, and where to start? It was Nicola Cabibbo who first introduced the weak mixing angle (it's CALLED the "Cabibbo angle" for cryin; out loud!) and developed the mixing matrix for two generations. Kobayashi and Maskawa extended it to three generations and showed that CP-violation could be incorporated as a phase angle in the matrix. Any sensible committee would have awarded the prize to the three of them and been done with it.

But no, they split the award with Yoichiro Nambu- a great physicist, but one who has toiled in the same fields as Peter Higgs and Jeffery Goldstone (Nambu-Goldstone bosons, anyone?) and for that matter Tom Kibble and Phil Anderson (at least Anderson recieved a Nobel, back in 1977). Why would you give a Nobel Prize to Nambu, citing spontaneous symmetry breaking no less, and not give a prize to Higgs? It is absolutely unbelieveable.

Add to this the recent explicit insult to American literature made a member of the literature selection committee, and you have to wonder if the Swedes have given into a Scandinavian sense of despair and self-loathing, and are purposefully trying to make the prizes less significant.

Dual Nature of Science?

2008-10-03T10:04:00.008-05:00

(In which our intrepid blogger attempts to answer a few questions from the studio audience, well, actually his sister-in-law)

Hey you,
I am trying to help Allison with her study guide for her LIfe Science test on Friday, and we cannot find a couple of answers online, notes or book. So I thought I might ask you, as you may know them. Okay so here goes....
1. What is universality vs diversity
2. What is equilibrium within systems?
3. What is the dual nature of science?
If you don't know, it's okay, hopefully she will ask in class, but who knows.Hope all is well.

Talk to you soon,
Tarilyn

Dear Tarilyn,

Gosh, you gave me some stumpers. Hope I'm not too late with the answers (such as they are):

1) I view universality and diversity to be fairly separate, complementary ideas. You have to remember that physicists and biologists sometimes use different language, even for the same concepts. To me universality refers to a trait or characteristic that cuts across different phenomena. Newton's law of gravity is "universal" in the sense that it applies to all kinds objects with mass, not only planets or only falling apples. In physics, universality means a property that is independent of the details of the system

Diversity of course means variation. In physics there is diversity in the configurations planetary systems (recent discovery, since extrasolar planets have only been known since the early 1990s) but there is universality in the underlying law of gravitation. In biology one would think about the diversity of species, all following a universal law of natural selection and evolution.

2) Ah, systems! Again, slightly different to a physicist than a biologist. To me, a system is in equilibrium if there is no net force acting on it. We talk about stable equilibrium, where a system returns to equilibrium if it is "perturbed" slightly, and unstable equilibrium, where a small perturbation causes it to roll away from the equilibrium configuration.

In biology I believe there is a similar idea, in that the biological/ecological forces are balanced. The term "homeostasis" is used to describe a living thing in which its energy consumption matches its output. Evolutionary biologists also talk about "punctuated equilibrium" which is a somewhat controversial alternative to classical Darwinism, in which evolution is viewed as occurring in sudden "spurts" rather than gradual changes.

3) I had not heard the phrase "Dual Nature of Science" before. The term seems to come from Eugene Lashchyk book, Scientific Revolutions, from 1969. This is a critique of Thomas Kuhn's famous book, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Not all scientists agree with Kuhn's interpretation of the nature of science, by the way. Lishchyk seems to say that science has two stages, one of which is a "normal" stage", the period of science research engaged in by the bulk of a scientific community "under the guidance of a cognitive matrix which defines the relevant problems, acceptable solutions, [and] admissible evidence". He characterizes the other stage as a "crisis", during which one dominate theory is replaced by a new one, Kuhn's famous "Paradign Shift". This is what Kuhn, Feyerabend and others characterized as revolutions, and Kuhn included it as part of the "normal" period of scientific research.

Hope this helps,

Lee

Update: Check this out -

For Dual Science of Nature, the answer that they all seemed to come to was "process=activity and Product =knowledge". I think that it is or something similar. It would have helped if the teacher had been there the two days prior to the test and had gone over all of it.

Yuck! That is the dual nature of science? No wonder no one wants to go into science. Give me jet packs and exploding chemistry labs!

The College Issue - The Thinker - NYTimes.com

2008-09-29T12:58:00.003-05:00

Hat tip to my colleague and avid NYT reader Dick Greenwood, who sent me this link -
The College Issue - The Thinker - NYTimes.com

It is a great article about a professor at Auburn, Kelly Jolly, who seems to have single-handedly rebuilt the philosophy department there. I particularly like the following quote:

“My view is that you really fall into a trap when you start allowing what you believe about your students to dictate how you teach your discipline,” he answered. “Too often these days we end up setting up our courses in light of what we believe about our students and we end up not teaching them. At best, we end up housebreaking them.”

Would that we all learned this lesson

Smart People for Obama

2008-09-21T13:09:00.001-05:00

Nobel winners, other scientists advising Obama, report says: Scientific American Blog

New McCain-Palin Campaign Poster

2008-09-18T15:37:00.002-05:00

Creationism Vs. Evolution: In-Depth Reports

2008-09-12T07:19:00.003-05:00

Scientific American has a terrific series of articles on evolution which should prove useful to those of us who are not biologists but find ourselves debating the subject:

Creationism Vs. Evolution: In-Depth Reports

In particular, look at "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense"

Obligitory Post on LHC First Beam

2008-09-11T15:10:00.003-05:00

So, they got some protons go to both ways around the LHC ring. Only 14 years in the making, at the cost of canceling of the SSC and ending U.S. leadership in particle physics. That plus a little over $4 billion, with about $500 million coming from the U.S. Am I bitter? Do I regret having to fly to Geneva to work on an experiment, instead driving four hours west to take shifts? What do you think?

Here is an event display from our experiment, ATLAS, showing beam going through the detector:

Nature has a series of excellent news stories on the LHC :
LHC by the numbers : Nature News
Physicists flock to Geneva : Nature News
Particle physics: The race to break the standard model : Nature News

the last of which talks about other ways that are being used to probe the limits of the Standard Model, incudling the ongoing experiments at the Tevatron, neutrino experiments, and cosmological tests. (Gotta love the superhero pics that go along with the article!)

Black hole or stranglet production won't start until collisions begin, probably around the time of the presidential election. Rapture ready fundamentalists can make of that what they will.

Lastly, the great web comic xkcd:

Day 1, Year 4 A.K.

2008-08-30T09:15:00.004-05:00

The semi-anonymous British graffiti artist Banksy has made some art in New Orleans, much of it on buildings damaged by Katrina, and it is fairly awesome.

While we are at it please contribute to the Ashley Morris Fund at http://www.rememberashleymorris.com/
Ashley Morris was a scientist and activist and a fierce New Orleanian blogger post-Katrina. He passed last April.

Not the Alpha and the Omega, Just the Omega

2008-08-29T09:10:00.001-05:00

This afternoon our experiment at Fermilab, the DZero collaboration, will announce the observation of the Omega_b baryon. This is an important discovery for DZero, the second major baryon state in as many years to be first observed by the experiment.

The discovery of the Omega itself was an important milestone on the development of particle physics, and this discovery of the related Omega_b state serves as a fitting bookend to a period of American dominance in accelerator-based particle physics. In 1964, the idea of baryons (particles like protons and neutrons) being made up of quarks was still very new and untested. The quark model proposed that year by Gell-Mann and Zweig was based on properties of particles previously observed, including a set of observation in 1962 of the Xi (related the last years discovery, the Xi_b). These observations seemed to predict a new baryon, which in the quark model would be composed of three strange type quarks, an (sss) system. It was a group at Brookhaven, led by future director Nick Samios and including Virgil Barnes, Bill Willis, and Ed Thorndike, who published the observation of a "Hyperon With Strangness Minus Three" in February, 1964, giving it the named proposed by Gell-Mann at the Rochester (now ICHEP) conference in 1962.

The Omega was the lynch pin in the establishment of the valence quark model. What followed was an intense period of research in the nature of quarks and their interactions, in which the quarks themselves became the main focus of research rather than the hunt for new meson or baryon states. The theoretical work of Feynmann, Glashow, Veltmann, Bjorken, and so many others in the later Sixties and Seventies, and the experimental observation of parton scattering at SLAC in 1969 by Friedman, Kendall, Taylor et alia, led to the development of a field theory for the quarks called Quantum Chromodynamics.It is the study of QCD and its predictions that is the main interest of our Markus Wobisch, and which is forming a key portion of our high energy physics group's analysis work at DZero and ATLAS. It is also key to the work of our medium energy particle group - Wells, Simicevic, Grimm and Johnston - as they try to understand such fundamental questions as the relative proportion of non-valence quarks such as the s-quark in protons.

Now, as we enter the twilight of accelerator-based physics in the United Sates, as our nation is preparing to no longer be the home of the highest energy collider in the world, in a beautiful act symmetry we find the cousin of the Omega, the (ssb) state known as the Omega_b, at the Fermilab Tevatron. Once again, the study of this baryon allows us the test the predictions of the quark model and the refinements possible from QCD, in the presence of the much heavier b-quark. It complements and fills in the elegant particle physics equivalent of the periodic table which is the various mesons and baryon "multiplets". But almost as importantly it forms a remarkable bookend to an unprecedented era of discovery and scientific research in this country, that proceeded in parallel with the Space Race and the breakthroughs in medicine and other fields, a time when the United Sates was the undisputed center of scientific research. We enter a new era when science well be more international and less centralized, with new nations like India and China playing an equally important role, and probably that is for the best.

But at the beginning, there was the Omega, and at the end there was the Omega_b.

Why 'Nonprofit' Does NOT Mean 'Lose Money'

2008-08-12T13:18:00.002-05:00

From Inside Higher Ed -

Why 'Nonprofit' Does NOT Mean 'Lose Money'

Tiny Bubbles

2008-07-22T08:23:00.002-05:00

Bubble Fusion Researcher Charged with Misconduct: Scientific American

This is s pretty good article on the Taleyarkhan scandal. Fortunately SciAM gets it right and identifies Taleyarkhan as an engineer, rather than as a physicist. This is what ASEE did in it's daily news digest "First Bell" yesterday, running a report from the Los Angeles Times that made the same mistake. I sent an email to the LA Times reporter who wrote the story, but no reply - hopefully mine was not the only email he received.

I can understand an engineering organization like ASEE not wanting to identify this guy as an engineer. And I do not want to pretend that improper professional behavior has not happened in physics. We recall the famous cases of recent years, the fraudulent claim of discovery of element 118 (which was later legitimately discovered) and the Schon case at Bell Labs. These two cases caused the APS to go into full frantic mode and pushing professional education in physics curriculum and a number of other remedies.

But there are some differences here. In the Ninov case (element 118) there was every reason to believe that the result was plausible - indeed the element was eventually seen, including by some of the researchers who had worked with Ninov. The Schon results, although remarkable, seemed plausible as well. It took a young professor named Lydia Sohn to carefully compare papers and to document that the same plots were being reused with different labels (she gave a talk about this at the 2004 Sigma Pi Sigma Congress).

This case smelled bad from the beginning. Most physicists hearing about sonoluminescence-produced fusion were immediately skeptical. It was too far out and seemed to violate Sagan's Razor: Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof. My guess is that Science would never have published it, except for the claim of confirmation from other groups, confirmation which we now know did not happen and which Purdue cited has scientific misconduct in their review.

Although I should probably not raise this question in this context, I have to wonder: Do engineers approach research differently than scientists? Do the two professions, while using the same language of experimentation and similar methodologies, place different weights on what passes for verification and confirmation? I know an engineering professor, a very good guy who I will not name, who seems to be only interested in proof of principle: If he gets a device working once, then the project is done. Systematic studies for others - he has moved on to the next topic. Is this an individual trait, or is this behavior widespread among our research engineering cousins? As engineering students get less exposure to basic science (at a time when they really need more science) will the perception of research methodology between science and engineering (continue to?) diverge in the future?

Google is really starting to piss me off

2008-07-21T07:26:00.005-05:00

Traveling again, and Google is trying to be too clever. When I connect from a French server I get the French language Google page, even if I am LOGGED INTO iGoogle! I drive across the border to CERN, Google knows I am in Switzerland now, and everything is suddenly in German.

Let's put aside the little fact that this is the French-speaking part of Switzerland. If I am logged in, and Google knows my language preference, then just leave me the hell alone! Stop thinking that I suddenly am fluent in German just beacuse I am connected to a wireless hub near Geneva.

Sheesh!

My First LOL - The New Sheriff

2008-07-07T14:02:00.002-05:00

moar funny pictures

Independence Day Quotes

2008-07-05T08:37:00.002-05:00

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

- John Adams

“Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.”

- Thomas Jefferson

Now, we may hope that our leaders and our government stand up for our ideals, stand up for what's right, and there are many times in our history when that's occurred. But when our laws, when our leaders or our government are out of alignment with those ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expressions of patriotism.

- Barack Obama

BEST HEADLINE EVER - All-time Grand Prize Winner

2008-05-08T19:39:00.004-05:00

From the BBC -

"Great tits cope well with warming"

and if you don't believe it, check out a recent research project on the subject

With Apologies to Rev. Neimoller

2008-05-04T16:46:00.003-05:00

First they came for the evolutionary biologists, and I did not say anything because I was not an evolutionary biologist.

Then they came for the atmospheric scientists, and I did not say anything because I was not an atmospheric scientist.

Then they came for the biochemists and geneticists, and I did not say anything because I was not a biochemist or geneticist.

Then they came for the cosmologists, and I did not say anything because I was not a cosmologist, though our areas of research are related.

Then they came for the particle physicists, and there was no one left to say anything intellectually honest.

Now, here is a cathedral for you - the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. Click on the picture to go to the ATLAS movie -

Persistence of Memory

2008-04-23T11:21:00.003-05:00

OK, I want you to read this article: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak

It is a long article, ostensibly about Piotr Wozniak, a Polish programmer who developed a learning software program called SuperMemo. But the article contains much more than that: It talks about the history of cognitive neuropsychology, of the "spacing interval" effect in how we learn and forget, the reason cramming does not work, the reason why repetition does work, and lot more. If you are not familiar with this idea, below is the so-called "forgetting curve" from the article

A lot of the way we teach is based on a complete ignorance of some very basic psychology. Students need to see material again, and the repetition needs to come at increasing, rather than fixed intervals. And then there is this (from the discussion of the components to log term memory - retrieval strength and storage strength. Emphasis is mine) -

One of the problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we're learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future. "The most motivated and innovative teachers, to the extent they take current performance as their guide, are going to do the wrong things," Robert Bjork says. "It's almost sinister."

Student evaluations, anyone? Anyway read the article, it is terrific.

Spring

2008-04-05T10:19:00.004-05:00

It has been spring in Louisiana for a good two weeks now. Around here the dogwoods are in bloom, bright splashes of impressionistic white dots in the emerging green of the woods. Great shoals of azaleas make their brief appearance. Redbuds have bloomed purple in the midst of oaks and sweet gums; the black gum in my backyard is tardy as always, the last tree to put out its leaves and the last to let them go.

Over Easter we made of our favorites trips, riding along the Tammany Trace "rail to trail" bike path. We parked on the middle of Abita Springs, one of the prettiest towns in Louisiana and home of a truly great brewery, and rode our bikes from Abita Springs to Mandeville on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain, and then over to Fontainebleau State Park. Jst as we were leaving we saw this Barred Owl just a few feet off the trail:

I love Fontainebleau - gorgeous ancient oaks that you cannot wrap your arms around, tired old limbs reaching down and growing into the ground. I was very afraid that they had been damaged by Hurricane Katrina, but those fears were misplaced. These old wonders have seen at least four or five Hundred Year Storms, and they'll see a few more. Only one of the great oaks seemed in bad shape, and I think it was sick the last time we were down.

The next day, Easter Sunday, we went down to New Orleans, touring the Aquarium of the Americas and the National World War II Museum. Both are open and in great shape. The WW II museum is always a very emotional experience for me, and it was the first time Carol and Ben had toured it. Afterwards we all felt drained, and decided to come back home that night.

Evil

2008-02-19T09:26:00.003-06:00

Not much time to blog - I have been working on monitoring software for the ATLAS liquid Argon calorimeter and getting a talk together, which I gave this morning. Now, as I leisurely copy files back to LA Tech, I some time to put up a couple of links. Maybe if I have time I can type in my impressions of Geneva.

First off, a brilliant little animation on YouTube, a history of evil from the Greeks to today:

I really liked this illustration of the dynamics of being a super-delegate in the Democratic party - but then, I have a thing for superhero chicks in tight spandex, doncha know.

If you want a nice clear example of walkin'-talkin' evil, you need look no farther than the Rev. Benny Hinn, as sorry a corrupt piece of excrement as ever slimed his away across this planet. (But is David Kuo slowly becoming my favorite evangelical Republican? Hmm...)

And finally my hero Greg Peters of Suspect Device tears 'em a new one over, of all things, perfidiously assigning the La Republican delegates to McCain instead Mike "I Heart Fried Squirrels and Fundamentalism" Huckabee. And by " 'em" we mean our local state senator as well.

Reading Amsterdam in Amsterdam

2008-02-15T15:04:00.003-06:00

I made it to Geneva yesterday. Long layover at Schipel in Amsterdam. I got to tryout the KLM Crown Club there, which was OK (free food drinks is always nice), but Schipol has a lot of nice places to sit compared to most airports, if you know where to look. Lost my power adapter plug to boot, had to buy a new for 15 CHF.

I am re-reading Amsterdam by Ian McEwan. I just finished On Chisel Beach, which I was not overwhelmed by. A very compact book about two idiots. I guess McEwan is making a statement about how missed communication can tear up our relationships, but I found it to be about how a couple of people's Britishness (ca. 1960) got in the way of their being human. Amsterdam is much better, also a lot of the theme about people talking around what they really mean (and ought) to say, but it isn't all that the book is about, fer cryin' out loud.

Geneva was right where I left it. I am staying at a nice, and pricey, hotel downtown, the Hotel Epsom. It was best bargain of what was left, the CERN hostel was booked up as were the hotels I usually stay at, like the Holiday Inn in Thoiry. I am saving a little by not renting a car - public transportation is basically free for visitors - you can get a free pass in the airport that gets you to you hotel, then the hotel front desk hands out passes for your stay. It takes about an hour to get from the hotel (located in an iffy neighborhood north of the Gare Cornavin train station called Paquis) to CERN, but with all the construction, I'm not sure a car would be much faster. I attended the last of the ATLAS Week meetings, then after lunch spent the entire afternoon, til about 7:00, working on calorimeter monitoring software with a Columbia U. postdoc named Francesco Spano.

Ate at a really good restaurant last night, called Carnivale do Venezia. Crappy way to spend Valentine's night, but food was good. Had Tartaglia al Carnonara and a 3 dl carafe of their house red (a Sangenovese, I think I overhead the waitress tell someone, but I was overhearing an Italian speaking French, so she might have said she was St. Anne from Vichy).

RoI Trivial Pusuit

2008-02-12T12:53:00.000-06:00

(RoI=Academic jargon for "Report of Invention")

What patents do the following people hold?

Abraham Lincoln
Heddy Lamar
Zeppo Marx

OK, I should make you go look it up yourselves, but the answers are: 1) A device for extricating paddlewheel boats from sandbars, 2) the frequency key shifting technology now used in cell phones, and 3) the Marman clamp.

What a guy

2008-02-12T11:51:00.000-06:00

So, what do you call someone from an old Virginia family (related to Jefferson and Madison) who grew up in South Carolina, and who as a wrestler, a wartime R.A.F. pilot and Foreign Legionnaire, recipient of the French Croix de Guerre and the American Eisenhower medal, movie star, socialite, trumpet player, songwriter, composer, Amazon explorer, horseman, stuntman, artist, ladies' man— who traveled the globe to help resistance movements in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

You call him Charles Fawcett, the man who, along with Varian Fry and a handful of others, helped over 2,000 Jewish refugees flee the Nazis through Marsielles, including such famous intellectuals as Hannah Arendt, Andre Breton, the painters Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, and Heinrich and Golo Mann (the brother and son of Thomas Mann) . He passed away a few days ago, at the age of 92. I hate to find out about people like this after they die.

Wednesday Thoughts

2008-02-06T19:24:00.000-06:00

I think I have the flu. I shouldn't have the flu - I had a flushot. Dammit.

One the many unique things about working for a Louisiana university is the fact you get Mardi Gras off. In fact, we got off Monday, Tuesday, and the students got off today. I think at one time the students had to come back on Wednesday, until the regents or whoever finally figured out that that wasn't going to happen.

Mardi Gras in New Orleans barely made it into the news, since the Super Duper Stuper Kerplooer Tuesday primaries were going on. What better time for the candidates to maybe mention that New Orleans is still suffering? But politicians don't give a sh1t.

Which reminds me of what the judge in the Corps of Engineers suit said (from NOLA.com):

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval wrote that the Flood Control Act of 1928 provides immunity to the corps and other federal agencies involved in building flood projects. He relied on 1986 and 2001 Supreme Court rulings that found the law "provides immunity where, as here, a flood control project fails to control floodwaters because of the failure of the flood control project itself."

Duval, however, issued a stinging condemnation of the corps and its actions in building the city's hurricane protection system.

"Here, the court must apply this broad immunity based upon the facts of this case," Duval said. "Often, when the King can do no wrong, his subjects suffer the consequences. Such is the case here."

"This story -- 50 years in the making -- is heart-wrenching," Duval, an appointee of President Clinton, said in his 46-page ruling. "Millions of dollars were squandered in building a levee system with respect to these outfall canals which was known to be inadequate by the corps' own calculations."

But, Duval said, "it is not within the Court's power to address the wrongs committed. It is hopefully within the citizens of the United States' power to address the failures of our laws and agencies."

Damn!

So let's change the country. The happiest outcome of Tuesday's primaries is that the election is still not decided. I am glad that I get to vote in a primary Saturday that will actually mean something! To all of you who say that prolonging the campaign helps the Republicans, I can only say 1) The Republicans are still tearing at each other, despite McCain's lead; 2) Every Obama-Clinton contest is free air time for them to present their views to the American electorate; and 3) F*ck you, this is America, and I am as pleased as I can be that the two candidates were not decided by freakin' Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Crackerlina.

Obligations & Responsibilities

2008-02-06T11:24:00.000-06:00

The Edge (www.edge.org) sponsors a yearly question, which it poses notable thinkers and writers. Last year the question was "What are you optimistic about?" This year the question is "What have you changed your mind about?" The answers are found at http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_index.html (the list of contributors to date is given in the sidebar to the left). One answer apropos to our discussions was given by my academic grandfather(*) -

LEON LEDERMAN
Physicist and Nobel Laureate; Director Emeritus, Fermilab; Coauthor, The God Particle

The Obligations and Responsibilities of The Scientist

My academic experience, mainly at Columbia University from 1946-1978, instilled the following firm beliefs:

The role of the Professor, reflecting the mission of the University, is research and dissemination of the knowledge gained. However, the Professor has many citizenship obligations: to his community, State and Nation, to his University, to his field of research, e.g. physics, to his students. In the latter case, one must add to the content knowledge transferred, the moral and ethical concerns that science brings to society. So scientists have an obligation to communicate their knowledge, popularize, and whenever relevant, bring his knowledge to bear on the issues of the time. However, additionally, scientists play a large role in advisory boards and systems from the President's Advisory system all the way to local school boards and PTAs. I have always believed that the above menu more or less covered all the obligations and responsibilities of the scientist. His most sacred obligation is to continue to do science. Now I know that I was dead wrong.

Taking even a cursory stock of current events, I am driven to the ultimately wise advice of my Columbia mentor, I.I. Rabi, who, in our many corridor bull sessions, urged his students to run for public office and get elected. He insisted that to be an advisor (he was an advisor to Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, later to Eisenhower and to the AEC) was ultimately an exercise in futility and that the power belonged to those who are elected. Then, we thought the old man was bonkers. But today......

Just look at our national and international dilemmas: global climate change (U.S. booed in Bali); nuclear weapons (seventeen years after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has over 7,000 nuclear weapons, many poised to instant flight. Who decided?); stem cell research (still hobbled by White House obstacles). Basic research and science education are rated several nations below "Lower Slobovenia", our national deficit will burden the nation for generations, a wave of religious fundamentalism, an endless war in Iraq and the growing security restrictions on our privacy and freedom (excused by an even more endless and mindless war on terrorism) seem to be paralyzing the Congress. We need to elect people who can think critically.

A Congress which is overwhelmingly dominated by lawyers and MBAs makes no sense in this 21st century in which almost all issues have a science and technology aspect. We need a national movement to seek out scientists and engineers who have demonstrated the required management and communication skills. And we need a strong consensus of mentors that the need for wisdom and knowledge in the Congress must have a huge priority.

_________________________________________________________________

* My adviser David Levinthal was Leon Lederman's graduate student at Columbia University.

Does this make Hank Stramm the Devil?

2008-02-03T13:59:00.000-06:00

At the DailyKos, there is a decidedly non-political post that describes the pagan origins of Super Bowl Sunday.

Huh...hmmm....

2008-02-02T20:05:00.001-06:00

Don't ask me to explain, just click this link.

And a star to guide me by

2008-02-02T11:09:00.000-06:00

NASA will commemorate its 50th anniversary, and the 40th anniversary of the recording of the Beatle's song Across the Universe, by beaming the song into space using the radio telescopes of the Deep Space Network. As Phil Platt at the Bad Astronomy blog points out, there are better candidate stars to send the song to, if our intention is for some alien life to eventually intercept the signal. Polaris, an old star and part of a binary pair, almost certainly has no planets, and if it does they are unlikely to harbor life.

My personal pick would be Epsilon Eridani or 55 Cancri - both are known to harbor planets and are very close in astronomical terms - but there is something apt about sending the signal to Polaris, the Northern Star. Think George Harrison's It's Only a Northern Song, or the Beatle's publishing company, Northern Songs Ltd.

Across the Universe

2008-02-01T13:08:00.000-06:00

Petr Ginz was born in Prague in 1928. His father was a clerk, and both of his parents were involved in the Esperanto movement - in fact, they had met at an Esperantist meeting. As a young boy, Petr was interested in science and space, read the novels of Jules Verne, and dreamed of one day going to the moon. He also wrote his own stories, even a novel when he was just twelve, and he drew and painted illustrations for his stories. He also learned Esperanto from his parents and became fluent.

Petr's mother was Czech, but Petr's father was Jewish, and when Petr was 14 he was taken from his parents and put on a train, which took him to a camp called Terezin. Although he was sad and afraid, he continued to study science and mathematics, and he continued to draw, and he even started a magazine in the camp, called Vedem, which means "In the Lead". He wrote an Esperanto to Czech dictionary, so he could help the others in the camp learn the universal language that would bring peace to the world.

While he was in the camp, Petr drew a picture. It showed what the Earth would look like when he was standing on the moon. The picture looked like this:

After two years, another train came to Terezin, and the guards told Petr to get on board. The train went north, into Poland and west of Krakow, to another camp called Auschweitz. No one told Petr, but his was one of the last trains that would be going to that camp. The guards made Petr wait with a large group of other children, women, and old men. Then they told Petr they were going to go to the showers.

Petr's picture survived the war, and eventually it was given to a man named Ilan. Ilan's mother and grandmother had also been in Auschweitz, but they had survived. Ilan was also a student of science, and like Petr, Ilan dreamed of going to space. He became a pilot for the Israeli airforce, and flew planes that probably would have seemed like spaceships to Petr Ginz.

In 1997, Ilan was told that he would really go to space, as a payload specialist on board the space shuttle. Ilan moved to Texas, and began training for his mission. When his spaceship, the Columbia, took off into space in January, 2003 - almost exactly 58 years after the Russians had liberated Auschwitz - Ilan had Petr's picture with him. It orbited the Earth 255 times, 15 days in space, and Ilan and his fellow crew members did a lot of experiments and took videos of dust glowing in the atmosphere of Earth.

And when that spaceship fell apart on re-entry, five years ago this morning, I was watching it on the television with my children, in shock and horror at the loss of life, never knowing that Petr's picture had also turned to smoke and ashes.

What The L Word Means

2008-02-01T10:56:00.000-06:00

So, I have known for a long time, at least since high school, that when the average person calls someone a "liberal" he means "that person I don't agree with". The "liberals" are the "others", the people who have the whole thing wrong; since our hypothetical interlocutor is obviously right, and he knows he is a conservative, so anyone who disagrees with his must be one of those liberals.

Sure there are intelligent conservatives, but for every politically mature thinker who has read Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, there are at least 10 and probably 100 who wouldn't know William F. Buckley from Harry Dean Stanton. The mass of self-proclaimed conservatives are Republican voters who moved to that party as a response to the civil rights and associated movements, the "How dare the guvmint give out all that welfare money and hey where's my farm subsidy check" crowd, augmented in recent years by the "Kill a Fag for Jesus" and the "We're Pro-life Til the Kid is Born, Then F*ck Em" evangelicals.

A few days ago, a friend of mine (and yes, he's friend, though we probably do not see eye to eye on any political issues) sent me an email with The Wheel & Beer: A World History Lesson, which fortunately I have discovered he did not write, and which can be found several places on the web (I'll omit including it here). Reading through this, it finally struck me what these folks REALLY mean when they use the word "liberal" - they mean "nigg3r". It is the same jokes, the same lame stereotypes, the same mockery and hatred disguised as humor that I remember from growing in the south in the Sixties. There have always been code words in the South, and they have crept into the national political debate. For a large group of people, and I would dare say the bulk of Southerners who vote Republican these days, "conservative"="white" and "liberal"="nigg3r" or "niggg3r-lover" (a term I remember being called at least a couple of times when I was a kid).

Am I a liberal? Well, yeah, I believe in liberty guaranteed by law in a democratic nation with the greatest possible number of its citizens enfranchised to participate in the political process. I believe in a secular nation where freedom of conscience is an ABSOLUTE, and not a relative, right. I believe in small government, but in those instances where we have to work together corporately through government, the bias should be toward helping the least fortunate in our society rather than most well off. But most of all, yeah, I ain't one of these pseudo-conservatives, and I never will be.

Of Mercury's Sphincter and Cardiod Microphone Porn

2008-01-31T20:10:00.002-06:00

There are some great pictures that already coming back from the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, and this is just the first flyby - MESSENGER will not go into Mercurian orbit until March, 2011. In the meantime, we get great pictures like this one, of an apparent impact crater in the Caloris Basin region with trough-like ridges extending from it.

Now the mission folks are calling this one the Spider, but I am afraid a better name would be the Anus. But hey, maybe it's just me. The really big trough on the bottom could even be a hemorrhoid.

Which reminds me of something that happened in my acoustics class yesterday. I had started lecturing on microphones, and I was going through the various sensitivity, or pickup, patterns. Probably the most common pickup pattern is called "cardioid, and depending on if your mind resides in the clouds or the gutter it looks sort of like a heart or a butt. (Actually, Desmond Morris wrote about how the classic "heart" shape really is a sexual image in The Naked Ape.)

So anyway, I draw a cardioid pattern looks like this:

Then, I drew a microphone at the center of the pattern, which looks like this, of course:

Inadvertent hilarity ensued, much to my embarrassment - it's bad enough when I do these things on purpose.

I'm a mutant!

2008-01-31T09:29:00.000-06:00

First the news, in 2005, that all light-skinned people trace back to a single mutation that occurred during the first major "out of Africa" exodus of Homo Sapiens, sometime between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago.

Today researchers are reporting that all blue-eyed humans are descended from a single mutated forbearer. This common ancestor lived between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.

I love it, I love it, I love it - white people are mutants, I always figured as much. (OK I'm being silly - we all originated in Africa, so of course our earliest ancestors were all brown-skinned. But it is extremely cool that scientists, using techniques like mitachondrial DNA sequencing, can trace back the process by which these changes in the human population took place.)

Go Cubs! I mean Saints! I mean Richardson! No, wait...

2008-01-30T09:14:00.001-06:00

So, the best way to judge who will not win a game/playoff/political race is to ask me who I am supporting. Am I just drawn to the underdogs, or is that the winners in life are usually so freakin' obnoxious?

I was initially supporting Bill Richardson for President - in every way the most qualified candidate and probably the most intelligent man to run for president since Adlai Stevenson. Unfortunately he did not generate even a Stevenson level of excitement. Maybe he'll the next Secretary of State, or maybe the vice-presidential candidate.

This morning Edwards has dropped out of the race. I was not as big a supporter of Edwards as I was of Richardson - I actually donated to Richardson, the first time I have ever sent money to a presidential campaign. But in fact, John Edwards is the closest to my own views of any of the candidates this year. Still, his departure solidifies my support for Barak Obama. Sure, he's kind of inexperienced, but in fact presidents don't actually do that much if they are successful - the least successful presidents have been the ones who tried to micromanage everything. The main thing about Obama is the huge boost to America's image abroad that he will provide, along with a renewed sense of optimism and hope here at home. But given my track record, maybe I should keep my mouth shut...

Well, we are still here, dammit!

2008-01-30T09:05:00.001-06:00

So, asteroid 2007 TU24 did not hit Earth yesterday. Somehow, that same science that the creationist-types think cannot get the Big Bang or Evolution right, still was good enough to predict the orbit of a 250m rock to within a few meters Great animated GIF of the flyby from an amateur astronomer in Utah named Patrick Wiggens (found on spaceweather.com - you have to click on the picture to see the animation.)

The bad news is that another asteroid did not hit Mars. That would have been pretty cool, particularly if had been within the horizon of one of the Mars rovers. Alas, the mean ol' scientists got that one right as well - we knew at least a month ago that there would not be an impact.

Enough talk, can we just please go drink?

2007-09-28T16:51:00.000-05:00

So, I have spent the entire day at the American Center for Physics, a semi-circular 3-story building in College Park, MD. I am hear attending the national council meeting of the Society of Physics Students & Sigma Pi Sigma. And it has been going on and on and on and on and on and on...

I should not be too mean - the American Institute of Physics pays for me to be here, and there are a lot of improtant things that SPS tries to do. I represent Zone 10 - Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, western Tenneesee - and if there is a region of the country that needs active student physics groups, this is it.

But the meeting started at 9:30 am, it is now 6:00 pm, and there is no sign of an end. We broke for lunch, and they are going to feed us dinner in a few minutes, but then it is back to the conference room for more discussions. One item that I know will be contentious tonight is the planning report for next year's quadrennial congress of Sigma Pi Sigma at Fermilab. I am on the congress planning committee, and even a small group tends to proliferate ideas for plenary speakers and discussion topics; with the full complement of 40 or so council members, the number of ideas will go up by about 40 factorial.

Still, it is nice to get an annual trip to Washington, D.C. We meet in the morning at the hotel (Marriott in Crystal City, VA - not bad, huh?) but then we are free to roam around Washington for thee afternoon.

I plan to ramble at some point by the World War II memorial, and think about H.L. I owe this blog, I owe myself, a lengthy article about H.L. Maybe tomorrow.

So I guess I'll Start Typing Again

2007-09-28T16:41:00.001-05:00

No one is reading this, I am sure, but maybe I can convince some folks to come/come back.

Mapping Music

2007-01-19T17:40:00.000-06:00

The article Mapping Music in Harvard Magazine (January-February 2007) describes a technique that uses non-Euclidean geometry and ideas from string theory to map chords. Very cool. This may provide some insight into the question of why certain note combinations are percieved as dissonant or consonant, and why some chord progressions "work" while others do not.

The guy behind this, Dmitri Tymocko, has a website here that includes the paper he published in Science on this (the first musicoloy paper in Science's history) along with movies and software to plot chords yourself. I am definitely using this the next time I teach acoustics!

This just in: Soy will turn your kid into a fey girly man with a very small penis. Also: God hates vegans

2007-01-11T16:15:00.000-06:00

OK, I really need to catch up after being out of contact over the holidays. But first things first: I just have to make note of the latest foul plot that has been unearthed by G*d-fearing members of the Christian (tm) Right: Tofu Will Make You Gay!

Breakthrough of the Year 2006

2006-12-22T10:23:00.000-06:00

Science magazine has it's Breakthrough of the Year 2006 and it is...the proof of the Poincare Conjecture. No physics stories made the top 10. (One of my favorite results of the year, the sequencing of Neanderthal DNA, was their #2 story).

One refreshing thing that Science does to go back to their predictions for 2006 and own up to where they were right, and where they missed the boat. This is, of course, something you would never expect from palm readers, televangelists, chiropractors, or similar quacks; but it is part and parcel with the intellectual attitudes of professional scientists. The magazines editors admit getting several predictions wrong, like first observatiosn from LIGO of gravity waves (but they also point out that analysis results are expected to be made public by March). They also make predictions, or "areas to watch", for 2007.

Who Said YouTube Was a Waste of Electrons

2006-12-21T14:55:00.000-06:00

Get past the rambling teenage monologues, music videos, and LEGO-based movie spoofs, and there is some good content on YouTube, like a cool video HISTORY OF EVERYTHING. No dialog, just images illustrating how things got here, from Big Bang to us. The amount time spent in different epochs are of course not proportional to the real intervals, or humans would only get less than single frame at the end. Except for a rather annoying version of John Lennon's song Imagine, it's worth a view.

Things Going on That You Don't Know

2006-12-19T09:23:00.000-06:00

Foreign Policy: The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006 lists a lot of evidence that things are much worse than you know. Only two of the items are positive (#7: decreasing gender gap, and #6: secret talks between Israel and Iran). In the long term, the most dangerous to Americans may be
* The decision by petroleum producing nations to switch from the dollar to the euro. This is one more piece of evidence that the U.S. is losing its dominance as the world's leading economic power. For several years the EU has had a stronger currency and a larger market than the U.S. As we continue to lose our manufacturing sector, I expect the dominant economic power to be the EU.
* The domestic power grab by the Bush administration. In the 2006 Defense Authorization Act, the president was giving sweeping new powers to send in Federal troops for domestic reasons, thereby greatly increasing the possibility of martial law in the future. The article quotes Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, one of the few to raise the issue in congress, saying that “Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.”

But don't feel bad that you never heard about these things - after all, there were those panty-less photos of Brittney Spears that needed news time...

TED Blog

2006-12-14T09:06:00.000-06:00

TED Blog has links to talks from the TED (technology, entertainment, design) conferences. Very high level stuff, the most recent one seems to have beome one of the focal points of the resurgent skeptics movements, with excellent talks from the likes of Dennett and Dawkins and (of all people) ex-SNL comedienne Julia Sweeney.

The Physics Story of the Year

2006-12-07T09:42:00.000-06:00

The Physics Story of the Year from the American Institute of Physics's Physics News Update page. They pick the high precision measruement of the electron magnetic moment (g, for those in the know, with an uncertainty of 0.76 parts per trillion). When combined with a theory calculation involving 891 8-th order Feynman graphs (!!), this leads to a measurement of alpha, the fine structure contant, that has an uncertainty of 0.70 parts per billion.

AIP lists several other top stories. Only one is from High Energy Physics as such - the observation of the Sigma_b baryons - although the g measurement is clearly related, as are some results like matter-antimatter chemistry and particle "lasers". AIP cites the HAPPEx experiment's measuremnt of the vitual s quark content of the proton, which is closely related to work being carried out by the LA Tech nuclear group on a different Jefferson Lab experiment.

My votes for top HEP stories would have to be
1) Evidence for single top production at the Tevatron.
2) Determination of the omega minus spin, 31 years after it's discovery.
3) Sigma_b
4) B_s oscillation measurements.
5) First results from MINOS.
6) Completion of the final LHC dipole magnet.

Water, water everywhere

2006-12-07T08:55:00.000-06:00

Water flows on Mars (December 2006) from PhysicsWeb describes an article, to be published in Science, that shows before and after photos from the Mars Global Surveyor which indicate that water flowed on Mars within the last seven years.

Shaken, not stirred

2006-12-06T09:08:00.000-06:00

An interesting article Is James Bond responsible for the Iraq war? By Richard Cohen in Slate Magazine makes the case that folks gave extra creedance to the now-discredited claim that Saddam was buying Uranium ore from Niger, simply because said the intelligence said that the informationcame from British intelligence, and our notions of British spies are inflated due to the Bond novels and movies.

I have to admit, I am a big Bond fan. I've read most the books, all of the original Fleming novels when I was still a kid, and I've seen all the movies. I could my hold own in a Bond trivia contest. For what it is worth, I really enoyed the latest film, Casino Royale, which had a lot of elements of the original novel (Vesper Lynd's emotional fragility, the torture scene - although in the novel LeChiffre used a carpet beater, Bond intent to resign and stay with Vesper).

Two by Two

2006-12-04T11:03:00.000-06:00

SkepticReport * The Whole Silly Flood Story goes through several critiques of the Genesis Flood story.

This is to most people a completely unnecessary exercise. Most folks do not take the Genesis story literally, even if they are themseleves religious, and therefore do not need to look at it scientifically. Unfortunately, the creationist-types, who are quite abundant where I live, make the Flood a keystone of their geology, and by doing so invite attacks like this. Their reaction will always be that folks like the Skeptic report are "anti-religion" (well, probably so), intolerant, and discriminate against Christians.

Radio Free Olbermann

2006-12-01T17:24:00.000-06:00

Great special comment from Keith Olbermann, taking former Speaker of the Reichstag...sorry, I meant of House of Representatives, and anti-historian Newt Gringrich to task for his recent comments favoring limiting Freedom of Speech (link via onegoodmove)

Hi! We're frm the government and we're here to help!

2006-12-01T10:49:00.000-06:00

Sex Will Make You Go Blind / Single? Under 30? You are in grave danger. Your government says so. Please, stop laughing

So, why is the media not covering exactly how pitifully stupid this administration is? Are they afraid that they will be accused of liberal bias, if they just let these meatheads' own words become widely publicized?

Here is another great example of our Glorious Leader's minions in action:

Fearless Voices Jessica Valenti: Bush Appoints New (Terrifying) Director of the Office on Violence Against Women The Huffington Post

But I Guess Things Could Be Worse...

2006-11-30T16:21:00.000-06:00

Kansas Outlaws Practice Of Evolution (from The Onion - America's Finest News Source)

Freedom to Teach Evolution as "Just a Theory"

2006-11-30T16:13:00.000-06:00

So, this is what I have to put up with...a local school board is implementing the latest attempt to weaken science instruction:

The News Star - www.thenewsstar.com - Monroe, LA

The newest tactic is to cloak the teaching of creationism under the guise of "academic freedom". In this case, academic freedom is apparently interpreted to mean the freedom to re-define terms like "science". "theory", or "explanation" to fit your particular religious worldview.

One other thing to notice is the use of the terms Darwinism and Darwin's Theory. This is not simply their way of ignoring over one hundred-fifty years of biological research. It is also a way of creating an easy strawman argument: Evolution = Darwinism => Darwin did not know about a lot of things, and made statements about holes in the fossil record => Ergo, you cannot believe evolution.

Just in case anyone is wondering, evolutionary theory does not equate in a one-to-one fashion with Darwinism. There has been a lot of biology since then (Darwin did not know about DNA for example). It's like attacking cosmology on the basis of statements in Newton's Principia (or the moral failings of Newton, of which there were many).

The one silver lining is that is not my parish's school board (it is the parish were I grew up, though). Maybe this nonsense won't spread, but I have lived in this state too long to get my hopes up.

By the Bay

2006-07-17T19:23:00.000-05:00

This week finds the Sawyer family in San Francisco, CA. We got here on Friday, did some touristy things on Saturday, then visited friends in the area on Sunday. That included going up to Petaluma to see Ransom Stephens, former high energy physicsists turned project scientist for Agilent turned author and lecturer on jitter. (His book writing ventures are aimied at a memoir and a novel - the jitter just pays the bill for now. He has his own website at ransomstephens.com) Ransom was a faculty member at University of Texas - Arlington, where I was a post doc, back in the days of the SSC.

We packed up some food and wine and headed out to Point Reyes to watch the Pacific Ocean beat the shore. It was great. Ransom's daughter Heather, a political science major at UC-Santa Cruz, came along and we talked politics in the car. Ransom, Carol, and I drank a couple bottles of wine, Ransom and I smoked a couple of cigars (which my son disapproved of greatly), and way too soon it was time to hit the road.

We left Petaluma and went to Menlo Park to visit another physicst who left the purity of science to make a living in the real world. Andy Belk was a fellow graduate student on the ALEPH experiment at CERN back in the late 1980s, but he got of the field right after finishing his PhD. He worked for SwissBank a while, living near Chicago where I got to see him and his wife Emmanuelle a couple times when I was at Fermilab. After a couple of years he took a job with Apple. He quit a while to work for a high-tech startup, but now he is back at Apple.

Andy and Emmanulle have three daughters: Bettina, Elena, and Fiona. Emmanualle is a photographer and artist by training, and she has some of the finiest photos of jazz musicians I have ever seen. She took them in Paris when she was the staff photographer for a jazz club. Being Silicon Valley, of course they have a website (have had, in fact, for a long time) at frogandrosbif.org.

We had some take-away Vietnamese food, and a little more wine, then sat around and talked a while.

It is an effort to maintain a friendship when you only see each other once every few years. And I am a terrible one about not writing or phoning. I place no blame on anyone I have lost touch with, it is invariably my fault. But these folks - Ransom, Heather, Andy and Emmanuelle - are important to me, even if we are out of touch for long periods of time.

Today we have stayed out of the City, walking around the Stanford campus and eating lunch in Palo Alto. We also did a little laundry. Tomorrow, we are going to the Exploratorium in the morning, and in the evening we fly to Vancouver, where I will get back into physics myself by attending the Vancouver Linear Collider Workshop.

In Medias Res

2006-06-01T16:44:00.000-05:00

So you got a new blog, you want to join the mighty blogosphere, and what do you do? You wait for that exciting event that you will use as the grist for your first post. But life is usually not very exciting, is it? So what you reallyhave to do is just jump in.

This week I have been working with a physics major, Joshua Hignight, on simulation studies for the proposed International Linear Collider. This is fairly high level stuff, and normally a junior physics major would not be able to handle the work. Josh, though, is a pretty exceptional character - a graduate tof the Louisiana Academy for Math, Science, and the Arts. He came into LA Tech with several credit hours of college equivalent work, and he knows how to program. This is a rare art indeed, believe it or not. Most of our students are Window savvy, but would not know C++ from Sanskrit. And our grdauate students, who are predominantly Indian, claim to know C++ but usually really only know Telugu.

So Josh is helping me to get some tracking studies done before the big American Linear Collider Physics Conference in Vancouver in July. Working on the ILC is one of two major physics projects that I am involved in. The other is the DZero experiment (officially written D0 with a / trough the 0) at Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Batavia, IL. I have been a member of DZero since 1992, which means I am one of the (many many) co-discoverers of the top quark in 1995. I have a postdoc who works for me at Fermilab, and I have a couple of graduate students involved in DZero work.

The other thing I do to while away the hours in the piney woods of north Louisiana is adminster the chemistry and physics programs. Because of a major reorganization of the College of Engineering and Science at LA Tech a few years back, we no longer have departments. Instead we have "programs". and instead of having department heads, we have "Academic Directors" - 12 month adminstrators who oversee the faculty in one or more programs - and "program chairs", who are 9 month regular faculty who take on the responsibility of class scheduling and curriculum issues (such as student advising, new course offerings, etc.) in a particular program. Actually, lucky me, I am both Academic Director for Chemstry & Physics, and Program Chair for Physics.

In my copious spare time I have a family, I write, and I play bass guitar with a couple of other faculty members in a blues band. That's just about me all over - let's start blogging!