Of Mercury's Sphincter and Cardiod Microphone Porn

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!

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...

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!

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?

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

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

Mapping Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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...

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

Freedom to Teach Evolution as "Just a Theory"

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.