With Apologies to Rev. Neimoller

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

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

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

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

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

(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

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

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

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?

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

Huh...hmmm....

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

And a star to guide me by

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

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

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

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.