Science
oracknows | January 8, 2013Remember Dr. Sin Hang Lee?
If you don't remember Lee, maybe you remember a while back, when the antivaccine group SaneVax touted findings that it claimed were devastating to Gardasil. Specifically, they claimed that there was vaccine-derived human papilloma virus DNA in Gardasi. Ring any bells yet? And it turns out that the guy who made this apparently horrific "discovery" was—you guessed it!—Dr. Sin Hang Lee. Back in 2011, Lee, apparently either funded by or working with SaneVax, "discovered" that there was DNA in his Gardasil. As I explained at the time, there was a lot less to this claim…
drorzel | January 8, 2013The most talked-about physics paper last week was probably Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom (that link goes to the paywalled journal; there's also a free arxiv preprint from which the above figure is taken). It's a catchy but easily misinterpreted title-- Negative absolute temperature! Below Absolute Zero! Thermodynamics is wrong!-- that obscures the more subtle points of what's going on here. So, in the interest of clarity, I'm going to attempt an explanation, over the course of a few posts, but given my schedule these days, that might spread over a couple of…
catdynamics | January 7, 2013On the Blues and the Lifestyles and Fates of the Hottest Stars as they Cluster in the Heavens: or, why aging gracefully depends on your lifestyle and environment...
The Stellar Dynamical Clock
- is a Nature paper that came out in the Christmas double issue, always my favourite and very good value, might I add.
This paper is from a long term collaboration lead by Prof. Francesco Ferraro which over many cycles has built up a systematic sample of Hubble Space Telescope images of Galactic Globular Clusters, focusing, in partiular, on the blue and UV emitters in the dense cores of clusters, but…
catdynamics | January 7, 2013It was at the gathering,
and all the astronomers were there,
drinking coffee among the posters,
hearing the NSF in despair...
I am at my almost regular pilgrimage to the Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, where I hope to do some semi-liveblogging of developments and science news in my copious spare time.
I have more tasks than usual at this meeting, as not only am I, and my student, giving talks, I am also doing recruiting for prospective graduate students, postdoctoral hires and faculty, and attending the informal gathering of the ApJ editors.
I would also go to The Party,…
drorzel | January 7, 2013Kate and I went down to New York City (sans kids, as my parents were good enough to take SteelyKid and The Pip for the weekend) this weekend, because Kate had a case to argue this morning, and I needed a getaway before the start of classes today. We hit the Rubin Museum of Art, which is just about the right size for the few hours we had, got some excellent Caribbean food at Negril Village, then saw The Old Man and the Old Moon in a church basement at NYU (the show was charming, the space was stiflingly hot by the end). All in all, a good weekend.
I drove back Sunday afternoon, and was…
drorzel | January 3, 2013As I hinted obliquely a little while back, I don't have a terribly high opinion of Wall Street or Wall Street traders. Given that, I'm not the most obvious audience for a book titled The Physics of Wall Street, and truth be told, I wouldn't've picked it up on my own. The publisher sent me an advance copy back in August, though, and I had a plane trip coming up to go play golf with some guys who work in business, so I thought it might make a decent read and possible conversation topic, and took it along.
I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it contains much more physics than Wall…
pharyngula | January 2, 2013[We are fortunate to have this transcript, taken by a company stenographer, from one of the early efforts of the resistance to instruct an army company in tactics. Although we now have more sophisticated technologies to hold these invaders in check, it is instructive too see how the American military in the 1950s struggled to cope with an unusual enemy, a struggle that was described in an excellent documentary produced by Warner Bros.]
Men — and ladies — the purpose of this briefing is to instruct you in the basic anatomy of the enemy. We have lost many soldiers to the assumption that these…
drorzel | December 21, 2012We're at that time of year where people publish lists of top stories of the year, but as many crazy people will be happy to remind you, this Friday marks the end of another calendrical period, in the Mayan calendar. So, I'm going to steal an idea from a college classmate on Facebook, who wrote:
When I look back on Baktun 13, I'm going to remember all the wonderful things that happened. What's your best memory from the last 144,000 days?
This seems like a good way to get some more cheerful and science-y content on the front page of the blog. So, without further ado (or very much thought),…
catdynamics | December 19, 2012More Phenomenal random links to random stuff: life, the Universe and Everything
Phenomena - new blog group under National Geographic, including some long time scibloggers: The Loom, Not Exactly Rocket Science, Laelaps and Only Human, to begin with.
On the Usefulness of Useless Knowledge - Bee explains.
Substantive Advice to Admissions Committees - Or, why, all things being equal, we should prefer candidates from less prestigious institutions.
This is actually sensible - it is a "what have you done with what you were given" argument.
But, all things are very rarely equal... and no one ever…
esiegel | December 16, 2012"The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination. It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it." -Richard Feynman
What did you think about, wonder about, and dream about the first time you saw the true magnificence of the night sky? Did you wonder about planets orbiting each of the thousands of points of light you saw? Did you think about the possibilities of rocky worlds with liquid water, of life, and even of intelligent aliens? Or did you perhaps think on even larger scales, about what stars…
esiegel | December 14, 2012"And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make." -Paul McCartney
Every once in a while, I throw the chance out there (on facebook, twitter, or google+) to ask me whatever questions you want. Yesterday, for some insane reason, I invited people across all three platforms to ask me whatever they liked, with a dual promise that I'd not only answer them, but that the best ones would receive a free "The Year In Space" calendar for 2013, courtesy of the Planetary Society.
Image credit: The Planetary Society.
So I got a ton of questions, and now I'll do my best to answer them as…
catdynamics | December 12, 2012
Dr Brad Barlow was nominated by his Astro 001 students for a great honour - whichever class collected the most money for this year's THON would get to designate a lecture style of their choice, and Brad won...
so he got to lecture as a character from a "classic christmas movie"[sic]
As you can see, he really got into character.
drorzel | December 6, 2012I have made allusions to a work-in-progress at various points recently, but my general policy is not to reveal any details until things become official. Well, as you can see from the above photo of signed contracts, it's official: I sold the work-in-progress to Basic Books, my publisher for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. The contract calls for 70,000 words (which most likely means the first draft will clock in at 110,000...) of a work tentatively titled How to Think Like a Scientist (because I'm only allowed to publish books with "How to..." in the title...).
So, what is this? Well,…
catdynamics | December 5, 2012On the purity of science careers; the waste of civilization and other assorted snippets... and a happy Feast of St Nikolaus
The Rise of the Science Politician - Matt B. continues provocative Conversations.
There is an interesting thread on this on The Astronomers fb.
On The Inevitability of Kardashev Civilizations - the Astro Wright continues to lay the ground work for some fun speculation
Waste Heat: Parametrizing Alien Civilizations - the Astro Wright series continues with a reformulation of the Drake Equation appropriate to K3 civs.
What Do We Want Graduate School To Be? - astrobites…
esiegel | December 2, 2012"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." -Henry David Thoreau
Every day that we have free or leisure time, there's this great conflict as to how we spend it: working to better ourselves and improve our knowledge, and taking the time to enjoy our lives in whatever way we see fit. Sometimes, this goes horribly awry, as the B-52s would attest in their (relatively) new song,
Funplex.
But there's often no better way to combine these two pursuits than by reading a good book.…
drorzel | November 28, 2012In which the skewing of a data plot in Ron Unz's epic investigation of college admissions makes me more skeptical of his overall claim, thanks to the misleading tricks employed.
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Steve Hsu has a new post on a favorite topic of his, bias against Asians in higher ed admissions. This is based on a giant article by Ron Unz that I don't have time to read, and illustrated with the graphic that's the "featured image" for this post (which I will also reproduce below for the convenience of RSS readers).
What does this show? There's a tangle of colored lines representing the fraction of…
drorzel | November 27, 2012In which I unpack a cryptic paper title and explain how quantum superposition lets you use light to keep things from interacting with light.
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I joined AAAS a couple of years ago to get a break on the registration fee for their meeting, and I've kept up the membership mostly because I like having individual access to Science articles, so I can read them in the coffee shops where I get actual work done. This also gives me access to articles in the "advance online publication" stage, which is hilarious because Union's institutional subscription doesn't include those articles-- if I'…
gregladen | November 26, 2012Alternate titles for this post:
"It turns out, it is a little like a priesthood."
"Join us. Join us. Join us. Braaainzzzzz"
"Imma gonna let you finish, but first I think you need to get your Wellies wet."
...
[Modified repost]
In a library, there is a spatial relationship between knowledge and books or journals, and there is a sense of completeness about it. I'm thinking in particular of the Tozzer library, one I spent a fair amount of time in. I would go to the basement of the library and the entire ancient world (this is an anthropology library) was arrayed in a set of shelves to the…
drorzel | November 20, 2012I've got a bunch of browser tabs open on my various computers that have been there for weeks, one of which is Alastair Reynolds on writing science fiction. This is mostly a response to a not-terribly-interesting complaint that the science fiction genre has been "exhausted," but there was a bit in there that resonated with me, where Reynolds talks about how he started writing one of his books:
That reaction, for me, encapsulates something fairly central to my subsequent relationship with SF. I don't care for a lot of it. Never have done, never will. But at the same time, I doubt that I'd feel…
drorzel | November 16, 2012Over at Tor.com, Kate has begun a chapter-by-chapter re-read of The Hobbit, and has some thoughts on Chapter 1. It's full of interesting commentary about characters and literary technique, but let's get right to the important bit: Physics!
Kate mentions in passing in the post that the Hobbit style round door with a knob in the middle seems a suboptimal design choice, however pretty it may look once Peter Jackson's set designers get done with it. This draws a couple of comments noting that the doorknob-in-the-middle thing is an English affectation, and pointing to the Prime Minister's…