Science
catdynamics | November 15, 2012Visiting Astrobiology Chair in DC: research and engagement.
Applications and nominations are open for the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology.
"Established in the Fall of 2011, the Blumberg Astrobiology Chair is a distinguished senior position at the Library’s Kluge Center.
The incumbent conducts research at the intersection between the science of astrobiology and its humanistic aspects, particularly its societal implications, using the collections and services of the Library. The incumbent is expected to be in residence at the Kluge Center for a period of up to…
drorzel | November 15, 2012Everybody and their siblings have been linking to this Minute Physics video, an "open letter" to President Obama complaining about the way that most high school and even intro college physics classes don't teach anything remotely modern:
I'm not entirely sure where the date of 1865 comes from, but it's true, the standard intro physics sequence doesn't really touch what's normally called "modern physics," a term which is itself laughably out of date, as it generally refers to special relativity and quantum mechanics as it stood around 1935. We don't teach really new stuff until about the 300…
drorzel | November 14, 2012OK, it's a paper I mentioned here before, when it went up on the arxiv, but the "Comments on Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics" article I wrote this summer is up on the Physica Scripta web site now, and for the next not-quite-thirty days it's free to read and download:
Searching for new physics through atomic, molecular and optical precision measurements
We briefly review recent experiments in atomic, molecular and optical physics using precision measurements to search for physics beyond the Standard Model. We consider three main categories of experiments: searches for changes in…
catdynamics | November 12, 2012Blows against supersymmetry and facebook.
Matthew Bailes continues ruminations at the Conversation - the general riff is on crowd sourcing and distributed computing, with a bit of bragging on The Beast they got down under.
Ok, I'm, just jealous.
I had not heard of Diaspora - be interesting to see if it can crowd out fb or other commercial social networks.
The Raspberry Pi I had indeed heard of, and will be acquisitioning. My kids are so looking forward to have their own computers... ;-)
But, what we really conclude, is that Matt needs to meet Charlie Stross for a quiet beer or three.
On a…
drorzel | November 12, 2012Over at Slate, John Dickerson has a piece expressing amazement that "numbers guy" Mitt Romney was so badly misinformed about the election. While I'll admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude about the general bafflement of the Romney campaign and the Republicans generally, this particular slant (which Dickerson isn't the only one to take, just the latest in a series) is more annoying than entertaining.
You would think that the 2008 economic meltdown, in which the financial industry broke the entire world when they were blindsided by the fact that housing prices can go down as well as up,…
drorzel | November 8, 2012Now that we've apparently elected Nate Silver the President of Science, this is some predictable grumbling about whether he's been overhyped. If you've somehow missed the whole thing, Jennifer Ouellette offers an excellent summary of the FiveThirtyEight saga, with lots of links, but the Inigo Montoya summing up is that Silver runs a blog predicting election results, which consistently showed Barack Obama with a high probability of winning. This didn't sit well with the pundit class, who mocked Silver in ways that made them look like a pack of ignorant yokels when Silver's projected electoral…
oracknows | November 5, 2012It's no secret that I have little but contempt for radical animal rights activists. I make no apologies for this and, quite frankly, consider my contempt for them well-justified based on their behavior and words. Be it their fetishization of violence against researchers who use animals, their threatening of students in order to frighten them away from careers in scientific research that might involve the use of animals (for example, Alena Rodriguez), intimidating researchers by declaring their children as "not off limits," trying to burn investigators' houses down, harassing researchers, and…
catdynamics | November 1, 2012New faculty positions in multiple science and engineering disciplines, including astronomy, emphasizing computational analysis and data mining.
Penn State is embarking on a transformative cluster hiring initiative in cyberscience – computation- and data-enabled science and engineering – to lead through cyber-enabled innovation in interdisciplinary research. This cross-college endeavor will coordinate multiple faculty appointments to develop new functional capabilities centered on data, models and simulation for deeper insights into the critical problems in Science and Engineering.
We seek…
catdynamics | October 30, 2012Schrödinger's Qu'ran - a 2012 thought experiment - in The Conversation, Matthew Bailes updates a classic paradox...
"...a physicist could extend this thought experiment to write a php script that would randomly download one of the Bible, Qur’an or even a classical quantum mechanics textbook to the iPad..."
On the Dispositive Null in the Literature - on an unrelated subject, the AstroWright expounds on a subtle issue.
Trendy Companions - more AstroWright
What do we want graduate school to be?
When do we want it?
Real Soon Now!
I will have a report on a definitive solution to the whole climate…
pharyngula | October 29, 2012I approve this plan. A number of researchers have gotten together and worked out a grand strategy for sequencing the genomes of a collection of cephalopods. This involves surveying the phylogeny of cephalopods and trying to pick species to sample that adequately cover the diversity of the group, while also selecting model species that have found utility in a number of research areas — two criteria that are often in conflict with one another. Fortunately, the authors seemed to have found a set that satisfies both (although it would have been nice to see the Spirulida and Vampyromorpha make…
esiegel | October 26, 2012"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." -Niels Bohr
What's going to happen next? It's perhaps the most important thing to know if we want to be prepared for practically anything in our lives. And without even thinking about it, most of us are actually very good at this in a huge number of aspects of our lives. For example...
Image credit: Crazy Adventures in Parenting.
I was hungry at work today, and I was prepared for it. Somehow, I knew that I was going to need food throughout the course of the day, and so I was prepared for it by bringing food from home. This…
drorzel | October 26, 2012In which I discuss the manner in which and the degree to which Twitter is ruining the media.
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Yesterday, Kevin Drum posted saying that Twitter is ruining political journalism, calling out its role in solidifying media groupthink before events are even completed. That seemed like a pretty good criticism to me, but like a true squishy liberal, Kevin later retracted his comments in the face of criticism. I saw the second link come across Kevin's Twitter feed, and responded there, saying:
You were right the first time. But Twitter's only the latest step in the continuing degradation…
drorzel | October 25, 2012For various reasons I can't talk about, I'm not in a good mental place for deep and thoughtful blogging just at the moment. But prompted by yesterday's Surviving the World, I'll revisit a past post topic, and suggest some abstract ideas you could dress as for Halloween, if you're so inclined.
The Doppler Effect: Wear an outfit that's blue in the front and red on the back. Answer questions from people in front of you in a high-pitched voice, questions from people behind you in a deep voice. Bonus points if you carry small bottles of helium and sulfur hexafluoride to inhale for the appropriate…
drorzel | October 18, 2012In which I get a little rant-y about yet another proud display of ignorance from the Washington Post's education blog.
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Some time back, I teed off on a school board member who couldn't pass a simple math test, who proudly told the world about his ignorance via a post at the Washington Post's education blog. Bragging about ignorance is apparently a Thing for that blog, which recently offered another fine example, with a parent complaining about his son being forced to take chemistry. The author, "nonprofit executive" David Bernstein, is a former philosophy major, who evidently didn…
catdynamics | October 16, 2012Given ηEarth=1
Find more terrestrial exoplanets.
Find habitable terrestrial exoplanets.
Find inhabited terrestrial exoplanets.
Go visit.
Consider the following snippets:
Kepler discover 5 planets orbiting inside 0.1 AU
Kepler: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet in a Quadruple Star System
Terrestrial mass planet discovered around α Cen B
Kepler exoplanet survey jeopardized
Kepler has lost one of its reaction wheels.
That was the spare, one more goes, and it will not complete its mission, it will not be able to stay pointed at its target.
Because of stellar jitter, the science goal for Kepler,…
catdynamics | October 16, 2012α Centauri B, a mere 4 lightyears away has a terrestrial planet orbiting it.
α Cen B b
The most interesting aspect of the discovery may be the inferences we can make rather than the planet itself.
The discovery by the Geneva Observatory team using the
HARPS spectrograph is a wonderful example of precision high cadence spectroscopy and the ability of observers to find planets wherever they may be. The precision of the measurment is 0.5 m/sec, which is astonishing.
The discovery will be published in Nature (X. Dumusque et al. Nature 17 Oct 2012) thursday, and was due to be announced…
drorzel | October 16, 2012In which I steal an analogy from Joe Emerson to explain the limits of quantum computing.
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As previously noted, a couple of weeks ago I went to Canada for the opening of the University of Waterloo's new Quantum Nano Center (their photo gallery includes one picture of me being interviewed, along with lots of more interesting pictures from the day). One of my events there was a panel discussion about the new center and what it will mean, which included me, Raymond Laflamme, the director of the Institute for Quantum Computing, and Mike Lazaridis, the founder of Research in Motion, who…
drorzel | October 15, 2012The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has just been announced, and goes to Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design." I know basically nothing about these guys, but I assume they've earned their Sveriges Riksbank Prize, so congratulations to them. And congratulations also to John Novak, who correctly called Shapley in the annual betting pool.
I think that's all the winners for this year, both of Nobel Prizes and from the betting pool. If I missed one, please point it out to me. And if you…
catdynamics | October 13, 2012Continued slow liveblog of the New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology Conference at the Franklin Institute.
Lunch is almost over and we are headed into the final session of research presentations, clearly saving the best for last...
I am also reminded why we have these meetings, in person, the chats during break and back and forth in sessions provides very dense information transmission and tight feedback loops on news.
Big Question IV - Are we Alone in the universe?
Or, are there other life and intelligence beyond the solar system?
1) Jonathan Lunine from Cornell on "The search for life…
catdynamics | October 13, 2012Continued slow liveblog of the New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology Conference at the Franklin Institute.
We have had coffee and we are rested and ready after yesterdays 14 hour marathon session (graduate students please note - though it did include breakfast, lunch, dinner and two coffee breaks ("working breaks" natch, apart from the hour+ break before dinenr) - and I don't think any of the faculty could actually keep it up for more than 2-3 days, except in our imagination ('course we then went back to the hotel and had to catch up on class and administrative issues left unattended, but…