Science
drorzel | March 20, 2012A couple of cool items in the promotion of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog:
-- A little while back, I spoke to Alan Boyle, who writes the Cosmic Log blog for MSNBC, who posted a very nice story about the book last night. Mainstream media, baby!
It also uses this very cool picture of Emmy and me in my lab:
(Many thanks to Matt Milless for taking that and a bunch of others.)
-- This weekend (either Saturday or Sunday, depending on where you are), I'll be on the Science Fantastic radio show, talking about relativity with Michio Kaku. There's a lsit of stations that carry it linked from that…
drorzel | March 19, 2012I'm trying not to obsessively check and re-check the Dog Physics Sales Rank Tracker, with limited success. One thing that jumped out at me from the recent data, though, is the big gap between the book and Kindle rankings over the weekend. The book sales rank dropped (indicating increased sales, probably a result of the podcast interview), while the Kindle rank went up dramatically. This suggests that people who listen to that particular podcast are less likely to buy new books on the Kindle than new books on paper.
This got me wondering, though, whether this was an anomaly, or a general truth…
drorzel | March 17, 2012I've done a bunch of publicity stuff for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, some of which frustratingly continue to not appear yet, but one thing from this week has gone live: a podcast interview on the Matt Lewis Show, where I talk about why and how I explain physics to the dog, and a little bit about why relativity is cool.
I continue to struggle a bit with the fact that relativity is a very visual subject-- most of the best explanations involve pictures, which aren't much help in an audio-only medium. I had trouble with this at Boskone, too-- when I was doing a reading, it was hard to…
drorzel | March 16, 2012A little more tab clearance, here, this time a few recent stories dealing with those elusive little buggers, neutrinos. In roughly chronological order:< /p>
The Daya Bay experiment in China has measured a key parameter for neutrino oscillation (arxiv paper), the phenomenon where neutrinos of one of the three observed types slowly evolve into one of the others. Mathematically, this is described as each of the three types we observe being an admixture of three more fundamental types. This mixing is described in terms of the sine of some "mixing angle," because physicists love geometry,…
drorzel | March 15, 2012Over at the Scholarly Kitchen, Kent Anderson complains about the uselessness of comments on journals:
Comments in online scientific journals have been notoriously poor -- either too much material of uneven quality or too little discussion to amount to a hill of beans. All too often, commenting has to be shut down because internecine and tiresome debates break out, creating more noise than signal. The best comments are scholarly, and borrow extensively from the form of letters to the editor.
After more than a decade and millions of blogs, it seems one main lesson practitioners are learning --…
jrosenhouse | March 14, 2012Back in October, philosopher Michael Lynch published thie essay in The New York Times He was discussing the problem of finding an epistemic justification for our confidence in science. A few days ago The Times continued the discussion with this exchange between Lynch and physicist Alan Sokal. The two pieces together are rather long. There is a lot to discuss, too much, in fact, for just one post. It seems to me, though, that both gentlemen are wrong about a central point in the discussion.
Here's Lynch, from his original essay:
Rick Perry's recent vocal dismissals of evolution, and his…
drorzel | March 14, 2012One of the things that made me very leery of the whole Brian Cox electron business was the way that he seemed to be justifying dramatic claims through dramatic handwaving: "Moving an electron here changes the state of a very distant electron instantaneously because LOOK! THE WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE EINSTEIN-PODOLSKY-ROSEN PAPER!" On closer inspection, it's not quite that bad, though it takes very close inspection to work out just what they are claiming.
That said, though, it's fairly common to hear claims of the form "when two particles are entangled, anything you do to one of them…
carlyo | March 14, 2012The Festival is thrilled to have Homer Hickam, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Rocket Boys, as a Featured Author this year. Homer's new book Crater, the first novel in his new Helium-3 series for young adults, will be released just in time for the Festival. You have the opportunity to meet Homer at the Teen Book Fair Stage: Fiction on Sunday, April 29th at 10:55 AM with a free book signing after!
Homer will also be a part of USA Science & Engineering Festival Book Fair Featured Author Panel Discussion entitled Science Stories in Society & School: Using Narrative to Bridge…
drorzel | March 13, 2012I finally got a copy of Cox and Forshaw's The Quantum Universe, and a little time to read it, in hopes that it would shed some light on the great electron state controversy. I haven't finished the book, but I got through the relevant chapter and, well, it doesn't, really. That is, the discussion in the book doesn't go into all that much more detail than the discussion on-line, and still requires a fair bit of work to extract a coherent scientific claim.
The argument basically boils down to the idea that the proper mathematical description of a universe containing more than one fermion is a…
oracknows | March 11, 2012Having a reasonably popular blog is a cool thing because at times I can do things like what I'm about to do. I'd like to start the week off with a little bit of crowdsourcing. Earlier this week, a reader wrote to me at my not-so-super-secret other blog with a request that concluded:
In short, I was wondering if...you...would be able to refer me to a scientific or psuedo-scientific article where the abstract completely misrepresents the article or the conclusion doesn't fit the analysis/data. The reason is that I'm writing is that I'm currently in my third year at [REDACTED], and currently I'…
pharyngula | March 11, 2012Good news! The gorilla genome sequence was published in Nature last week, and adds to our body of knowledge about primate evolution. Here's the abstract:
Gorillas are humans' closest living relatives after chimpanzees, and are of comparable importance for the study of human origins and evolution. Here we present the assembly and analysis of a genome sequence for the western lowland gorilla, and compare the whole genomes of all extant great ape genera. We propose a synthesis of genetic and fossil evidence consistent with placing the human-chimpanzee and human-chimpanzee-gorilla speciation…
carlyo | March 9, 2012This April, Jeff Lieberman, artist, scientist and host of Discovery Channel's "Time Warp", will be performing at the 2012 USA Science and Engineering Festival with his show "Beyond Your Imagination". In "Beyond Your Imagination", Lieberman will give you a tour like no other - a tour of yourself. Using advanced technologies and scientific discoveries, we will see just how amazing you are - beyond anything you could imagine! Lieberman explains that "Science doesn't just tell us about the world outside -- it also reveals a deeper understanding of who we are as human beings, and how we see the…
denialism | March 9, 2012The safety of soda has been in the news a lot lately. The news even seems bad for diet coke, which hits close to home for me given my diet coke addiction. The worst seems to be this correlative study proposing a link between diet sodas and stroke risk:
The study, which followed more than 2,500 New Yorkers for nine or more years, found that people who drank diet soda every day had a 61 percent higher risk of vascular events, including stroke and heart attack, than those who completely eschewed the diet drinks, according to researchers who presented their results today at the American Stroke…
denialism | March 8, 2012I think it's a nice, succinct description of the problem of climate change from one of the leaders of the field.
On a related note the nation of Kiribati is relocating to Fiji as their island nation is disappearing.
drorzel | March 8, 2012Yesterday was a really grueling day, and I'm home with The Pip today, so no substantive blogging. But here's a song about the universe, written and performed by one of my colleagues:
If this becomes the next LHC Rap, remember you heard it here first.
By a weird coincidence, we've been watching our Animaniacs DVD's with SteelyKid, and just a couple of days ago got to this one:
So that's not one, but two songs about the universe. Which ought to be enough to keep you entertained for the day.
drorzel | March 7, 2012So, the news of the moment in high-energy physics is the latest results being reported from a conference in Europe. The major experimental collaborations are presenting their newest analyses, sifting through terabyte-size haystacks of data looking for the metaphorical needle that is the Higgs boson.
And what are those results? It sort of depends on who you ask. Tommaso Dorigo points at the final data from the Tevatron and claims victory; Matt Strassler thinks the lack of evidence at the LHC is almost as important, though there is progress there in excluding some new regions. The net result is…
denialism | March 7, 2012Ed Yong demands higher accountability in science journalism and has made me think of how in the last two days I've run across two examples of shoddy reporting. These two articles I think encompass a large part of the problem, the first from the NYT, represents the common failure of science reporters to be critical of correlative results. While lacking egregious factual errors, in accepting the authors' conclusions without vetting the results of the actual paper, the journalist has created a misleading article. The second, from Forbes, represents the worst kind of corporate news hackery,…
drorzel | March 6, 2012The new book is out, which means it's time for lots of promotional efforts and links to radio shows and news articles and that sort of thing. Such as this one: I'll be talking about relativity and dog physics tomorrow night, Wednesday the 7th, on the Big Science radio program(me) at 9pm London time (in the frame of reference in which London is at rest, anyway). This'll be the first radio show for the new book, though I've done a few phone interviews for print publications (links as they become available...).
If you're in London, and have nothing better to do, tune in. (We are, after all, more…
drorzel | March 6, 2012My course on the history and science of timekeeping has reached the home stretch, with students giving presentations in class for the remainder of the term. My portion of the course was wrapped up with two lectures on "quantum timkeeping," as it were: a lecture on the development of quantum mechanics:
History of Quantum Mechanics
View more PowerPoint from Chad Orzel
And one on the development of atomic clocks:
A History of Atomic Clocks
View more PowerPoint from Chad Orzel
These are pretty fast-moving, but by this point in the course, students were already working on their final…
drorzel | March 5, 2012My timekeeping course this term is a "Scholars Research Seminar," which means it's supposed to emphasize research and writing skills. Lots of these will include some sort of poster session at the end of the term, but I decided I preferred the idea of doing in-class oral presentations. Having assigned that, of course, I felt I ought to give them a class with advice on how to give an oral presentation. I went looking for advice on this, and found that I wrote a guide to giving good PowerPoint lectures back in 2006 (God, I'm a blogging dinosaur...), which holds up pretty well. So, I dusted that…