Science
catdynamics | August 11, 2011Summary of results on Higgs particle on LHC workshop at KITP
I wasn't here for it, but last week John Conway presented the
LHC Higgs Searches (slides, audio, video)
summary talk at the LHC11 workshop.
I had, of course, kept half an eye on the flurry of conference announcement on the preliminary LHC constraints on various wished for particles and sparticles, but it is particularly satisfying to see a good summary presentation.
Low mass joint Higgs constraints - more data needed (from Conway's talk, link above)
So, there is space in the parameter space, there are a few little gaps in the 200…
drorzel | August 11, 2011Yesterday was apparently Gender in Science day here, while the theme for today is Tab Clearance-- a couple of shortish posts about things that deserve more than just a Links Dump mention, but don't really cohere into any kind of grand synthesis of deep thoughts, or whatever.
This particular link was prompted by an item in the SF Signal links dump for today, with the title Writing Science Fiction as a Non-Scientist, by Jamie Todd Rubin. that made me blink a little, because it's never really seemed like a science degree was a necessary condition for writing SF. Even within so-called "hard SF,"…
pharyngula | August 10, 2011I've had all of these perspectives in my career, so I can tell you that they're mostly right…except for the one about how professors see themselves. You should just substitute the postdoc:postdoc image for the professor:professor one.
Also, I worked my way through college as an undergraduate technician. Even with my lowly status, I really did see all the undergrads/grads/postdocs as spoiled children who were there only to screw up my lab and my precious experimental animals. Especially when they'd leave a pile of gore and blood and dead animal parts scattered all over the surgery, and…
drorzel | August 10, 2011The other big gender-disparity graph making the rounds yesterday was this one showing the gender distribution in the general workforce and comparing that to science-related fields:
This comes from an Economics and Statistics Administration report which has one of the greatest mismatches between the tone of the headline of the press release and the tone of the report itself. Nice work, Commerce Department PR flacks.
There are a couple of oddities about this report, the most important being that they appear to have excluded academics from the sample, though that probably depends on how people…
drorzel | August 10, 2011There are two recent studies of gender disparities in science and technology (referred to by the faintly awful acronym "STEM") getting a lot of play over the last few days. As is often the case with social-science results, the data they have aren't quite the data you would really like to have, and I think it's worth poking at them a little, not to deny the validity of the results, but to point out the inherent limitations of the process.
The first is a study of lifetime earnings in various fields that includes this graph showing that women with a Ph.D. earn about the same amount as men with a…
drorzel | August 9, 2011An angle I had hoped to get to in last week's broader impacts post, but didn't have time for, was this piece questioning meet-the-scientist programs by Aimee Stern at Science 2.0:
Over the past several years, a growing number of trade associations, foundations and science and engineering companies have started major efforts to get scientists into schools and hopefully inspire students with what they do. The goal, of course, is to get kids interested in pursuing careers in scientific fields, by showing them just how cool science is.
But I wonder - no matter how well meaning, how much do these…
drorzel | August 9, 2011It's that time of year again, when I start thinking about my fall term classes. I would really prefer to put it off for another couple of weeks, and I will put off spending much time on class prep in favor of finishing up some paper-writing and other things, but when the calendar turns to August, I inevitably start thinking about what I'm going to be doing in September, no matter how much I'd like to be thinking about other things instead. This year is worse than most, because I'm planning to really shake things up with regard to the way I teach the intro mechanics course.
I've been doing…
bioephemera | August 9, 2011
"Magnetic Field Outflows from Active Galactic Nuclei"
P.M. Sutter, P.M. Ricker, H.-Y. Yang, G. Foreman, D. Pugmire/ORNL
Wired has an article/webgallery of award-winning scientific visualizations which is worth a lunchtime visit. (Having trouble with Wired's interface? The videos collected there are the winners from SciDAC 2011's "Visualization Night" challenge, so you can also just watch them here.)
These visualizations are not your usual public-facing educational animation. Rather, they're just what you'd see at a scientific meeting - dry, functional, aimed at a specialist audience, and…
drorzel | August 8, 2011SteelyKid has used a pacifier from very shortly after she was born. We've been slowly working her off it-- she's stopped taking it to day care, or using it other than at bedtime or in the car-- but she's resisted giving it up entirely.
since she's now a great big three-year old, we decided it was time to ditch the pacifier completely. For help in this, we turned to her favorite tv show: MythBusters:
In that clip, Adam and Jamie investigate how difficult it is to take candy from a baby. This, predictably enough, results in a bunch of unhappy babies. SteelyKid has watched this clip a lot, so…
drorzel | August 8, 2011When we got home from visiting Kate's family yesterday, there was a large shipping envelope from my agent waiting for us. This can mean only one thing: author copies of foreign editions!
That's the Czech edition, Jak nauÄit svého psa fyziku, which seems to have used the same glasses-wearing golden retriever as the Brazilian edition. The overlaid equations and graphics are lifted directly from the translated figures, which is nice.
My new favorite edition, though, is the Korean edition, whose cover designer went for "Puppy Innnn SPAAAAAACE!!!" as a concept:
There's nothing remotely…
pharyngula | August 7, 2011This is a wonderful video debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument. What I really like about it is that it takes the tortured rationales of theologians like William Lane Craig, who love to babble mangled pseudoscience in their arguments, and shows with direct quotes from the physicists referenced that the Christian and Muslim apologists are full of crap.
(via Skepchick.)
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | August 7, 2011Science fiction dreams may come true: a small, thin band of stable anti-matter has been discovered near Earth. It was predicted theoretically, but now emissions from the annihilation of these particles has been observed.
The existence of a significant flux of antiprotons confined to Earth's magnetosphere has been considered in several theoretical works. These antiparticles are produced in nuclear interactions of energetic cosmic rays with the terrestrial atmosphere and accumulate in the geomagnetic field at altitudes of several hundred kilometers. A contribution from the decay of albedo…
pharyngula | August 6, 2011I learned something new today, and something surprising. I've opened up my fair share of bellies and seen intestines doing their slow peristaltic dance in there, and I knew in an abstract way that guts were very long and had to coil to fit into the confined space of the abdominal cavity, but I'd always just assumed it was simply a random packing — that as the gut tube elongated, it slopped and slithered about and fit in whatever way it could. But no! I was reading this new paper today, and that's not the case at all: there is a generally predictable pattern of coiling in the developing gut,…
drorzel | August 5, 2011Last week, I asked for advice on the show Fringe, because I need to be able to speak sensibly about it for the purpose of talking about parallel universes. I've been working through Janne's list of recommended episodes, watching on my laptop while SteelyKid goes to sleep, and have got up through the Season 3 premiere. So, what's the verdict?
The three-word review is "Entertaining but maddening." Because it's pretty well done in an X-Files kind of way, but partakes of all the things that drive me nuts about the portrayal of science in fiction.
The chief problem with this is that, in fine…
drorzel | August 4, 2011I didn't pay that much attention to the mini-controversy over the NSF's proposed revision of its grant evaluation criteria when they were first released, because I was working on the book. I was asked to say something about it yesterday, though, and having gone to the trouble, I might as well say something on the blog, too.
The main source of complaint is the "Broader Impacts" section of the grant, a category that has always been sort of nebulous, but which the new standards attempt to clarify:
Collectively, NSF projects should help to advance a broad set of important national goals,…
pharyngula | August 3, 2011Larry Moran went crazy and has created the largest Carnival of Evolution ever. There is so much good stuff in there…and I'm annoyed that the creationists are staying away by the legion. It's all evidence and data and science, which are apparently toxic to them.
drorzel | August 3, 2011In the "ideas I wish I'd thought of first" file, the Canberra Times has an op-ed comparing politicians to quantum objects, because they seem to hold contradictory positions at the same time, and are impossible to pin down. It garbles the physics a little, and is very specific to Australia, though, so let's see if we can do a little better at identifying quantum properties of US politicians.
Duality: Quantum physics tells us that all objects in the universe have both particle-like and wave-like properties, and which you observer will depend on the design of your experiment. Similarly, quantum…
bioephemera | August 2, 2011What with all the buzz surrounding Bjork's Biophilia project, science films are so hawt right now! Don't know what I'm talking about? Then check out this weirdness:
Yeah. . . okay!
Anyway, some other science/film folks, the crew over at Imagine films, reached out to ask me to remind you that the deadline is approaching for your science films to be considered for this year's festival:
We are currently looking for short or feature length films to showcase at this years festival. Submissions should weave elements of real science into a fictional narrative and filmmakers from all backgrounds are…
drorzel | August 2, 2011I was just tagging this for the Links Dump, but I thought it deserved better. Fred Clark, blogdom's best writer on politics and religion, is putting together a book-like thing from his blog, and has posted the introduction to the section on creationism:
The oldest book in our Bible contains a hymn of praise to the Creator that rambles on for chapter after chapter. It's the longest such hymn in the Bible, skipping about through all the earth and all the universe with the wide-eyed, giddy enthusiasm of a kind in a candy shop, marveling at all the wondrous things that God has made.
But this isn'…
pharyngula | August 2, 2011I shall have to turn on my television Sunday evening (7 or 8pm, depending on where in the US you are). Stephen Hawking will be on the Discovery Channel to answer the question, "Is There a Creator?" — I'm pretty sure he's going to answer "no."
He also tersely answers a few questions online.
Q: First, we wonder if you could comment on why you are tackling the existence of God question?
A: I think Science can explain the Universe without the need for God.
Q. What problems you are working on now, and what do you see as the big questions in theoretical physics?
A: I'm working on the question…