Science
pharyngula | July 16, 2011OK, I'm feeling guilty: I'm off at The Amaz!ng Meeting enjoying myself, and totally neglecting the blog readers who aren't lucky enough to be here too. And since I've been getting lots of requests to put the full content of my talk online, I figured…yeah, sure, I can do that. So here you go, all of the slides and what I said about them, mostly, below the fold. Criticize and argue and do your usual.
TAM is a tough crowd for me: it's a meeting where the emphasis is always on the space sciences, especially this year with a theme that just crows about astronomy, and I'm a biologist. It doesn't…
oracknows | July 15, 2011Like P.Z., I've been busy, busy, busy. TAM is a whirlwind of activity. Yesterday morning, I did my talk for the Science-Based Medicine workshop. Turnout was damned near standing room only, which makes me ask: Why would so many people be interested in hearing five somewhat geeky doctors pontificate about recurring themes in alternative medicine? Or me pontificating about "toxins"? Ah, well, there's no accounting for taste.
One hugely gratifying thing that's happened already is that one of you, my readers, provided me with a needed bit of accessorizing for my badge. I had no idea such things…
drorzel | July 14, 2011I really ought to be doing other things, but this roller slide business kept nagging at me, and I eventually realized I could mock up a crude simulation of the results. This led to the production of this graph:
This looks pretty similar to the Tracker Video data from the previous post, which I'll reproduce below the fold, along with an explanation of the math that went into the model:
The two graphs are qualitatively similar, other than, you know, the godawful Excel aesthetic of the simulation results graph. One line looks relatively straight, like motion at constant speed, while the others…
catdynamics | July 14, 2011Mystery flashflood reveals new hydrothermal system and probable small subglacial eruption this week, or two, or three...
Who the f#@k named a volcano Loki anyway...
The other night there were some gentle rumblings on the west side of Vatnajökull
Literally: small earthquakes and low frequency tremors characteristic of large volume fluid flows.
Fögrufjöll (click to embiggen)
From geographic.org
This was right under "Hamarinn" - aka Loki - Fögrufjöll
Hamarinn (click to embiggen)
From vedur.is
These are part of the complex of volcanic bumps and bits on Bárðarbunga, which is a ginormous…
catdynamics | July 14, 2011House appropriations committee reported out the Science etc bill.
JWST remains deleted; armchair quantum wires are in...
Here we go.
Next step.
House appropriations committee approved the report of the subcommittee on Science etc for 2012 appropriations.
Bill was essentially unchanged, with minor amendments.
0.1% was shaved off everyone and given to NOAA.
JWST remains CUT CUT CUT!
And McCollum (D) put in two amendments prohibiting funding for corps convicted of felonies or owing taxes - that could have interesting consequences, wonder who that is aimed at.
Anyway, Sen. Mikulski put out…
drorzel | July 14, 2011On Monday, I posted a short video and asked about the underlying physics. Here's the clip again, showing SteelyKid and then me going down a slide made up of a whole bunch of rollers at a local playground:
The notable thing about this is that SteelyKid takes a much, much longer time to get down the slide than I do. This is very different than an ordinary smooth slide, where elementary physics says we should go down the slide at the same rate, and empirically I tend to be a little slower than she is.
So what's the difference?
First of all, let's be a little more quantitative about this. Here's…
drorzel | July 13, 2011Last week Doug Natelson noted a drop-off in active physics blogs. This had not gone unnoticed hereabouts, though I couldn't immediately think of what to say about that. Yesterday, though, former ScienceBlogs wrangler Christopher Mims provided a possible answer: Google+ has destroyed blogging completely.
I would've liked to find a way to tie all this together into a deep and meditative blog post about the nature of blogging and the reasons for the decline of physics blogging specifically (to the extent that this is a decline, which is somewhat debatable). I have a faculty meeting to go to this…
catdynamics | July 12, 2011back to the science subcommittee appropriations
In case I haven't gone on about it enough, I think the James Webb Space Telescope has been tossed under the bus.
It is deleted, after being isolated and hung out to dry.
It is possible that funding will be restored in the Senate or in conference, but I think the deal has been made, implicitly, that Goddard gets to keep the (equally or worse mismanaged) big weather and environmental science programs, and JWST is sacrificed as a token high profile budget cut.
The money does not go back to astrophysics, which then has a permanent large cut in…
catdynamics | July 12, 2011House subcommittee on Science etc has reported out and full committee is scheduled to vote on the 13th.
JWST cut is formally in as are various other interesting snippets.
The subcommittee report (pdf large) - ie the appropriations by agency recommended to the full committee
Summary Table (pdf) - handy dandy difference between 2012 actual appropriations vs 2011 actual and 2012 requested, respectively.
Remember: this is the subcommittee recommendation to the committee, that gets voted on, then sent to House, then Senate does its thing, then it goes to conference to reconcile.
Change can…
pharyngula | July 12, 2011That's not hyperbole. I really mean it. How else could I react when I open up the latest issue of Bioessays, and see this: Cephalopod origin and evolution: A congruent picture emerging from fossils, development and molecules. Just from the title alone, I'm immediately launched into my happy place: sitting on a rocky beach on the Pacific Northwest coast, enjoying the sea breeze while the my wife serves me a big platter of bacon, and the cannula in my hypothalamus slowly drips a potent cocktail of cocain and ecstasy direct into my pleasure centers…and there's pie for dessert. It's like the…
drorzel | July 12, 2011Among the articles highlighted in this week's Physics is one about a new test of QED through a measurement of the g-factor of the electron in silicon ions. This comes on the heels of a measurement of proton spin flips (this includes a free PDF) a couple of weeks ago, and those, in turn, build on measurements of electrons from a few years back, which Jerry Gabrielse talked about at DAMOP. Evidently, it's magnetic moment season in the world of physics.
The media reports on the proton experiment tend to be a little garbled in a way that reveals the writers don't quite understand what's going on…
drorzel | July 12, 2011A month and a half ago, I reported on a simple experiment to measure the performance of a timer from the teaching labs. I started the timer running at a particualr time, and over the next couple of weeks checked in regularly with the Official US Time display at the NIST website, recording the delay between the timer reading and the NIST clock.
As a follow-up experiment, I did the same thing with a different timer, this one a Good Cook brand digital timer picked up for $10 in the local supermarket, and the same Fisher Scientific stopwatch/timer as the first experiment, with the Fisher…
pharyngula | July 12, 2011When I was in London last month, Richard Dawkins and I had a public conversation sponsored by the British Humanist Association, and now you can watch it wherever.
And here's the Q&A:
drorzel | July 11, 2011(Note: This was not prompted by any particular comment. Just a slow accumulation of stuff, that turned into a blog post on this morning's dog walk.)
It's been a couple of years now that I've been working on writing and promoting How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I've had a lot of conversations where the subject of writing a popular audience book on quantum physics comes up. I've had enough of these now that I can recognize a few different categories of responses, one of which drives me up the wall. I suspect that the same is true for most pop-science authors, so as a public service, let me…
pharyngula | July 11, 2011One of the advantages of being an old geezer is that I remember watching this kind of thing as it was happening, and having to keep the television on all day and all night to catch the latest news from the Moon. You young whippersnappers just get it handed to you at your convenience on this youtube thingie.
It was awesome then, and it's awesome now.
(via Carl Zimmer)
drorzel | July 11, 2011We took SteelyKid to the playground at one of the local elementary schools on Sunday morning. this one includes an odd sort of slide, made of dozens of rollers that are 1-2 inches in diameter (they're all the same size-- the range is just because I didn't measure them carefully). They're on really good bearings, and while it's kind of noisy, it's a reasonably smooth ride.
There is, however, one slightly mysterious aspect to this slide, clearly visible in this video that Kate was good enough to shoot for me:
SteelyKid takes something like 6 seconds to go down the slide, while it only takes me…
drorzel | July 10, 2011This morning, via Twitter, I ran across one of the most spectacular examples of deceptive data presentation that I've ever seen. The graph in question is reproduced in this blog post by Bryan Caplan, and comes from this econ paper about benefits of education. The plot looks like this:
This is one panel clipped out of a four-part graph, showing the percentage of survey respondents reporting that they are satisfied with their current job. The horizontal axis is the years of schooling for different categories of respondents.
So, I looked at that, and said "Wow, people with more education are…
catdynamics | July 9, 2011Cratering of ice sheet and possible small eruption under ice.
click to embiggen
Crater in ice over one of sites of the 1918 eruption - four of these formed overnight.
Lot of shallow quakes still in a line across the caldera - some might be ice-surface cracking, others are several km deep. Could be magma pushing into a fissure, angle is consistent with the general orientation of the mid-atlantic rift through there.
Or not.
Be quite spectacular if that whole line ruptures though.
click to embiggen
Nice picture gallery at visir.is
Video of flood here (ruv 32 bit wmv) - can't get it to…
catdynamics | July 8, 2011A jökulhlaup has started in Múlakvísl, the glacial river that comes off Mýrdalsjökull, that is the glacier that Katla is under.
No eruption at this point though.
RUV has a webcam on it (32 bit wmv) - not much to see at midnight EST
Lots of
small earthquakes in a line across the caldera though.
Some have a depth of less than a km, and are, most likely, just the ice shifting,
but there is steady activity down to 10-15 km depth, suggesting some magma movement.
Police are warning of strong H2S odour on the sands, and possibly lethal concentrations of the gas in low lying areas nearby.…
catdynamics | July 7, 2011Name a concrete, new international facility class science project that the US is going to be leading in near future.
Seriously: and you can either keep it to Astronomy, or any natural science.
Used to be that you could rattle off several upcoming major science projects which were US initiatives, international in scope and clearly great things to do.
Heck, you could do that just in astronomy.
There are still some US projects, mostly though put in place a long time ago and just now peaking.
There are still major international scientific projects, but mostly without US leadership. Either…