Free Thought
drorzel | April 22, 2010What's the application? Producing artificial "stars" to serve as a reference for telescopes using adaptive optics to correct for atmospheric turbulence. This allows ground-based telescopes to produce images that are as good as those from the Hubble Space Telescope.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? "How can I make this giant telescope produce even more impressive pictures?"
How does it work?The basic problem with ground-based telescopes, as anyone who has ever looked at the stars or listened to nursery rhymes can tell you, is that stars "twinkle." They appear to fluctuate in brightness…
drorzel | April 22, 2010
Scathing Amazon Reviewer Revealed as Author Orlando Figes' Wife - AOL News
Why didn't I try-- oh, right. Because Kate has integrity, as do I. That's why.
(tags: books literature history stupid internet)
Backreaction: It comes soon enough
"I think of the future frequently - and more often than not I think it could come sooner. But sometimes I am stunned when I read things I've been talking about actually become reality."
(tags: computing internet society culture technology science)
A gassy mystery: Researchers discover surprising exoplanetary atmosphere
At what point does "New planet…
drorzel | April 21, 2010What's the application? An optical frequency comb is a short-duration pulsed laser whose output can be viewed as a regularly spaced series of different frequencies. If the pulses are short enough, this can span the entire visible spectrum, giving a "comb" of colored lines on a traditional spectrometer. This can be used for a wide variety of applications, from precision time standards to molecular spectroscopy to astronomy.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How do I compare this optical frequency standard to a microwave frequency standard?" 2) "How do I calibrate my spectrometer well…
drorzel | April 21, 2010
We Are Not Alone § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
"From illusory "canals" spied through blurry 19th century telescopes, to today's high-endurance robotic rovers, in the search for life beyond Earth, Mars is the perennial favorite target. It is, after all, the most hospitable planet we know other than our own.
But despite the Red Planet's watery, warm ancient past and more than a century of Earthlings' increasingly sophisticated scrutiny, no clear evidence of Martian life has ever been found. At least, that's the mainstream scientific consensus. But according to a new book by astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-…
jdupuis | April 20, 2010That's the topic for the most recent Schubmehl-Prein Prize for Best Essay on Social Impact of Computing.
The Schubmehl-Prein Prize for best analysis of the social impact of a particular aspect of computing technology will be awarded to a student who is a high school junior in academic year 2009-2010. The first-place award is $1,000, the second-place award is $500, and the third-place award is $250. Winning entries are traditionally published in the Association for Computing Machinery's Computers and Society online magazine.
The winners of the 2009 contest are published in the most recent…
drorzel | April 20, 2010
Ptahhotep
"The Instruction of Ptahhotep to his son survives in papyrus copies. It is a collection of maxims (not all are given here) dealing with human relations. The maxims do not cover all aspects of Egyptian life. For the most part, they touch on the peaceful virtues of kindness, justice, truthfulness, moderation and self-control.
A man by the name of Ptahhotep was a vizier under King Isesi of the Fifth Dynasty. If he authored the instruction under this name, then it dates from 2450-2300 BCE. On the other hand, Miriam Lichtheim argues that the style of the document puts its origin close…
aardvarchaeology | April 15, 2010It's been more than four years since the first time I blogged about how cool it is to have broadband on a train. But I still haven't gotten over it. Trainblogging again! The sun is shining and Södermanland zips past outside the window.
I'm on my way to Linköping to drop off finds at the County Museum and teach a class on Late Iron Age elite settlement in Ãstergötland. The finds drop-off is one of the loose threads that remain for me to tie up after my last book project. Backpack and a cardboard box full of goodies from Sättuna in Kaga and other great sites!
BTW, is anybody reading this in…
drorzel | April 13, 2010I'm teaching a junior/senior level elective this term on quantum mechanics. We're using Townsend's A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics, which starts with spin-1/2 and develops the whole theory in terms of state vectors and matrices. This is kind of an uneasy fit for me, as I'm very much a swashbuckling experimentalist, and not as comfortable with formal mathematics.
This occasionally leads to good things, though, such as Monday's class, on photon polarizations. the book uses some vector arithmetic to show that circularly polarized photons have spin angular momentum of one unit of h-bar.…
clock | April 13, 2010Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here.
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A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'?
A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird
A Blog Around The Clock: Evolutionary Medicine: Does reindeer have a circadian stop-watch instead of a clock?
Anthropology in Practice: The Irish Diaspora: Why Even Trinidadians Are a Little Irish
Back Re(action): To whom it may concern (poem)
Bad Science:…
cagapakis | April 12, 2010I got a lot of interesting responses to my post about DIYbio and how modeling innovation in biotech on computer hacker culture may lead to a science that is less "democratized" than what is being proposed. My friend Adam pointed me to Jaron Lanier's work criticizing the "open" and "free" culture movements online as both unfair and leading to cultural stagnation. While I don't agree with all of Lanier's arguments about the prospects of an open digital culture, he makes a lot of really important points that resonate with my feelings about the future of science based on the open online model, in…
revere | April 12, 2010Markos Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of DailyKos, the world's largest political blog. He travels quite a bit and is dependent on his laptop and the internet. So I read his first experience with the iPad with a great deal of interest. Go read it (like they need the traffic; on a quiet Sunday night they are running 35,000 visits an hour!). Bottom line: overwhelmingly positive for someone who has a few, routine but critical functions handled by email and Microsoft Office level programs. I've already written about my own plans to get one later in the year, after the kinks are worked out…
drorzel | April 10, 2010
Neil Fraser: Hardware: Lava Lamp Centrifuge
"Would a Lava Lamp work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter? Would the wax still rise to the surface? Would the blobs be smaller and faster? With broad disagreement on the answers, I built a large centrifuge to find out."
(tags: physics gravity experiment science video planets astronomy silly)
LaserFest | SpectraSound Music Transmission Device
"All too often a great dance party is ruined because the stereo is far off over yonder. Well never let that happen to you again. We at LaserFest present you with SpectraSound -the device that…
jrosenhouse | April 9, 2010This time from the Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society. The reviewer is Paulo Ventura Araujo, a mathematician at the University of Porto in Portugal. Interestingly, he notes at the start of the review that he had never heard of the Monty Hall problem prior to reading my book. Here are the final two paragraphs of the lengthy review:
The non-mathematical portions of the book, and even the least demanding mathematical portions, are very good reading and are suitable for a large non-specialist audience. In the cognitive chapter, for instance, we are made aware of two basic types…
pontiff | April 8, 2010Items sharing a similar topic, meandered onto in the depths of a major outpouring of procrastination...
The path less traveled by Andrea Schweitzer (via @mattleifer) on a different way to have a career as a scientist. And for a description of one of the most successful scientists from quantum computing, an interview with Ignacio Cirac (sent to me by Daniel.) Somedays, however, one might wonder about all the time professors spend working and contemplate the idea of death by tenure track. Or if you care a lot about the notion of tenure versus non-tenure AND you don't mind reading redstate.…
clock | April 8, 2010David Bradley read the book and liked it.
Perhaps you'll like it, too. If you use the code "SHOWERS" in April during check-out you will get 10% off. Just go here right now and click on "Buy now" ;-)
Under the fold - OpenLab2010 entries so far, and the submission buttons:
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A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'?
A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird
Anthropology in Practice: The Irish Diaspora: Why Even Trinidadians Are a Little Irish
Back Re(action…
drorzel | April 8, 2010
Wave interference: where does the energy go? « Skulls in the Stars
The two waves cancel each other out, leaving a completely unmoving string due to destructive interference. My student asked me: what happens to the energy? As posed, it seems that we started with two waves carrying energy, but they canceled each other out, leaving no energy! This interpretation cannot possibly be correct, so where is the flaw in our description?
There are actually two aspects to the answer that I want to address, each of which is rather important in the understanding of wave phenomena. The first of…
gregladen | April 7, 2010I'm going to make an argument that you should buy an Apple iPad despite widespread rumors of hardware problems and despite widespread criticisms of its design as funky and flawed.
And by "you" I mean yooz guyz who are skeptics.
In order to get there, to the point of this argument, I'm going to have to define skeptical computing, and to do that, skeptical anything, and to do that, what being a skeptic is. That sounds like a long journey but I promise to be concise.
What is a skeptic? A skeptic is a person (or other sentient, symbolically thinking being) with the ability to make rational…
oracknows | April 6, 2010Will it blend?
Personally, I doubt I'll be getting in iPad. I have an iPhone, after all, and I don't see where I would use something like the iPad rather than my laptop. Most of the stuff I need to do with a computer that I can't do on my iPhone requires Microsoft Office and various graphics programs. There just doesn't seem to be a niche in my computing habits that isn't already filled by my laptop or iPhone. That could change as the iPad evolves, but for now this Apple fanboy is going to abstain.
On the other hand, I wonder where you get a job like this guy's, where I'd get to blend…
clock | April 5, 2010Thanks, this year again, to Zen Faulkes for putting together the submission buttons that you can embed wherever you want on your sites and thus have easy way to submit an entry for Open Laboratory 2010 whenever you read a cool science post.
You should read the long-winded instructions about what is and isn't appropriate to submit, deadline, and other pertinent information.
And you should certainly buy (or tell your friends, colleagues, family and neighbors to buy) the 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 editions. Especially if you buy in April - we have entered the anthology into the April contest at…
cpikas | April 1, 2010I'm still on this kick on recommender systems. I'm further encouraged by happening on a report on "discoverability" by the Minnesota librarians when looking for something else on JR's blog. The report agrees that recommender systems are a more important trend.
In standard information retrieval stuff, you're going from whatever query the person puts in (which can be very, very different from their information need see Taylor [1]) and you're computing similarity between those terms and what ever representation you have of information in the system. Smarter systems do a lot more than that, but…