Physical Sciences
drorzel | May 25, 2010
...My heart's in Accra » The Partisan Internet and the Wider World
"I think the comparison between ideological isolation in media and in face to face encounters is more like comparing apples and hedgehogs. They're thoroughly different types of interactions and we should have very different expectations for diversity and ideological isolation in each set. The media I consume damn well better be more diverse than the community I live in. That's what media is supposed to do - give me a broader view than I'm able to get from friends, family and coworkers. It's okay that there aren't any Thai…
drorzel | May 20, 2010
The Virtuosi: Cell Phone Brain Damage: Part Deux
"I thought I'd take another look at cell phone damage, coming at it from a different direction than my colleague. Mostly I just want to consider the energy of the radiation that cell phones produce, and compare that with the other relevant energy scales for molecules."
(tags: science physics medicine biology quantum optics thermo atoms molecules blogs virtusoi)
Can we please stop talking about Supreme Court nominees like they are real people? - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
"What I see in the national obsession over Kagan's unmarried…
oracknows | May 19, 2010Here we go again.
I've written a few times before about the controversy over whether cell phones (a.k.a. mobile phones in most of the rest of the world) cause brain cancer, concluding on more than one occasion that the evidence does not support a link. For example, there has not been a large increase in brain cancer or other cancers claimed to be due to cell phone radiation in the 15 to 20 years since the use of cell phones took off back in the 1990s, nor has any study shown a convincing correlation between cell phone use and brain cancer.
Of course, one would not expect a priori, based on…
drorzel | May 18, 2010There's a Dennis Overbye article in the Times today with the Web headline "From Fermilab, a New Clue to Explain Human Existence?" which I like to think of as a back-handed tribute to the person who linked to an interview with Sean Carroll by calling him "The cosmologist, not the scientist." This is the secret of human existence explained by science, not biology.
The physics issue in question is why we have more matter than antimatter in the universe, as symmetry would seem to demand they be created in equal amounts in the Big Bang. Had that happened, though, all of the matter should've…
drorzel | May 18, 2010
DLMF: NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions
An Abromowitz and Stegun for the Internet age.
(tags: math science software physics books internet)
Blog U.: Is TED Making Us Stupid? - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed
"Pre-TED, I used to be able to sit through a boring lecture or presentation -- diligently taking notes while being sufficiently nourished by whatever small sliver of new insights or information the speaker could provide. I had patience, fortitude, and a long attention span for the bad presentation. TED has extinguished this valuable skill."
(tags: ted…
elerner | May 17, 2010Space has a way of inspiring the imagination more than almost any other scientific field. When we talk about making huge investments of money and brainpower to solve some looming problem--say, the need for renewable energy--we talk about making a new moon shot. And while some of the most exciting scientific discoveries are being made right now on the smallest scales imaginable, there is something about the grandness of both time and distance that makes space truly the final frontier.
Drawing out the comparisons between investigating the infinitesimal and the infinite, astronomy is the only…
drorzel | May 15, 2010
News: Profs Turned Pols - Inside Higher Ed
"From local school board races to Congressional campaigns, an effort is under way to push scientists out of the lab and onto the stump.
Through a series of Web-based seminars and organizing efforts on university campuses, Scientists & Engineers for America (SEA) has been luring professors and others with advanced degrees into political life. The nonprofit group's underlying premise is that public policy debates often lack the direct input of scientists and engineers, who would bring knowledge and problem-solving skills to topics as diverse as…
drorzel | May 14, 2010Blame Bryan O'Sullivan for this-- after his comment about misreading "Bohmian Mechanics" as "Bohemian Mechanics," I couldn't get this silly idea out of my head. And this is the result.
I like to think that this was Brian May's first draft (he does have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, after all), before Freddie Mercury got hold of it:
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Do objects have real states
Or just probabilities?
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see
Studying quantum (poor boy), I need no sympathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go
A little psi, little rho
No interpretation ever…
drorzel | May 10, 2010
Against a Definition of Science Fiction -- Paul Kincaid
"When I called my collection of essays and reviews What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction, I was struggling toward something I could not fully articulate. I don't know what is involved in reading science fiction, because I don't know what science fiction is.
There was a time, not so long ago, when I was quite clear what science fiction is. I could pick up a book from the shelf and know, with no real doubt or confusion, that it was science fiction. That certainty is with me no more, not because science fiction has changed (it has…
rallain | May 8, 2010I have one more comment about the previous MythBusters episode where they compared two cars crashing into each other at 50 mph vs. one car crashing into a wall at 100 mph. At the end of the episode, Jamie reflected on the experiment. He said something like (regarding how he incorrectly thought one car at 100 mph was the same as 2 at 50 mph):
"....that was a mistake. You know what? I am ok with that. That is how you learn stuff"
What a great attitude. I think this is something many students miss out on. Which is better, taking a class where you know everything and don't even need to…
drorzel | May 8, 2010
YouTube - Walk on water
"Liquid Mountaineering is a new sport which is attempting to achieve what man has tried to do for centuries: walk on water. Or to be more precise: running on water. We are developing the sport from scratch. By accident we found out that with the right water repellent equipment you can run across bodies of water, just like a stone skimming the surface."
(tags: sports video youtube)
Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 183602 (2010): Observation of a Cooperative Radiation Force in the Presence of Disorder
"Cooperative scattering of light by an extended object such as an atomic…
oracknows | May 7, 2010
Remember Life Technology� Back when I actually used to do Your Friday Dose of Woo each and every Friday before subjecting myself to such woo-tastically extravagant bits of unreason every week led me to decide to cut my weekly feature back to on an "as the mood strikes me" basis, Life Technology produceds some of the finest installments of this recurring series. Who could forget Vir-X⢠homeopathic boner pills? Or the the Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet Professional Version 1.0� Or the Tesla Purple Energy Shield� Good times, for sure.
As I sat down last night to decide upon a…
oracknows | April 28, 2010People who have read my review of FRONTLINE's The Vaccine War may have noticed that the comments have featured someone who may or may not be a concern troll but is definitely at the very least very naive about the anti-vaccine movement. This commenter thinks that being harsh in my assessment of anti-vaccinationists will never reach anyone and only turn off the undecided. This commenter wrote:
Anti-vacciners' view is in many cases just as strongly held as yours, and their data is just as compelling to them as yours is to you. Tell me, how many idiots yelling at you that you are stupid for…
drorzel | April 28, 2010
Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War - PowerPoint - NYTimes.com
""PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
"It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control," General…
cortex | April 27, 2010The process of enculturation doesn't just afflict middle-aged scientists, struggling to appreciate a new anomaly. It's a problem for any collection of experts, from CIA analysts to Wall Street bankers. Let's stick with Wall Street, since Goldman Sachs is in the news. The question for senators and regulators is why some very smart people (and their very clever quantitative models) missed a financial bubble that, in retrospect, looks devastatingly obvious.
Let's begin with a classic experiment, led by Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman. A group of undergraduates was briefly shown a series of…
cortex | April 27, 2010I just discovered (via Tyler Cowen) a fascinating economics paper on the changing dynamics of scientific production over the 20th century. A few months ago, I wrote about the tangled relationship of age and innovation, and why different fields have different peak ages of creativity. In general, math, physics and poetry are for the young, while biology, history and the social sciences benefit from middle-age:
Interestingly, these differences in peak age appear to be cultural universals, with poets peaking before novelists in every major literary tradition, according to [Dean] Simonton's…
cortex | April 25, 2010I spent a fair amount of time hanging out with professional poker players while writing How We Decide. For the most part, these players have exquisite control over their facial expressions, so that those micro-muscles around the eyes and mouth rarely betrayed their inner thoughts. (The players reacted with the same look of unflappable boredom to a pair of aces and a hand with mismatched number cards.) But I was always amused by their insistence on wearing opaque sunglasses inside the dimly lit casino. What relevant information did they think their eyeballs would betray? (Most muttered…
rallain | April 16, 2010If you have been on the internet, you surely have seen this website showing the sizes of different starships. Way cool. Here is a small sample - but it doesn't do the site justice. You really need to go browse around.
Of course, I can't let something like this just go. One of the things I always think is interesting is to consider objects of different size. Perhaps the general idea is that you can just scale stuff up or down as you like. But, it doesn't work this way. Let me start with my own spaceship. It is a sphere with a thruster on the back. It just holds one person.
Now, what…
drorzel | April 13, 2010
Michelson and the President (1869) « Skulls in the Stars
"I'm currently working my way through the book The Master of Light: a Biography of Albert A. Michelson (1973), written by one of his daughters, Dorothy Michelson Livingston. I typically find the beginnings of biographies to be rather slow-moving, with some sort of statement like, "There was little to indicate in his/her childhood what a great scientist he/she would become," but this is definitely not the case for Michelson -- his life story is interesting starting pretty much at birth!
I thought I'd share another anecdote from the…
drorzel | April 12, 2010What's the application? LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Graviitational Wave Observatory, because (astro)physicists feel free to drop inconvenient words when making up cute acronyms. This is an experiment to look for disturbances in space-time caused by massive objects, which would manifest as a slight stretching and compression of space itself.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "Can we directly observe the gravitational waves that are predicted by the equations of General Relativity?" 2) "Can we detect things like colliding black holes, because that would be awesome!"
How does it…