There's another paper about the Fermi Paradox highlighted on the arXiv blog today. This one describes extensive numerical simulations which purport to show that no more than 1,000 spacefaring civilizations can be exploring the galaxy with non-replicating slower-than-light robotic probes. Of course, this is highly contingent on a bunch of assumptions about the behavior of these imagined aliens. Enough so that the numbers seem to be pulled out of the air-- why would you assume that robotic probes last 50 million years? What makes that a reasonable figure? It's clear that the authors have put a…

The missing research program for space colonization -- KarlSchroeder.com "No amount of data about how the human body reacts to zero-G is going to answer the important question, which is: how does the human body react to extended periods under fractional gravity--like the moon's 1/6 G or Mars's .38 G? If there's a potential show-stopper to colonizing other worlds, it's going to be how our physiology responds to fractional gravity, not zero gravity." (tags: space science medicine blogs physics planets technology) ...My heart's in Accra » Fun and games with human misery "The best $50…

The semi-nonymous Phillip H. at DC Dispatches liked the idea behind the Project for Non-Academic Science, but he didn't want to reveal his secret identity. So he wrote up and posted his own interview: 1) What is your non-academic job? I'm the National Program Coordinator for Protected Species at my Federal Agency. This means I work to bring together a whole host of offices, labs, programs, and people to conserve and recover marine species that are listed under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Go over there to read his answers to the rest of the questions.

In the same basic vein as yesterday's post about thermodynamics, the following poll contains a list of physicists who are not household names, but who made significant contributions to the science of optics. Which of them is the best? Which of these physicists from the field of optics was the best?(polls)

The Corporate Masters have launched a "featured blogger" program, asking individual ScienceBloggers to comment on news articles from the main site, and publishing the responses with the magazine piece. I just did one on new quantum experiments, which was posted today. The news article is Supersizing Quantum Behavior by Veronique Greenwood. My piece is Reconciling an Ordinary World, which starts out: One of the most vexing things about studying quantum mechanics is how maddeningly classical the world is. Quantum physics features all sorts of marvelous things--particles behaving like waves,…

So, yesterday featured a silly poll about underappreciated old-timey physicists. Who are these people, and why should you know about them? Taking them in reverse order of the voting: Rudolf Clausius is the originator of the infamous Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of any closed system will tend to increase. He was one of the most important figures in terms of systematizing the study of thermodynamics, pulling a lot of other people's work together, and showing how it all fit. James Joule was a brewer as well as a physicist, making him a really good guy to know. He's…

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Jon Moulton, a biologist working at a small biotech company.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I work for Gene Tools, LLC, manufacturers of Morpholino antisense oligos, as a molecular biologist and general-…

The Republic of T. » Sotomayor & The Vulcan Standard, Pt. 2 "It hit me like a slap in the face. It sounded familiar, but different. To me, this fictional family was white. But in the time and place they occupied on the page they weren't "white enough." "Oh my God!" I exclaimed. My husband, who was reading the same book, looked at me. I looked up from the page, looked at him, and said with a note of wonder in my voice, "There are different shades of white."" (tags: race society culture history literature blogs republic-of-t) OMG QIP=PSPACE! : The Quantum Pontiff "This solves a long…

While I'm stealing post ideas from Twitter, here's another poll question, thanks to Eric Weinstein, who wrote earlier: And @CameronNeylon, when you write "Good science means not having an (emotional) allegiance to any theory surely?" I must strongly disagree. This position results from the luxury of living on the far side of an adaptive valley which long ago was crossed by others. So, here's another poll: Agree or disagree: "Good science means not having an (emotional) allegiance to any theory."(polls) (This was in the context of a running series of ruminations about academic organization…

The question of who is the greatest physicist of the physicists who are household names-- Newton, Einstein, Maxwell, etc.-- has been debated thousands of times, and will undoubtedly be debated thousands of times in the future. What isn't as often discussed is the ranking of physicists who aren't in that rare group of household names-- people whose surnames are attached to equations that GRE takers struggle to memorize, but whose given names and life stories are mostly forgotten. Well, this post is for them: The following poll presents a list of important figures from the history of…

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Katherine Porter, an editor of textbooks and other educational materials.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I work as a science content editor for Words & Numbers, an educational content developer. Our…

There's an interesting report at Inside Higher Ed today on a study of religiosity and college. Some of the results will probably come as a surprise to many people around ScienceBlogs: # The odds of going to college increase for high school students who attend religious services more frequently or who view religion as more important in their lives. The researchers speculate that there may be a "nagging theory" in which fellow churchgoers encourage the students to attend college. # Being a humanities or a social science major has a statistically significant negative effect on religiosity --…

kate_nepveu: Worldcon: online jerkitude "I'm trying to come up with a list of bedrock principles that apply across all online contexts, and I keep getting bogged down in my lawyer tendencies. So what would you say are the fundamental, applies-anywhere minimum requirements of human decency when it comes to online interactions?" (tags: internet culture society SF blogs) Invisible flash takes photos without the glare - tech - 16 July 2009 - New Scientist "Although the dark flash gives a crisp image without disturbing those in the picture, the results have an odd colour balance that looks…

The Project for Non-Academic Science posts have been very well received, and I continue to get a steady trickle of new volunteers. I'm going to slow the rate of posting these a little bit, as the recent posting rate has been a little ridiculous, but I'll keep posting them as long as people keep answering questions. Were I a more compulsively organized person, I would be tagging and indexing these in a systematic manner as I go. I'm not that organized, though, though it's possible that I will at some point be so desperate to avoid work that I ought to be doing that I will go back and sort them…

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Tim Johnson, a software engineer.) 1) What is your non-academic job? In a nutshell, software engineering. Started off with C/C++, TCL/TK, and a sprinkling of perl. For the last few years, it has been Java…

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Evie Marom, an honest-to-God rocket scientist at SpaceDev.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I'm an Aerospace Engineer at a rocket and satellite company called SpaceDev. The company was recently acquired by a…

Timothy Burke notes a controversy about an NEH program that some philosophers feel tramples their discipline. In talking about a hypothetical program that would do the same for his field of history, Burke suggests something that caught my eye: f the NEH set up a course development grant called "Time and the Past" aimed at supporting interdisciplinary courses that examined change over time but framed the grant so that ordinary history courses didn't qualify, my first impulse would be to object. Why exclude the discipline that makes that question its central concern? But hold on a moment. What…

KR Blog » The Wilderness of Memory "[Chabon asks] a valid question, but I can't escape the feeling that it reflects a particularly American idealization of childhood. Growing up slowly is a privilege of wealth, and few children throughout human history have enjoyed a childhood without the privations of hunger, war, or grinding poverty. " (tags: books literature society culture history class-war kid-stuff blogs) Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood - The New York Review of Books "The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible…

The del.icio.us automatic blog posting that usually produces the daily links dump posts here has been broken during the recent ScienceBlogs upgrade. The links dump posts from last Thursday on didn't happen, but we've kludged up a way to get that material back. These are the links that should've posted on Saturday the 25th: Friday Recipe: Chinese Potstickers (aka Jiao Zi) : Good Math, Bad Math Mmmmmmm.... potstickers..... (tags: food blogs good-math) The importance of stupidity in scientific research -- Schwartz 121 (11): 1771 -- Journal of Cell Science "A Ph.D., in which you have to do a…

The del.icio.us automatic blog posting that usually produces the daily links dump posts here has been broken during the recent ScienceBlogs upgrade. The links dump posts from last Thursday on didn't happen, but we've kludged up a way to get that material back. These are the links that should've posted on Friday the 24th: Scientists capitalize on extended solar eclipse Jay Pasachoff leads another eclipse expedition taking students to China. And manages not to mention any of them by name in the press release. (tags: science astronomy education academia) Diary of Trade Book (Newton and the…